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REVIEW
“
You have a right to ask
certain questions, but not others.
Recent years have seen individual consumers becoming more wary of director of Information Arts, about the ability to deliver fresh
sharing personal information with companies, not least because of information from his company’s composite pan-European database of
concerns about how secure it will be. Many of the most valuable external B2B information.
sources for SCV data enhancement either capture specific data as a direct “One of the issues we have had is how to incorporate D&B data,
part of their business or aggregate multiple data sets in order to build because they have their own Duns Number for every company. We
coverage and confidence. have had to create our own unique reference number that goes across
As well as positive variables, such as date of birth or renewal dates. all the data sets we use which is unique at company site and
SCVs also need to be screened for negative ones, which are individual level,” says Lawrence.
notoriously difficult to get directly. “Notifying a company about One advantage that URNs have for customer data enhancement is that
somebody’s death is the last thing their family will tell the only new data needs to be transferred from the data owner, via a third
organisation,” says Lamb. “That is why we have seen such growth in party, onto the customer database. This can be an important way of
suppression files.” avoiding the fear that many data owners have that their precious database
Data sets like Royal Mail’s National Change of Address have will be imported wholesale into a SCV without yielding any revenue.
become more relevant in the switch towards retention marketing as it Information Arts has built its pan-European B2B database using
allows a company to track and trace existing customers. “NCOA tells feeds from D&B, Harte-Hanks, EuroContact Pool and others. They
you where they have moved to, which pure suppression might not need to have confidence that royalties will be paid and data kept
have,” he says. secure, while clients want access to more data at a higher frequency,
Customer behaviour has become much more dynamic as a result of but lower cost. “It is about a balance of fairness to data owners and
economic pressures. While there may currently be fewer house flexibility for clients,” says Lawrence.
moves, there will be more bankruptcies or company liquidations. When the marketing department puts the case for spending money
Families and marriages also come under heightened pressure in such on data enhancements, a question which the business might
times, so household compositions could be changing fast. reasonably ask is why the existing SCV is not sufficient? After all, its
Even organisations that have invested previously into a single creation was often a substantial piece of capital expenditure which
customer view have often not “householded” that data, in order to marketing previously persuaded it to make.
understand what group of people (or companies) might be found at a Jon Cano-Lopez, managing director of Ai Data Intelligence, says
single address. As this becomes more relevant to understanding and this is when the difference between earlier and current objectives
predicting behaviour, so that information is being sought out. often comes into focus. “You have to take a marketing view of your
“The days when a SCV was seen to be totally accurate are gone,” customers, rather than an operational view,” he says.
states Colin Bradshaw, managing director of Rapp (formerly Identex). Previous SCV builds have been made to support CRM strategies,
“Organisations are upgrading their data, particularly if it has a shelf which are mostly executed through the call centre. Marketing has
life of more than a few months, by using third parties to validate it.” clung on to the coat-tails of these programmes because it has gained
He points out that enhancement does not have to be limited to an insight into customers for the first time. But that does not have to
physical world demographics and marketing. “The third piece is be the be-all and end-all.
observed behavioural activity, like visiting websites. If you know more “It goes all the way back to when we used to talk about cleaning
about customers who come in, you can start serving up different and upgrading records to PAF standard. The view was that you should
content to them,” says Bradshaw. convert records without recognising that there were customer-
“The key question is what propensity does that persona have to go on preferred address elements that were relevant to marketing,” says
to purchase? That is a big untapped area,” he says. Alongside profiling of Cano-Lopez.
website visitors, marketers are also looking to use data derived from “Companies now tend to assume that the data they have is perfect.
user-generated content to drive their marketing strategies and output. Whereas it might only be right 90 per cent of the time,” he points out.
By mining customer blogs, for example, brands can find out a lot Unless customer data is being constantly verified, validated and
about the positioning of their products and the segments who use enhanced, assumptions made in the marketing plan may be
them. For many organisations, such advanced techniques are still unrealisable. Even just from goneaways and deceaseds, inaccurate
some way off – plus there is the question of how appropriate they are. data can change the economics of a campaign into negatives.
“I don’t think it matters whether you are adding data for digital or Although his company has multiple data licences as part of its
physical world campaigns,” argues Bradshaw. “If you have a SCV, Refinery proposition, it has avoided creating common URNs across
what matters is for it to have accurate, up-to-date information at the those sources because of the challenge of trying to tie up agreements
time when you do something with it.” with every data owner. Instead, data refreshes are delivered to clients
Just building a single view of customers can be challenge enough, via two-way matching. “The solution is the same, but the technology
particularly if there are high numbers of data feeds to include. is different,” say Cano-Lopez.
Matching that to external data brings yet another degree of With markets in turmoil and customer behaviour less predictable
complexity into play. A key solution to this problem has been the use than before, it might be easy for organisations to question the value of
of unique reference numbers which are appended to both customer their SCV. Given the willingness of data owners to consider new
records and external databases. approaches to licencing and the ability of third parties to provide
If you do append URNs to customer data, a whole new world of dynamic enhancement, often in near real time, feeding off third
dynamic data matching and enhancement becomes possible. “We can parties could be a way to sustain support and improve the payback
provide refreshes via a URN link,” says Simon Lawrence, managing from the customer single view. a71
DATA STRATEGY | REPORT | APRIL 2009 6
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