Data cleaning for a financial institution
The Challenge
The Hanover Group communicates with customers about their respective investments on a regular basis. The transmission of private financial information via mail emphasises the necessity for clean, reliable address information. This is important for the Hanover Group both as a professional and credible company who advocate and respect privacy, and on the practical and commercial level of getting the right information to the right customer and optimising marketing spend.
Hanover’s address database was not sufficiently accurate and due to restrictions with their legacy system, Hanover were prepared to manually improve their address data, but needed help with:
- Establishing a data quality benchmark
- Categorising the issues to show what exactly needed to be done
- Identifying which addresses were the priority for manual corrections
The Solution
Rather than supply an unmanageable list of ten thousand customers, whose addresses were unable to be automatically corrected, Datamine established 8 broad categories (A-H) in order to assess data quality after automated cleaning. Category A represented ‘good' addresses, while the subsequent divisions represented addresses which were inadequate in the areas specified. Within each of these broad categories, the faulty addresses were further broken-down into sub-groups and the various quality issues documented, so that specific instructions detailing how to improve the addresses could be provided.
Essentially, the Datamine team used their strengths in data analytics and software development to deliver a highly targeted and segmented list of ‘unclean’ addresses. This simplified Hanover’s internal planning and implementation of the changes; saving time, money and additional effort.
The Result
Datamine produced a structured set of reports allowing Hanover staff to work efficiently and effectively at correcting the various addressing issues. The solution informed the processing team of what was necessary to standardise and correct the addresses held on Hanover’s core systems, while providing a benchmark for the company’s address quality.
Datamine’s address quality segmentation and remediation guidelines enabled a targeted and informed approach to the manual correction of address quality issues. Hanover’s address quality has been significantly improved through the use of this approach. With the recent implementation of a new contact management system, Hanover are no longer constrained by their legacy system and as a result, are in a position to implement the new New Zealand Post SendRight addressing standards and ensure their continued qualification for bulk mailing cost benefits.