Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) is Canada’s largest communications company, providing wireline, wireless, data/Internet and satellite services throughout Canada and arts of the United States. With over 4 million wireless subscribers, Bell Mobility supports a complete range of wireless communications solutions — including PCS and cellular, mobile Web browsing, SMS text messaging, paging, and airline passenger communications services.
To gain new subscribers, Bell Mobility uses telemarketing and direct mail campaigns to contact and engage prospective customers. Bell Mobility conducts a number of these highly targeted campaigns annually, typically receiving the prospect data lists from external sources. Because accurate information is essential to any direct marketing campaign, the company had to perform careful and thorough matching, cleansing and de-duplication of this third-party data before each campaign. The company also relied on outside vendors to perform address verification before each mailing.
“Traditionally, we used SQL code to create the matching procedures that helped us eliminate duplicate entries,” says Jim Gallagher, database manager with Bell Mobility. “This was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and we needed a better tool to quickly and effectively build an effective data quality process for contact lists.”
Having better, more accurate contact information meant the company could more intelligently target its direct marketing efforts, improve response rates and build better customer relationships from the beginning by more completely anticipating customers’ needs.
To help it meet these goals, the company chose the award-winning suite of DataFlux data quality tools. With the intuitive DataFlux graphical user interface, business users were able to quickly and easily create data matching, cleansing and de-duplication routines. The flexibility of DataFlux technology also ensured that data from multiple sources could be matched and standardized before being integrated into the master list, eliminating duplicate prospect records and enhancing the quality and accuracy of the mailing and telemarketing lists.
By performing extensive data quality routines on new and existing contact information, Bell Mobility provided more reliable data to its telemarketing and direct mail groups, allowing them to contact more of their targeted audience than in previous campaigns — and spend less time on inappropriate contacts.
Armed with this better prospect data, the company was able to add over $1 million CAD in annualized revenue through more effective database marketing campaigns — for a return on investment (ROI) of over 1,300 percent. Additionally, by no longer outsourcing address verification for its targeted mailing lists, the company found it was saving an average of $5,000 CAD per mailing campaign.
“The effectiveness of our database marketing programs is based on the quality of data that we have,” Gallagher says. “DataFlux allows us to create cleaner and more accurate lists that drive our marketing programs. Plus, we could find ways to make the management of customer data more efficient, helping us eliminate some unnecessary costs at the same time.”
The company has also found new uses for DataFlux technology within its systems. Discovering that DataFlux data monitoring capabilities could be used for natural-language monitoring, Bell Mobility was able to use DataFlux technology to parse and sort SMS text message communications with its clients. Through a DataFlux monitoring routine, Bell Mobility could automatically forward the messages to the appropriate queue, allowing a resource that had previously been dedicated to manually sorting these messages to take on more cost-effective tasks.