Barley Laing, UK Managing Director at Melissa
With precious budgets under significant pressure due to high inflation and belt-tightening post-pandemic, it has never been more important to ensure funds are efficiently spent.
One important way is to gain insight, a single citizen view (SCV), of those on your database. This will facilitate the personalisation of communications and improve the delivery of services – which will have a positive impact on the user experience – along with improving operational efficiency. Also, obtaining a SCV will help to reduce the opportunity for fraud.
A major challenge to obtaining a SCV is data decay. Contact data degrades at 25 per cent a year without regular intervention, as people move home, get married, for example. An additional issue when it comes to collecting contact data at the user onboarding stage is that 20 per cent of addresses entered online contain errors. Spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers and incorrect postcodes are primarily caused by people mistyping their details into small keyboards on their mobile devices.
With simple and cost-effective changes as part of your data quality regime, incorrect contact data can be easily fixed to help deliver a SCV.
Cleansing and standardising held user data to deliver data quality in batch, as well as when new data is collected in real-time, is important. Furthermore, data can be enhanced by using cleansing tools that can fill in any missing contact details.
Autocomplete prevents inaccuracies at onboarding
Technology, such as address autocomplete or lookup, are vital in ensuring public sector organisations gather accurate address data in real-time at the onboarding stage by providing a properly formatted, correct address when the user starts to input theirs. By reducing the number of keystrokes required, by up to 81 per cent when typing an address, it also enables convenience. The onboarding process is speeded up, reducing the probability of the user not completing an application to access a service.
It’s not only about the address. The first point of contact verification can be extended to email and phone so that these valuable contact data channels can also be verified in real-time. This ensures organisations have the ability to communicate effectively with users, not just on the first occasion, but on an ongoing basis, and support the delivery of a SCV.
Match and dedupe
With the average database containing 8 – 10 per cent duplicate records, it’s a necessity to undertake data deduplication. Duplicate records are frequently caused when two departments merge their data and mistakes in contact data collection occur at different touchpoints.
Unfortunately, it can add cost in terms of time and money, particularly with printed communications, the delivery of which can also negatively impact on the sender’s reputation. Receiving more than one of the same communication will be viewed by many as an excess waste of public money by recipients, particularly at a difficult time for public sector finances.
To avoid such waste it’s important to utilise an advanced fuzzy matching tool to deduplicate data. It can merge and purge the most challenging records, making it possible to create a ‘single user record’ and obtain an optimum SCV. This will also maximise efficiency and cost reduction for those in the public sector because multiple outreach efforts will not be made to the same person. Another key benefit is the potential for fraud is reduced due to the creation of a unified record for each citizen.
Enrichment
The data cleaning tools sourced should be able to fill in any gaps in the contact data, for example, a missing telephone number, as well as correct them where required, which in turn will improve personalisation. This additional, accurate data will also aid those in the public sector to make learnings about their citizens, to further improve communications and their experience.
SaaS supercharges data quality efforts
It has never been easier or more cost-effective to deliver data quality in real-time. Today, you can access a scalable data cleaning software as a service (SaaS) platform that requires no code, integration or training. All that’s required is to plug in and benefit immediately. It’s technology that instantly cleanses and corrects names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers worldwide. Records are matched in real-time, ensuring no duplication, and data profiling is delivered to help identify issues for further action. A single, intuitive interface provides tools for data standardisation, validation, and enrichment, resulting in high-quality contact information across multiple databases that will help to deliver a SCV.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Once public sector organisations have obtained accurate customer data, artificial intelligence (AI) can add significant value to the data they hold. For example, a type of machine learning called semantic technology can promptly deliver high value, in-depth intelligence on the users of your services, and therefore enhance your SCV. Semantic technology, or semtech, associates words with meanings and recognises the relationships between them. It works by delivering powerful real-time connections between records, combining the missing pieces of data to support an informed decision about the content of a communication to a user.
Prioritising the delivery of a SCV at a time when their budgets are under huge pressure is vital for those in the public sector. Obtaining and maintaining contact data quality is at the heart of this. Once you have data quality communications can be personalised, improvements can be made to the provision of services, and a standout user experience delivered. Additionally, public bodies will experience greater operational efficiencies and the opportunity for costly fraud will be reduced.
For more information about Melissa and how our data quality and identity verification services can help you, please visit: www.melissa.com/uk, email: barley.laing@melissa.com or call: 020 7718 0070.
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