Data Cleansing

Along with my database development work, and creating software, there have been many times when I have been asked by clients to help correct their data. This can include things like identifying bad addresses, missing postcodes, sorting out the way names are stored in the system that sort of thing. It can also involve identifying and resolving duplicates. For residential addresses, finding duplicates is fairly straightforward, but for organisational data it can be much more complex.

When correcting business contact data there can be several layers and a lot of related information to deal with. For example, Organisations change name through re-branding exercises, (e.g. Barclays Bank, became Barclays) flotations etc..  Also, companies may have different forms of their names such as Kandy Solutions Ltd, and Kandy Solutions Limited. They may change addresses, and of course staff can move branch change company and change position within organisations. This is where having a database specialist can be very useful first of all in identifying all these duplications and variations, then in merging the records together.

Why does this matter? Well, how much it matters will depend on your business, but if you are mailing brochures or other mass mailings you will be wasting a lot of money mailing to the same person multiple times, posting to addresses that don't exist, so the mail never arrives.

My company, Kandy Solutions have now started to offer a full data cleaning service for customers in the UK. We can take care of everything, from checking that the database does not need additional unique indexes to prevent unnecessary repetition of data through to identifying new addresses for organisations, checking addresses are correctly formatted and match the official Royal Mail Postal Address file, identifying people who have signed up to the various opt-out schemes operating in the UK, looking up business and residential phone numbers for people on the list and many move.

Here is a full list:

Deduplication

Royal Mail's Postal Address File (PAF) Verification

Business Gone Away - find their new address

New Contact Addresses - where people has paid for their mail to be redirected, it can be possible to find their new address too, if they have chosen to let the Royal Mail make that information available

Business Telephone Lookup - we can add business telephone numbers to your data if they are missing

Residential Telephone Lookup - As long as people are not ex-directory, we can add their home phone numbers to your database

Mailing Preference Service (MPS)

Telephone Preference Service (TPS) - Vital if you telemarketing to individuals, you need to know if they are registered with the TPS, because if you call them and they complain you could face a fine.

Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) - Similarly if a business has registered a telephone number with CTPS and you cold call it, you are committing an offense. We can update you database and identify any numbers you hold that are on this list and help you avoid inadvertently calling people you shouldn't

Analysing Data - Which are your best clients, which leads are old and have never come to anything, and so can be archived rather than wasting money continuing to target them. I can answer these and many more questions by analysing your client database.

Telephone Number Validation

Data Enhancement

Name reformatting

There is much more information about the data cleansing service we offer available on our web site at http://www.kandysolutions.co.uk/Data%20Cleansing.html