Situation

Coloplast UK has used QAS Pro for several years to validate customer addresses within its home delivery department’s call centre. QAS Pro enables accurate name and address information to be captured at first point of contact with the customer to ensure their order reaches them on time.

The home delivery service was running smoothly, assisted by the use of QAS Pro. However, Coloplast found that the customer data was decaying over time as its customers moved house or passed away. This became problematic when the data was then used for other purposes including marketing.

Four times a year, Coloplast sends a magazine called Charter to its database of 106,000 customers. It was receiving high volumes of returned mail as the mailing packs were incorrectly addressed or the contact was no longer living there to receive them.

Coloplast looked to Experian QAS for a solution that would enable regular updates to the consumer database and ensure that it was not trying to communicate with people who could not respond.

Solution

When Coloplast upgraded to Siebel 7.7, it decided to invest in QAS Batch with Suppression to solve the issue of data decay. It also wanted to minimise the number of old and irrelevant contacts that were imported into the new system.

David Edgeworth, Database Administrator at Coloplast, comments: “The nature of our business means that we have a large customer base of elderly people who unfortunately pass away or quite frequently move into residential and nursing homes.

Out of respect for the families concerned, and also because it does not make good business sense to waste money mailing them, we chose QAS Batch with Suppression.”

As QAS Batch with Suppression is a desktop tool, it enables Coloplast to manage their data cleaning and suppression in-house rather than using a third party bureau service. This means that when a mailing is scheduled to be sent out, Coloplast can run the contact data through QAS Batch with Suppression in advance to ensure it is accurate and up to date.

The data is matched against eight suppression files, including National Change of Address, goneaway and bereavement Suppression files as well as the Telephone, Mailing and Fax Preference Services (TPS, MPS and FPS).

Results

When Coloplast first ran the suppression files against its database, it found that its database was only 81% accurate, with 20,000 contacts having incorrect address details or having passed away. It is estimated that each mailing pack that Coloplast sends out costs £1 so this was potentially £20,000 worth of wasted marketing budget. That does not account for the extra time and effort that would have been spent processing the high volumes of returned mail.

“Using QAS Batch with Suppression, we have seen a substantial saving on the postage costs alone. This is without even considering the production costs or the damage caused to the brand through mailing people who have moved or died.” says David.

Coloplast now runs the data against suppression files every three months. After the expected initial high number of invalid addresses, it has found that the remaining data is cleaner and more up to date. In the last run, only 1,750 invalid addresses were flagged against the suppression files, indicating that the database was 98% accurate. This shows a dramatic improvement in data quality.

Future plans

Given the success it has enjoyed with Experian QAS software, Coloplast is now starting to think about how it might be used to improve the quality of name and address data captured by its sales force.

Each sales person enters customer details on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which synchronises with their laptop. These details are then submitted directly into the customer database, which can result in data errors. Coloplast hopes that by giving its sales force access to Experian QAS’ contact data management software, it can bring about similar improvements as those made to its magazine mailings.