January 2010 Archives

In any customer-centric business, be it hospitality, banking, retail or insurance, there are numerous touchpoints where the consumer interacts with the business. Many interactions take place between the consumer and the business through various direct and indirect channels: direct marketing campaigns (email, mailers, telemarketing, etc.); points of sale; information kiosks; online shopping portals; and feedback forms for services rendered.

During all these transactions or points of contact, consumer data is collected in varying ways. The trouble lies in the lack of a consistent framework in collecting consumer attributes. Most organizations collect the same consumer through multiple channels with no consistency in the attributes collected. Hence, when these organizations build data warehouses and data marts to study consumer behavior, they lead to a large number of duplicates in the consumer tables in the warehouse or mart. This can be disastrous for any business.

Data deduplication is the process of defining duplicate consumer data in consumer-centric databases and seeking corrective action to cleanse the duplicate records from the databases and ensuring that no coherent, accurate, and relevant data is lost in the process.

Read the eight strategies in "How to Improve Customer Data Quality" from Information Management Daily.

A recent LinkedIn poll conducted on behalf of ONEPOST, the UK's leader in postal management and advice, reveals 65% of companies will increase their use of direct mail this year, particularly as part of an integrated marketing strategy.

With its unique software and expert knowledge of postal services ONEPOST is able to offer significant postal savings as well as add value to mailing campaigns through nominated day deliveries and recommendations for environmentally friendly mailing packs.

ONEPOST Managing Director, Graham Cooper comments "Most companies and advertisers are finding themselves under increasing pressure to deliver more for less. The measurability of direct marketing makes it a great proposition for marketers and with the mailing incentives and postage discounts we currently have at our disposal there has never been a better time to achieve this."

For more information on ONEPOST please visit www.onepost.co.uk.

From midnight tonight, to midnight tomorrow (US Central Std Time), buy Larry English's new book, Information Quality Applied: Best Practices for Business Information, Processes and Systems and receive over $1,500 worth of FREE educational items! All you have to do is click on the following link and buy Information Quality Applied at AmazonIQApplied.com.

This is a must-have book if you care about increasing your organization's effectiveness by eliminating process failure and waste caused by Poor Quality Information. You learn a Step-by-Step Guide to Accurately Assess Information Quality, Measure Costs of Poor Quality Information and Improve Information Processes to prevent the High Costs of Poor Quality Information and Process Failure that can ultimately lead to Enterprise Mission Failure.

If you understand and apply the easy-to-follow steps in the book, you will be able to improve both Information and Business effectiveness-all with positive and tangible results thousands of times the cost of the book-or your money back!!! See Larry's money-back warranty on page xxix of the book.

After buying the book, click on the link "Register for Membership" please use the last four digits of your Amazon order number as your password. If you already have purchased a copy from another source simply put the source in the password field. (Be sure to remember your password.) Once you have confirmed registration, click here to register for access to the "FREE Educational Items" on IQApplied.com.

Act now! This book will fly off the shelves!

 

Melissa Data is pleased to announce that Presort Object, a developer's API for postal presorting, has received USPS® PAVE™ Gold certification for PAVE Cycle K. Gold certification ensures a higher level of compliance with postal regulations because the software has passed an extra round of tests above and beyond the standard PAVE protocol.

Presort Object helps service bureaus and end-users reduce postage costs by up to 35 percent, and it gives integrators the flexibility to configure mailing parameters once, then run the mailing process automatically without a computer operator to streamline operations and save on manual labor.

Presort Object is available as a stand-alone solution to sort mailing lists according to USPS standards for First-Class™ and Standard Mail®. Presort Object can be easily combined with other Melissa Data products for address correction and standardization, move update processing, and duplicate elimination, providing a quickly realized return on investment.

To learn more about PAVE certified Presort Object, visit http://www.melissadata.com/presortobj.

By Admound Chou

Assistant Data Quality Manager