ChoicesUK - Commited to Customer Service Excellence

ChoicesUK is one of the UK's leading home entertainment retailers. The company has more than 200 retail outlets, offering DVD movies for sale and rent, together with videogames, games consoles and mobile phones. It also offers mail order through ChoicesUK Direct and also has an online store, ChoicesUK.com.

Ensuring efficient fulfilment

With its growing business and emerging channels for interacting with customers, ChoicesUK required a data management solution to improve and maintain the information it holds on customers.

ChoicesUK was aware that some deliveries were not reaching their destination and, although not quantifiable, the company believed that having two separate customer management systems created lots of inefficiencies. ChoicesUK also felt that its existing address management solution had a number of limitations. Most importantly, when a postcode was entered, it did not offer all the potential delivery points under that postcode, which meant staff could not identify situations where a caller had given them an incorrect house number or incomplete address.

Capture accurate addresses - first time, every time

ChoicesUK selected QAS Pro a solution that ensures accurate address data is captured at source, improving business efficiency and customer service.

In addition, ChoicesUK also bought QAS Batch, a solution that cleans and verifies addresses against Experian QAS' enhanced version of Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF). This enabled ChoicesUK to clean and maintain its customer database of over two million people. By using QuickAddress Batch to enhance address data captured in-store and map it to correct names, it was also able to improve its marketing activities.

Then in 2003, when ChoicesUK was introduced a new EPOS system into its retail stores, it took the opportunity to bring in further address capture products from Experian QAS to enable store staff to accurately capture customer address details in the most efficient manner possible.

"Before we introduced Experian QAS, we had no address management solution in-store, so we had lots of badly-formatted, poor quality address data. Introducing Experian QAS enabled us to capture much better-quality data, first time."

Benefitting from improved data accuracy

Since ChoicesUK introduced Experian QAS software in 2001, it has come to rely on it to ensure the accurate capture and maintenance of customer address data. The commercial teams also benefit greatly from improved data accuracy. "We can confidently extract specific data - such as customers who have rented but never purchased a product - and deliver targeted marketing campaigns to them."

ChoicesUK also use QAS Mailsort to obtain postal discounts on its marketing and brochure mailings. "QAS Mailsort allows us to organise our outbound mail with the minimum effort to claim available postal discounts."

Extending the data quality strategy

Having seen first hand the business benefits that QAS software offers, ChoicesUK also introduced QAS Pro in its finance department in order to guarantee the quality of address data when setting up new customer accounts.

The company is also looking to work with Experian QAS to suppress the names and addresses of customers on their database who have passed away, moved house, or registered with the Mailing Preference Service. ChoicesUK also intends to extend its data quality strategy by deploying QAS Pro Web on ChoicesUK.com to improve accurate and complete address capture on the web.