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| Innovative Helps Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Obtain a Complete View of its Customers |
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| Founded in 1917, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans is a member-owned fraternal benefit society of 1.1 million Lutherans who are joined together for financial security, outreach, and volunteer service. Thrivent Financial offers Life, Health, and Disability insurance as well as mutual fund and annuity products to its members across the United States. It also provides strategies for college and retirement programs, estate analysis, and investment products. |
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Their Challenge
With 2 million member names and addresses spread across several product-centric databases, and an additional 6 million names in its prospect database, Thrivent Financial inevitably ran into customer service problems. It was often difficult for employees on Thrivent Financial's front lines to get information on a member's complete set of relationships, and often, a member would be associated with more than one address. Thrivent Financial realized that in order to resolve service problems it was having, the company needed to have a consolidated view of its member and prospect information. |
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| Service problems were not the only issue Thrivent Financial was experiencing. It was not uncommon for multiple copies of its bi-monthly magazine, Bond, to be mailed to the same address as a result of these disparate databases. Aside from the obvious wasted postage costs, members also questioned why they were getting more than one copy of the magazine. Thrivent Financial risked annoying their members — the company knew that these "soft" issues, those that cannot be quantified, were important to its members. |
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The Vision
Thrivent Financial's president and CEO, Robert Gandrud, had a vision to have a customer-centric database. As a membership organization, it was critical for Thrivent Financial to have instantaneous, complete information about a member's full relationship to the organization. In order to create this customer-centric view, Thrivent Financial made the decision to consolidate all of its products into a centralized operational database. This effort would enable Thrivent Financial employees to have a complete view of their members. "Before the consolidation, if a member had 6 of our products, and they moved, the new address information had to be entered 6 different times — once for each product. This process was cumbersome for our employees and it left room for human error," said Mary Abbey, vice president of strategic operations at Thrivent Financial. "Since the consolidation, the address is changed once, and all of the member's products use that single, centrally stored address," Abbey added. |
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| Although creating this customer-centric view was a major milestone for the company, it did not eliminate duplicate records — every day duplicate names and addresses were being entered into the system, and every day Thrivent Financial's data quality began to diminish. "We were spending too much time entering and cleaning duplicates," said JoAnne Gibbs, business analyst at Thrivent Financial. "We knew we needed to improve the searching and matching process." |
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Achieving Accuracy with the Best in the Business
To address this issue, Thrivent Financial brought Innovative Systems in to stop the contamination and to make this consolidated member and prospect data highly accurate and useable. The first step for Thrivent Financial was to implement Innovative's online change management solution. Every time customer service representatives take a phone call from a member or prospect, they conduct a look-up with their database. Innovative's online search engine automatically searches for the member or prospect name and prioritizes the search results. "Before we started using Innovative's online search engine, our reps would do a phonetic search and a very long list of possible matches would come up — users had to search the list visually to find the person they wanted. With the Innovative search engine, the best candidates are listed first. We've had excellent experience with it," said Gibbs. "The results come up quickly too," she added. "A name like Anderson, which is a common name in our database, now comes back with accurate results within a second or two." |
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| Thrivent Financial also implemented Innovative's linking capability. This system allows users to deduplicate member and prospect names on the database. "When we ran the linking capability on our database, we eliminated 22,000 names from our prospect file," said Gibbs. "Our use of the product saved us from duplicating a total of 482,000 customers and prospects." Thrivent Financial's database now has about 8 million prospect and customer records. It takes them four hours to run Innovative's linking capability. "This is excellent timing," said Gibbs. "Before we had it, our in-house matching process took approximately 9 hours to run 2 million records." |
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Demanding Excellence
Thrivent Financial chose Innovative to solve their data quality problems because their primary concern was performance. They needed a software system that was easy to use, had enough flexibility to apply their business rules, and was the most accurate. After testing three different products, Thrivent Financial chose Innovative. "Unlike the other products we tested, Innovative's linking and online search engine capabilities met our needs," said Abbey. "Their product was the most accurate and the most flexible," she added. |
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Rapid Installation — Experience
Thrivent Financial was especially impressed with the vast amount of experience of the Innovative team. "Both capabilities were installed extremely quickly and smoothly — the project was completed much sooner than we anticipated thanks to Innovative's professionalism and experience," said Abbey. |
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Benefits of the Consolidation
This consolidation effort changed the way employees at Thrivent Financial did business. "The consolidation has been transparent to our members, but service has improved as a result," says Gibbs. "We also have better member and prospect data to use for marketing and research." |
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