A leading provider of business information supplies company specific credit reports and profiles to a global clientèle of corporate clients. The company also provides e-commerce enablement tools, including sales and lead generation lists.
This business information provider currently has more than 54 million active organizations in its information database. The information is used by its clients to make better decisions regarding credit risk, purchasing and marketing when conducting business-to-business (B2B) transactions. The company receives data for its information database from several different sources, including websites and data entry by internal account representatives.
With nearly 500 companies logging on each day and inputting new or edited data into the company database, the business information supplier needed to be able to automatically validate and verify the status of the company inputting information, such as if the company was:
Because people might enter their name or their company name differently each time they accessed the system, the business information provider found that up to 20 percent of the information flowing into the business database consisted of duplicate records.
In addition, the information in the business information database often served as the foundation for database marketing efforts for the company. Lack of reliable information could hinder the company’s efforts to retain and acquire new customers.
Since almost one-fifth of the new data entering the system was unusable, the company had to take steps to address the spread of bad information that could jeopardize the company’s primary product: business data.
The business information provider chose DataFlux to routinely match and verify customer data across any platform, including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases that the company used to store data for different purposes. DataFlux helps the company match inquiries to company data and integrate information into their existing IT architecture. And prior to database marketing campaigns, the company can compare mailing lists to their customer records to remove duplicate entries.
With better, more reliable corporate data, the business information provider was able to present a better product to the marketplace. High-quality data helped them process customer data faster and more efficiently, and the removal or consolidation of duplicate data allowed them to lower data storage costs.
The marketing department also benefited from better data. Previously, 15-20 percent of all mailings to prospective customers came back undeliverable. With DataFlux solutions in place, duplicate mailings disappeared almost entirely, saving the company time and money on wasted mailing and production costs.