Innovative Success Story: Birmingham Midshires

Birmingham Midshires Cleans Up

When Birmingham Midshires needed to create an accurate members’ register it turned to Innovative Systems to help it perform a complex data quality exercise. Since then, ISI’s i/Lytics® Data Linking solution has been an integral part of the data cleansing routine at Birmingham Midshires, maintaining the integrity of its operational and marketing databases and underpinning its relationship with its customers.

Data quality is a serious matter for every company, but for financial institutions facing the complex and onerous process of demutualisation, it could not be more crucial. When Birmingham Midshires started the process of converting from a building society to becoming a division of Halifax plc, it needed to create an accurate members’ register. The members’ register was crucial for two reasons — it would determine who could vote for demutualisation and it would provide the basis for the list of members eligible for payment of a distribution.

Excellent Track Record
The society turned to Innovative Systems for its i/Lytics Data Linking solution. “KPMG, our scrutineers, had used ISI for other building society conversions, so that influenced our choice — the software had an excellent track record, we knew it was reliable and that it would meet the stringent quality measures required by the project. It easily beat the competition on quality and functionality,” said Jane Beddows, Customer Information Manager, Birmingham Midshires.

Birmingham Midshires has been a division of Halifax plc since April 1999. With its own brand, branches and product ranges it employs over 2,000 people. It manages assets in excess of £10 billion and continues to provide a high quality service to its customers. It has also continued its relationship with ISI. As Kevin Clarke, Database Marketing Manager, Birmingham Midshires, explained: “i/Lytics is so well integrated into our regular data routines we can’t function without it.”

Emphasising Data Quality
Using i/Lytics to create the members’ register resulted in the elimination of 10% of the one million records in the customer database. Having invested in this large data quality and de-duplication exercise, Birmingham Midshires recognised the importance of maintaining the integrity of its customer information for all customer records — not just members eligible to vote — and established a Data Quality Unit.

One early project ran the de-duplication exercise across all customers in the database and this resulted in the elimination of a further 1% of the database. By now Birmingham Midshires had merged and dropped 11% (125,000) from its original database. “With average mailing costs running at up to £1.50 per pack, a business which recognises the importance of data quality and routine de-duplication can realise huge savings on direct marketing activities,” said Jane Beddows.

As part of the regular data quality routines, a procedure to match customer records is undertaken on a monthly basis on the Operational database, which contains the core details of every customer. A significant proportion of matches are merged automatically, and the remaining records checked manually. A weekly matching and merging routine is also performed automatically on the Marketing database.

An emphasis on customers rather than products means increased customer interaction and hence more customer information is gathered on a regular basis. With new and existing customers buying products from a variety of channels, such as via IFAs, call centres or branches, it is easy to see how duplicate records can be created. Inevitably, collecting customer data is an error-prone activity, as data comes from many different sources.

But the cost of retaining duplicated or inaccurate records is extremely high. As well as incurring the expense of wasted mailshots, relationships with customers are in serious jeopardy if customer details are fragmented across a number of records, creating confusion and losing trust during customer interactions. With i/Lytics, data from all these sources can be merged to provide a single, unique customer record.

Positive Customer Experience
“Data quality is the foundation of successful customer relationship management,” said Jane Beddows. “Our Customer Relationship System is effective because our data quality processes are so efficient. We have the ability to make the whole interaction a customer has with us productive and worthwhile. And if the customer has a positive experience we will sell more products and services.”

A complete customer record, including an up-to-date contact history, enables Birmingham Midshires to maintain a single, accurate view of every customer. “The single customer view is the goal for our organisation, but it is only possible with stringent data quality measures in place,” said Jane Beddows.

With an accurate customer database, Birmingham Midshires is able to use a range of marketing tools and data from third-party sources such as information services providers. These ‘overlays’ are used in conjunction with the customer database for specific mailshots or other marketing projects. Customer profiling is undertaken in a variety of ways, such as looking at lifestyle data to determine a customer’s potential to buy a new product or service. Without the bedrock of good quality customer data, those marketing tools would be less effective.

Moving Forward
As Jane Beddows explained: “With the high level of database integrity we can achieve a very high match rate from these overlays to our data, enabling us to use some very powerful marketing techniques. This would just not be possible without i/Lytics.”
Jane Beddows continued, “Marketing has become very sophisticated, but unless your basic data is clean, the techniques will remain a theory and not a reality. That’s why we will be continuing to use i/Lytics.”

For Birmingham Midshires, i/Lytics provided an efficient means of de-duplication, but its real value is that it provided a focus for data quality, one of the most important building blocks for effective customer relationships and productive marketing. As Jane Beddows concluded: “i/Lytics is not just excellent software; it has provided us with the means to move the business forward.”

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