THE CASE
The Energy Information Centre (EIC) has around 20,000 records in its customer relationship management databases, which it had struggled to keep accurate and duplicate-free.
The independent consultancy advises on wholesale and retail market intelligence, outsourced procurement, data management, carbon management and strategy.
EIC had always outsourced to third-party providers the task of cleansing its data, which was partly collated from mailing lists for its own publications, but the results were patchy.
As a consultancy working for industrial, commercial and public sector energy users in the gas, electricity, water and oil markets, EIC could not afford to ignore this problem.
"We couldn't be sure if (the list cleansers) were identifying all potentially duplicated records," says EIC marketing executive James Kelly. "It is unprofessional to send several copies of the same material to the same person. It also wastes time, stationery and postage."
In addition, the company often experienced difficulties when integrating data from third parties into its databases owing to format inconsistencies such as varying address fields.
THE SOLUTION
EIC realised it needed to take control of its data-cleansing operations, so it looked for a reliable and easy-to-use in-house solution.
In particular, the company needed a system of advanced deduplication to ensure it sent each mailing to every contact only once. The product it identified as best suiting its requirements was matchIT from helpIT systems, a provider of data cleansing and correction software services.
MatchIT is based on helpIT's proprietary, phonetics-based "fuzzy matching" engine, which compares records in terms of how words sound in addition to spellings and fields of data entry. It also recognises common name variations such as Bill for William and Beth or Liz for Elizabeth.
MatchIT also has suppression capabilities, enabling it to highlight goneaways, the deceased and people who have opted out of receiving mailings.
"The matchIT product is the main function of the matchIT data cleansing suite, which is well suited to pan-European and North American data," says helpIT systems sales manager Graham Clark.
THE RESULTS
EIC's Kelly says the software allows the company to add new data from third-party lists more easily and is now an integral part of its data strategy. "We are able to identify more duplicated records than ever before and are also given the opportunity to check and correct spellings and appropriate salutations," he says. "It means that when we want to append new data from third-party lists, we can link new contacts or new addresses to companies that are already in our main data set."
CLEANING KIT: MATCHIT FROM HELPIT SYSTEMS
What is it?
This data-cleansing solution includes merging, purging and deduplication and can be applied to data files of any format and shape. HelpIT systems says it makes common operations intuitive, with the option for fine-tuning and advanced settings, so new users can be cleansing their own data within minutes. It cases data intelligently and creates salutations from unstructured names. The software also merges files and purges duplicate records, as well as transferring information between matching records.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
MatchIT employs predefined wizards that lead the user through the data matching, cleansing and output processes, generating graphical feedback at all stages of the job. It uses helpIT's proprietary "fuzzy matching" technology to identify potential data matches. In deduplication and suppression, for example, it highlights the maximum number of matching records to avoid duplication and maximises suppression hit rates.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?
MatchIT conducts various data-cleansing tasks simultaneously, which saves time and money. The company says the product is suitable for all data-cleansing requirements and any database format.