Working with Modern Analytics and DataFlux technology, Canada’s largest communications company eliminated more than five million duplicate records – and gained an accurate view of domestic dwellings.

The Business

BCE is Canada’s largest communications company, providing a comprehensive and innovative suite of communication services to residential and business customers in Canada.
 
Under the Bell brand, the company’s services include local, long distance and wireless phone services, high-speed and wireless Internet access, IP-broadband services, direct-to-home satellite and VDSL television services.

The Challenge

As a premiere communications provider, Bell offers multiple services to its clients. Having the ability to know detailed information about a customer is essential to be able to offer the appropriate goods and services. Bell sought to combine its customer address information with details of Canadian dwellings.

Like many companies, Bell manages customer data in multiple applications. To improve customer service and support initiatives, Bell wanted to gain a unified view of the services already in use at a specific address. It also needed to verify that each address was, in fact, unique and distinct.

To achieve this unified view, the company used a third party vendor to combine internal customer profiles with multiple external sources to create a master list of Canadian dwellings. However, after examining more than 24 million records from this process, Bell found errors, duplications and variations in the data. Inaccurate and unreliable data hindered the company’s ability to offer new services to potential customers.

Bell wanted a flexible and efficient in-house solution that managed its match rules, so they invested in a DataFlux data management server license. In addition, Bell turned to Modern Analytics, a DataFlux partner and an industry-leading solution provider in data processing automation, business intelligence and customer analytics. After assessing the scope of the problem, Modern Analytics recommended a tailored solution – with DataFlux technology at the core – to provide a foundation for this customer data initiative.

The Solution

DataFlux technology enables business users to reconcile, cleanse and enrich internal address data, with localization and address enrichment capabilities that offer the ability to create complete and accurate address information for more than 240 countries around the world. In addition, DataFlux can enrich address data with geographic, demographic or other details.

“Our experience working with Modern Analytics and DataFlux greatly exceeded our expectations,” says Yves Lapierre, associate director of the customer data mart, Bell. “The team went beyond simply solving the problem; they gave us the information we needed to improve our business. We were expecting a company that could just help us properly deploy the technology, but Modern Analytics helped us understand what was required as well as preparing us for the future.”

The Results

With DataFlux technology providing a data management framework, Modern Analytics helped Bell create a more accurate master list of Canadian dwellings that can now be used for extensive product marketing campaigns. Using the advanced fuzzy-matching capabilities of DataFlux, Bell identified and eliminated more than five million duplicate records from its databases.

Bell also applied the same de-duplication business rules to monitor the ongoing quality of new and incoming data. With DataFlux batch processing capabilities, the company can now reconcile new address information nightly, ensuring that overall customer data quality remains high.

“DataFlux provides a robust solution that allowed us to accomplish the tasks related to this project in a timely manner,” said Matthias Gruber, director of engineering, Modern Analytics. “With its ease of installation, configuration and user interface, the DataFlux technology is our preferred choice when timelines are tight and data quality is a key. The smooth integration into the existing architecture clearly illustrates the flexibility of the DataFlux solution. The knowledge transfer to the Bell team was seamless and facilitated the ultimate success of the project.”

“Turning to Modern Analytics and DataFlux has proven to be a great improvement over outsourcing the process,” says Lapierre. “The intuitive DataFlux solution is helping us get better results at a much lower cost.”