Defaqto is a leading financial information business, helping financial institutions and consumers make better informed decisions for over 20 years.
About Defaqto
With over 41,000 ratings of financial products in the UK, Defaqto have 60 experts collectively spending 400 hours per day monitoring products for any changes to ensure they stay up to date.
Challenge
The team at Defaqto, realised that their database was hindering them in improving their communications and marketing efforts.
With data in three disparate and non-integrated systems: Silverpop for marketing activity, Microsoft Dynamics for contact management and a matrix database, the information was out of date, duplicated and not in sync between the databases.
The large job required specialist technology and expertise, so they actively sought out Data8 to collaborate with to create a bespoke process to amalgamate and cleanse the data.
Solution
The newly created ‘Dataforce Team’ which comprised of marketing, directors and finance staff at Defaqto worked closely with the cleanse team at Data8 to use a custom cleansing process which consisted of five stages:
Input
The first part of the process was for Data8 to extract data from Dynamics where all fields were taken from CRM. Defaqto then supplied a current copy of the Silverpop database to Data8’s FTP site.
Improve
Records are prepared for a full cleanse using three strategies:
- Standardising and formatting the data, for example correcting telephone numbers into the appropriate field for landline and mobile.
- Data was cleansed, one example is matching contacts to accounts using custom rules based on domain names.
- Using the data from the Silverpop and Matrix database, the Dynamics database was appended and enriched to make current records more detailed
Cleanse
The full cleanse focuses on all areas of a record:
- Address cleansing – PAF data was used to cleanse the data to PAF standard
- Email validation – using multistage validation techniques to check domains, IP addresses for bounce backs, spelling errors and validity
- Identification and removal of:
- Businesses who had ceased trading
- Deceased records
- Goneaways and movers for both B2B and B2C companies
- Telephone validation for landline and mobile
- Appending additional variables to enrich records
- Preference service screening for the TPS, CTPS and MPS
Dedupe and merge
The bespoke deduplication process identifies duplicate records and whether they should be merged together to form a new unified company or contact record. The process involved fuzzy address matching, with some records being manually decided upon before deduplication.
The deduplication technology found:
- Just over 20,000 duplicates with a premise level match
- Nearly 20,000 duplicate emails
- Just under 6,000 duplicates with an initial level match
Once duplicates are identified, a master record is initially recognised which will remain on CRM with the subordinate entries then being merged into them to create one wholesome record.
Results
The results were directly inserted into Defaqto’s CRM outside of office hours for minimal disruption.
Your Next Steps..
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