What is the state of your data?  Does it bring value?

The buzz in the industry is “Big Data”.  What do you do with it?  How do you manage it?  What is its value?  Whether you plan to use the data in a batch environment or real-time or both, you need to decide that ahead of time to make the most of your data management process.  To really understand where the value is in data and where you stand in deriving the value you can use the grid below to assess you situation and what you should do next.

8 States of Data

The cost of getting to the states of ‘Distributed’, ‘Analyzed’, and ‘Prediction’ are relative to the scope, complexity and control of the data with control being the key piece in the cost equation.  If you outsource or use existing structures your cost of control goes down while if you want to own the process and data the cost goes up with the hardware, software and resources necessary to pull it off.  Generally all but the largest rely on external support.

When I go through my home mailbox I’m typically good about filtering out  those mail pieces addressed to the wrong person, in a lot of times, one that has not lived at the residence for over three years. But there are those days when anything that looks important gets opened out of haste and hurry.

The other day as I was filing through my mail I realized that I had opened and accessed another individual’s retirement account information by mistake! The account number, balance and other numerous sensitive data items were staring me in the face. I quickly destroyed the documents and added a call to the company’s customer service line to my “to do” list. The recipient was an individual who had not lived at my address in over five years, maybe more.

When it comes to financial information, many measures have been put in place to ensure security of the account and individual, yet our mailboxes can potentially blow all these measures out the window with a simple missed step like processing a customer file through the National Change of Address (NCOA) database. In today’s booming electronic world, companies and financial institutions have made great gains in attempts to deter identity theft, hackers, phishers and spammers, but in the process, have they forgotten to protect the good old fashioned mailbox?

What practices does your company have in place for sensitive customer data mailings? Is your online customer database in sync with your customer mailing database? Do you know the details of your NCOA processing? Do you have a pre-mailer in place for customers who have had little to no recent activity?

A home mailbox is a federally protected piece of property, yet it is so vulnerable to any slight data integrity mishap. Unfortunately companies can’t password protect mail pieces, but they can take measures to protect their customers by taking the necessary data processing procedures a step further when it comes to sensitive data. I’m guilty of being locked out of my own electronic account because I couldn’t answer a security question like the “what was the name of my maternal grandmother’s first cat” correctly, but now I wonder, what information are the people I sold my house to receiving about me? I will never know, but I hope the companies I do business with are protecting my information.  Protect your customers and protect your company in the process.

If your organization is like many Altair works with, the amount of customer information you have is restricted by the retrieval/input method.  For instance, your point of sale (POS) only captures name address, phone and/or email.  Even then you are counting on the sales associate to correctly spell and enter these elements.  Now you have two problems, a limited amount of data on the customer and potentially incorrect data from the POS.  Many times you would like to have additional variables to help drive decisions, or selections for mail campaigns/promotions but you can’t get there with what you have.

I worked in the banking world for over 15 years, and many of those years in the marketing/analysis side.  We always wanted to know more about our customers, but we didn’t always have the cleanest data or the most complete data.  I learned not only how to clean the data but get more matches by matching at the level of the corresponding data elements.  Given the amount of information you have you can get more data than you think.  There are levels you can match at that will help this.

Overlay match levels:

Individual – First Name, Last Name, Address

Household – Last name, Address

Address – Address only

Some data elements need be done at the Individual level (age, gender, etc).  However, many variables can be overlaid at the household level (Household income, Number of Children, etc), or the address level (house square footage, lot size, summarized credit data, etc.).  So even when the retrieval/input limits the information you have, you can add data to your customer file that enhances the capabilities for analysis and selection for marketing.

There is a full range of things that can be done to make your customer file work for you.

• Hygiene such as NCOA and Delivery Point Verification (DPV) can prepare your file for mailing.  This not only benefits marketing but billing and collection as well.
• Data append as described above can enhance decision making with additional information outside what’s been given.
• Profiling is the next step to learning more about your customer.  A profile is different than an append in that you are now comparing your customers to their peers in the same geographic footprint.  See an example of our profile here : Customer Profile
• Modeling outcomes are much more robust with outside data.  The combination of your data and the third party data allows for the prediction of outcomes such as booking a loan, responding to an offer or leaving you as a customer.

To learn more contact Troy Blackman at tblackman@altairci.com or 615-468-6821

I recently received 2 coupons from a local grocery store, the first to my fiancé, and the second to an indecipherable name.  Both saved me $5 off a minimum dollar spend amount.  Frankly, receiving two was great for me, but it got me wondering about how much it was costing the grocery.

Let’s look at the numbers:

I ran a count on the Altair Online System, and in Williamson County, TN alone we have 67,718 households.  As a conservative estimate, I am going to say that 2% of those are duplicate mailing addresses or incorrect name/address.  That gives us a remaining 1,354 for incorrect “junk.”

Average printing and mailing costs per piece may be anywhere from $1.00-2.00 per piece based on a large direct mailer I checked out online.  This doesn’t sound too bad on a per piece basis, but when you consider the 3,386 times $1.50, you’re looking at $2,031 in wasted marketing dollars.  And that’s in ONE county, with ONE mail piece.  It also doesn’t take into account that I now have more than one $5 coupon.  Now, consider that there are 110,483,968 households in the country.  I’ll let you do the math.

Point is, marketing dollars can be easily wasted if you don’t have the correct data and/or a streamlined system between your different channels.  As mentioned in our Loyalty study results, one of the largest struggles for companies is data integration.  This new “Big Data” nightmare can really add up on the cost side of marketing, but we can help!

Whether you have a website, coupons and direct mail, a digital & social media presence, a newsletter, or all of it!  We can segment your customer base data across all these different platforms.   For example, who is using your coupons and is also visiting the website frequently?  Who is receiving your newsletters but does not yet buy your products?  We can take the data and consumer information from all these platforms, including your POS, Accounting, Web, etc. and clean it up for you, then link it all into a single standardized database.  Voila!  Increased ROI and less waste in marketing.

How many times have you been the recipient of a mail piece addressed to someone else? What usually crosses your mind when this happens? If you’re in the Direct Mail Marketing business, you think of the steps that did or did not take place that should have before this piece went out. But if you’re NOT in the business, which sums up the majority of the population, you most likely toss this piece in the trash without much thought, other than a glance at the sender’s name.

While the advertising element is still there, three very crucial elements are now at stake: Credibility, timeliness and relationship. Do you think more, or less of the companies that you now know have incorrect information? On a credibility scale, these companies have dropped a notch or two in most recipients’ books, simply because their data is wrong. If they can’t get your name right, can you trust them?

Let’s turn the tables around for a minute and move from the prospect’s perspective, to a business perspective. Obviously data integrity is of utmost importance with any mail campaign, and many companies have become more aware of NCOA processing, mainly due to more stringent regulations set by the USPS since 2008 (and of course, the postal discounts that come with that coveted NCOA certificate).

But the benefits of NCOA processing go far beyond a postal discount.

While maybe you suppress your current customers from your upcoming mail campaign, do you still know where your current customers live?

With Altair Customer Intelligence’s unique product line-up, we cater to client’s needs by outlining NCOA specifics. Here are some key elements that you should always ask when it comes to NCOA:

1. What is your NCOA time-frame window?

NCOA tracks moves in blocks by months. Most NCOA processing tracks moves within the past 18 months. Anything beyond may or may not be captured. While 48 –month processing is available, it is not typically the standard.

2. Should I NCOA my customer file?

You should always NCOA your customer file for a mail campaign, but it is at your discrepancy whether or not to NCOA the file for suppression purposes. There are many moves that might not have a forwarding address. At Altair we give the option to retain original addresses as well as new addresses in order to reduce the chance of re-prospecting your customers.

3. When was my data file processed through NCOA?

This is important to receive the postal discount. The current USPS standard is that your data file be processed through NCOA in the past 90 days.

4. What happens to the records that match in NCOA (the movers)?

This is an important aspect of the NCOA processing. Depending on your product and projected prospect group, the decision to keep or drop these records is an important decision. At Altair our experienced sales team can coach you through these decisions in order to achieve your goal. While a New Mover campaign would benefit from keeping the records with new addresses, a Home Refinance campaign might not. There are many ways that this processing could also work as a suppression step when trying to eliminate movers within a certain timeframe.

I think one of the best lessons I learned from my college computer programming classes was that no matter how well you thought your program worked you had better be running your final QC on the output file itself.  Your program may run without an error and your output may have been created but do you know it is correct?

You’ve done your QC along the way and everything is checking out.  You expect the output file to be correct but simple practice of opening the file and looking at it can sometimes expose errors that no one thought would slip by in the processing.  This is especially true when processing systems run in one format and output files are created in another.

Performing some simple analysis on the output file such as running min and max frequencies on the output fields can determine if correct criteria was used in the selection process as well as validate the data in that field.   Looking at each frequency with the expectation of what is possible provides the verification necessary to ensure proper validation.  At Altair we require our Operations team to supply our QC team with output reports that are used in the verification that file was run correctly.  Having this focus on the output, as one of many QC points, adds an extra level of security for both Altair and our clients.

Did you know that Altair Customer Intelligence offers services that go beyond the direct mail marketing, customer intelligence, and analytical spectrum? Our unique set of technological and data processing tools gives us a unique position in today’s high tech business world. Companies in the Health Insurance and Healthcare Industry in general are prime examples of those that can benefit from Altair’s services.

Most Health Insurance and Healthcare companies put their money where the profit is, naturally. For some this is bill review, for others, provider recruitment and credentialing might take a big piece of the pie. Because of the nature of these companies, the budget may not allow for enhanced data processing tools. These limitations lead to inefficiencies and ultimately, loss of dollars through hours, weeks and even months of unnecessary manual address validation efforts, not to mention additional hours of work for data production and reporting teams due to lack of resources.

Many Healthcare companies spend endless hours tracking down and confirming provider data by phone, fax and mail, at a time when much more efficient address validation and standardization processes are available, but who wants to invest in these resources if this isn’t the primary nature of your business? That’s where we come in.

Does your company have a provider network that isn’t quite as polished as it should be? Do you have patient demographic data in desperate need of standardization and address validation? Do your clients complain about inaccurate addresses on Workers’ Compensation Panels? Altair can help! We have the capacity to standardize, NCOA and output various database sizes in a matter of hours or less. We can deliver reports and data subsets to cater your company’s needs in a highly efficient and timely process.

Call us today to find out about testing us in helping with your provider and patient data updates. Let us help you do what you do best, by doing what we do best.

In the data processing world mistakes happen.  It’s just a fact of doing business.  Knowing that, implementing a quality control (QC) procedure is a must. Volumes can be written about QC.  Here are a few highlights from our perspective.  Putting processes in place to catch errors during the order fulfillment process keeps Altair from those embarrassing moments when the client gets something other than what they asked for.  This leads us to the first and most important step in our quality control process, reviewing the order with the client to ensure we are giving them what they want.  All of us in the data processing world have delivered jobs that are exactly what the client asked us to do but not what they wanted.  Clarification up front keeps this most detrimental of error types from happening.

Second, it is not enough to put “one size fits all” error detectors in place when custom orders are involved.  This is a twofold QC step. Any time you add, change, delete, or create there is opportunity for error.  If this is coming from the client it needs to be in writing for clarification.  This creates the documentation for the processing as well as the QC.  If the manipulation is happening to produce a specific output it must be verified.  At Altair we incorporate custom QC at the key processing steps to identify errors and to prove to ourselves that the processing is running smoothly.

Last, take the time to actually do the QC.  It does take time and when meeting deadlines that are tight, time is of the essence.  Our philosophy is we’d rather be a little behind than deliver an error. Our clients appreciate the diligence and when involved in the development of the process with us become even more aware of the importance.

Processing time is money. The sooner we identify an issue, the sooner it can be resolved.  Rerunning a completed order because of even the smallest of issues is still rerunning the entire order.  What’s the old saying, “If you didn’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over.”… Experience has taught us to sweat the details upfront.

Tools we use:

• Word Forms: check lists for gathering important information
• Work Orders: gathers details from clients and documents the process for both sides
• Visio: creates a flow of the process for, allows for efficient processing and QC design
• Access: Brings all work orders together for effective communication and multiple project handling
• Six Sigma process control
• QC Focus groups.
• ENTERPRISE LEVEL INVOLVEMENT! Not just operations.

Everyone wants a deal. That statement seems true enough in today’s world. For instance, some of the hottest websites and stocks right now are Groupon, Living Social, and Yipit. Even if you don’t hit the web for a deal, I am sure that one shows up in your mail box at least once a week. For most of us, that mail piece either catches our eye or we toss it. But, for some, the intrusion becomes too much. Many ask:

• How did they know I have a newborn?
• Why is this addressed to my ex?
• Where did they get my name, I just moved here?
• I never signed up for this! Why am I getting it?

Most of us see this as a nuisance, at worst, but if you really just don’t want to see the mail any more, there are several things you can do to stem the flow:

1. Contact the business and ask to be removed from their mailings
2. Contact the Post Office and ask to have the address information corrected.
3. Contact the Direct Marketers Association to select the types of mail you wish to receive, or not receive.

Marketers, and the businesses they work for, are challenged to get more results out of smaller budgets every day. Believe it or not they do not want to contact the incorrect person or offer something you would not be interested in. They truly prefer to solicit to those who are most likely to buy, thus preventing brand damage or angering current (or potential) customers.

Here are some helpful links:

USPS Change of Address

https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/icoa-main-flow.do?execution=e1s1

Direct Marketing Association

www.DMAchoice.org

What is the match rate? This is the first question I hear when appending data for a customer. But is it the most important question?

Assuming your vendor is standardizing the names and addresses on both datasets to ensure the most matches, how do you know the appended data is matched properly? There are many possible match levels – address only, last name + address, full name + address or phone number. The type of data determines how to match.

In most cases, matching should follow this loose guideline:

-          Deed/Mortgage/Demographic matching  should be done at the household level

-          Tax/AVM/home value matching should be done at the address level

If your vendor is matching at different levels to the same file, you could be receiving false matches depending on the type of data you’re using. Ask your vendor to flag the different types of matches so you can determine yourself which appended elements make sense and at which match level. Ultimately, the match rate is important, but the way the match is done is paramount.

Altair has several enhancement databases available to supplement data element population totaling more than one billion current and historical records. We have the experience and data to assist in providing the highest quality matching for overlay/append projects. Please contact us to learn how Altair can help.