Last night I was invited to present our annual Best Use of Technology award at the Young Enterprise Herefordshire & Worcestershire area competition held at the home of Worcestershire County Council, County Hall.

The evening was a celebration of the culmination of eight months of blood, sweat and tears invested by the students with a great deal of support provided by dedicated Link Teachers and business advisors.

As the evening unfolded it was a testament to the thriving culture of encouraging the attitudes and skills for entrepreneurship in our two counties.

After a dazzling line up of companies performing their presentations which basically highlight the highs and lows of experiences throughout the eight months of running their respective businesses, the judges had the unenviable task of choosing a winner. The company considered to be the best among the ten competing then goes forward to represent Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

This year it is even more exciting as the Young Enterprise Company of the Year Presentation event is being held locally at the University of Worcester, which sets a precedent for us in the city and county.

Highlights from the 10 companies include pH6 from The Chase School who produced a children’s book aimed at 4-5 year olds about recycling called ‘Leo the Lion and the Rubbish Robot’.

Representing Wyre Forest District was Stourport High School and Young Enterprise company Shape who had produced a range of innovative jewellery made from recycled unusable bank notes.

From our neighbouring county students from Herefordshire College of Technology and  Young Enterprise company Hands on Accessories performed a slick presentation in cool shades.

Although they were not one of the companies invited to present, we were delighted that our friends and neighbours from The Chantry received a commendation in the Sustainability  award category. Little Big Enterprises and their products produced from vinyl and wooden offcuts were close to our heart as Postcode Anywhere’s Mike Cook and Laura White mentored the students in the company in the early stages of the programme before we moved to Diglis.

The Sustainability Awards were supported by Worcestershire County Council and presented by Rupert Brakspear.  The council’s Sustainability Officer Rupert was impressed by the number of Young Enterprise companies that had included environmental themes either in their products or in their operational practices.

All the companies competing in both the Area Board and Herefordshire and Worcestershire competition levels are to be applauded as again the standard this year exceeded everyone’s expectations.

The company going through to represent our two counties at the next level, the West Midlands Company of the Year competition is WigWam, from the King’s School who ironically are our new neighbours.

WigWam had a number of ‘cash cow’ products including school tea towels and fleece scarves which enabled the company to produce its main product a range of high quality pewter jewellery.

Students from WagWam have monopolised the competition and have won a string of awards including the Postcode Anywhere Best Use of IT award at both area and county events. We wish them every success at the West Midlands final and needless to say we will be cheering them on!

The event was brilliantly and eloquently hosted by Ian Smith deputy chairman of Young Enterprise South Worcestershire. Ian, who is also a partner at accountancy firm Bishop Fleming Rabjohns, received a well-deserved Gold award from Young Enterprise for his outstanding contribution to the enterprise education charity.

Bringing his usual witty narrative to the Young Enterprise area board and county events in so many ways, Ian has contributed so much. He has been a pioneer in promoting Company Programme to prominent business leaders as a means of helping their employees to develop the prerequisite skills for management for example.

As a serial networker, Ian’s contacts and influence in business circles has helped Young Enterprise to heighten its profile as well as secure essential corporate support.

Other Prize winners &  Award Supporters

Best Use of Technology Award – supported by Postcode Anywhere – WigWam, The King’s School

Entrepreneurship Award – Supported  by Worcestershire Ambassadors – Shape, Stourport High School

John King Award – Supported by John King. Troubleshooter – WigWam

Sustainability Awards – Supported by Worcestershire County Council – Shape and From Bee to You, The King’s School. Companies highly commended were  HashTag  Reco, North Bromsgrove School, Prestige, Bishop Perowne C of E College and Little Big Enterprises, The Chantry School

Marketing Award – Supported by Thomas Vale, Shape

Best Company Report – Supported by Worcester Bosch Group, WigWam

Best Trade Stand – Supported by Westbridge Foods Limited,  Hands on Accessories, Hereford Sixth Form College

Best Presentation – Supported by QinetiQ, Supernova, Malvern St. James

Best Company overall  – Supported by Worcestershire County Council, Wig Wam

Online checkout and delivery is a key retail battleground for 2013. Most problems with online delivery originate from a poorly optimised checkout.

A telling expose by the Independent on Sunday (“The great online delivery scandal”) revealed that during December 2012, an estimated 225,000 parcels each day failed to arrive when promised. Failing to live up to promises is damaging for your brand – an Econsultancy survey of 1,000 UK consumers found that 50% would not shop with a retailer again if they failed to deliver on time.

This blog looks at good practice tips for ensuring your checkout provides an excellent user experience, helping you to reduce your abandonment rates.

1. Enclose your checkout and minimise number of pages

Enclosing your checkout reduces background noise, removing unnecessary navigational elements.

The examples below show two contrasting approaches. Which design do you think would encourage a higher click through?

A one-page checkout is not essential – the most important challenge is to minimise the number of pages customers need to complete. Base your checkout flow on usability and user experience considerations instead of trying to shoehorn it into a pre-conceived number of steps. You could even consider using tools like OneStepCheckout to simplify your checkout.

For further reading, we recommend Graham Charlton’s Econsultancy blog “Why you should enclose the checkout process” – an old post but still relevant today.

2. Use intelligent form validation

There are three common errors with online form validation:

1. It’s not clear which elements are mandatory
2. There are no instructions for how to complete boxes like password (e.g. minimum number of characters, numbers & letters only etc)
3. Errors aren’t displayed until all fields are completed and the form is submitted.

In a test conducted with Usability experts Etre, Luke Wroblewski found that real-time validation caused a 22% increase in success rates and 31% increase in satisfaction rating.

Our recommendation is to use in-line, or real-time, validation. This validates what the customer enters in each field as they progress. An error is flagged immediately with instructions for correcting it, helping them to complete the form accurately.

Below is an example of in-line form validation from Office Max.

We recently launched Capture+ for online checkouts. This uses rapid searching to increase accuracy – matching addresses appear as soon as your customer starts typing, so no more need to enter data then click “find address”. One less click, one less opportunity for exit.

3. Avoid a one-way system

This is one of our pet hates! Some checkouts have a nasty habit of not allowing you to go back without losing everything you have already done.

Make sure you enable shoppers to move seamlessly between different stages of the checkout and save the information they have entered – making them re-enter gives them a reason to leave.

An often over-looked requirement is to ensure that if a customer uses their browser back or forward buttons, it doesn’t break the checkout. Ensure you code the checkout to preserve information, or at least display a warning message that navigating away from the page risks losing data.

4. Provide multiple ways to checkout

A 2012 study by Econsultancy/Toluna found that 25% online consumers would abandon a purchase if they were forced to register:

“After adding items to your basket, what would make you abandon your purchase?”

A famous case study from 2009 called “The $300m button” showed that replacing the word “Register” with “Continue” and a simple message increased purchases by 45%.

In reality, the difference between account registration and guest checkout is a password. That’s it. But it’s the psychology of word association that leads to exits at this stage. So phrase your checkout carefully.

Key recommendations:

1. Provide guest checkout.
2. Make it easy for existing customers to log-in.
3. Enable easy account registration for those who want it.
4. Consider adding social log-in such as Facebook.

The two examples below from ASOS and New Look don’t mention account registration:

The example below shows how Mydeco also enables log-in via Facebook.

5. Make it easy for people to remember what they are ordering

 To achieve this, make sure you include an order summary throughout the checkout. This helps customers remember what they are ordering and how much they are spending – transparency is important.

Accessories Online does this nicely with a simplified two-stage process.

6. Make delivery information clear and concise

Don’t throw in curveballs at the last minute! You should ensure that delivery timings & costs are made clear before the checkout is started – this can be done on product and basket pages.

If there are so many delivery options it’s not possible to accurately quote the cost upfront, then show a “Delivery from” message with the cost for standard delivery with a link to your detailed delivery information page (opening in a light box, of course). This at least sets expectations.

When providing premium services like next day delivery, make it clear when the cut-off is and what day the parcel will arrive. The example below from Accessories Online show a live ticker counting down the daily order cut-off time.

7. Provide multiple options for payment & delivery

Offering a one-size fits all delivery doesn’t give customers choice. Delivery is now a major competitive differentiator. Beyond the standard delivery promise, consider adding the following, which are proven to increase order completion:

1. Next day / Preferred day
2. Time slots e.g. 1hr time slot during the day – Maximuscle does this
3. Evenings
4. Saturdays
5. Collect+ – delivery to a local outlet for collection – Wiggle provides this.

For large catalogue retailers, it’s common for delivery variation at product level. Use your product database to specify which delivery options are available for each product, so that realistic expectations are set. This information can be emphasised at checkout for clarity.

Online shoppers are also used to seeing alternative payment options in checkouts. These include:

1. PayPal
2. Google Wallet
3. Payment on account
4. Finance

Buy.com is a good example of multiple payment options at checkout:

The Watch Gallery is an example of a store that provides finance payment options:

8. Make your checkout mobile friendly

PayPal expected to see $7bn in mobile payments in 2012, driven by eBay sales. Data released over Christmas showed large spikes in mobile traffic on retail sites on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

People want to use their mobiles to transact, so provide an optimised mobile checkout that makes it easy to use on smartphone. For larger tablets, you’ll probably find that the desktop checkout works fine.

If you force mobile visitors onto other devices to make a purchase, you risk losing their business – they could purchase from a mobile friendly competitor.

The example below is from Amazon, who unsurprisingly have an excellent mobile checkout (this from their mobile app):

9. Protect and assure your customers

Make sure trust and security signals are clear throughout the checkout. This includes the following:

1. Security seals – for SSL Certificates link to the online certificate.
2. PCI Compliant logo if relevant.
3. Independent 3^rd Party accreditations like Trusted Shops (merged with IMRG’s Internet Shopping Is Safe scheme).
4. Payment options supported.

See the example below from Boohoo – they position the content zone as “Shop safe with Boohoo” and use relevant accreditation logos.

Done poorly, this is proven to be one of the key reasons people abandon checkouts.

This ties-in with providing multiple payment options – it’s about convincing shoppers you are trustworthy and providing them with the best possible service.

10. Use testing to fine-tune the process

Last but by no means least – commit to using a continuous testing process to fine tune and optimise your checkout. It’s impossible to know instinctively what the optimal combination of process, content & technology is to maximise your checkout conversion rate. Testing is absolutely essential – it helps remove subjectivity from decision-making and show you in real-time what page designs/flows are delivering the best results.

We like to include online user testing in the mix. Take a peek at Usertesting.com and Whatusersdo.com for great options for video testing.

Comments and questions

So there’s our Top 10 starter kit for checkout optimisation. What do you think? Please drop by and share your comments, questions and experience. Please also share any relevant links you think readers would be interested in.

Recently, Dutch organisations which should know my new German address, such as the tax service, started sending documents to my old Dutch address, which the new inhabitants were good enough to send on. After some investigation as to why they were doing this when I had informed them all of my new address directly, it became apparent that either I, or somebody in the Amsterdam municipality, had added my new address in the population registry as being at number 17 instead of 14.  This population registry data is used as a golden record by many institutions, and this error had been iterated downstream, overriding any correct information that was already in their systems.

A taxing problem

Much as I would sometimes prefer the tax services not to know how to get hold of me, they have a habit of making wildly inaccurate assessments and taking the money anyway, so I decided it was best to let them know where I really am.

There is a number 17 in my street, but it’s a long way away from number 14, and its inhabitants don’t know me from Adam, so they had been sending back the mail from these Dutch institutions, which in turn led those institutions to question their data and to start sending information instead to the old Dutch address in the hope that it would be sent on.

Once an error like this is in the system, correcting it is far more costly and time-consuming than getting it right in the first place, for both parties.  It quickly became clear that the municipality required proof that there was an error, whilst proof had not been required to create a change of address record in the first instance, and that the correction would not wash down the system with the same efficiency as the error did.

Address validation systems would not have spotted the initial error. Numbers 17 and 14 (in fact, every address in this municipality) share the same place name and postal code. There were checks and balances missing which could have caught this issue, though.  As my better half and I had to fill in the forms separately, and we each indicated that we would both be moving to the same new address, the discrepancy between our records should have been flagged up at that point.

Regardless of whose fat finger caused this problem in the first place, it’s a clear indication on how essential correct data is, especially when it is being used as a trusted and much accessed golden record.

If you attended Internet World this year you may have spotted me there at the Big Data Show, giving a talk on how small businesses can turn big data into a big opportunity. If you missed it, fell asleep half way through, or just had too many beers, don’t panic as I’ve summarised the talk in these four handy tips:

 1. Never throw data away

No one should ever be afraid of hoarding too much data. In fact, I would highly recommend that you release your inner Edmund Trebus and start collecting as much data as you can get your hands on. There’s plenty of gold buried deep in your organisation’s data and valuable insights that a little mining can help bring to the surface.

A purpose can always be found for older records and moreover, there is always software on the market that can help if the amount of information stored has built up to an unmanageable level. This brings me on nicely to my next point…

 2. Store data carefully

If we are going to use big data to provide insights and pattern analytics, we need to make sure that the information collected adheres to a critical standard. If we cannot accurately identify the customers, regions, segments, expiration dates, etc., how can we possibly provide the breakdown of this information to the decision makers?

At least half the battle of generating intelligence from data is having readily available data to begin with, so while your smaller organisation might not be able to afford a massive big data initiative, you can start deriving actionable information from your data.

Flexibility and agility are crucial for SMEs. With their limited resources SMEs have to manage input from a range of different data sources – from structured transactional data to unstructured sources such as social media, web traffic and customer sentiment.

The ability to move a record easily from one source to another is therefore key. If the process is ironed out it provides instant access to valuable insight, which you can respond to such as spikes in demand for certain products or searches for a particular service. Equally, it allows you to act on emerging trends, engage with their customer base and even expose potential risks.

3. Keep it clean!

With big data all the range at the moment, many IT leaders seem to be forgetting the most basic price of admission to the big data world, clean data.

Your big data analytics are only ever going to be as good as the data that goes into it. So if you are burdened with incomplete or inaccurate data, fix it first.

As you can probably imagine, it is quite a long slog to link, match, cleanse, and transform data across systems. However, it is necessary to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies, and multiple data linkages, or your data can quickly spiral out of control.

Saying that, it’s a much better idea to look at preventive measures in addition to one-off cleaning methods. Maintaining a closer relationship with contact data right from the point of entry is critical. Consistency can be enforced, and the consequences of poor formatting will be improved.

Capturing addresses correctly the first time is therefore crucial. Any subsequent processing will never match the quality of an address captured correctly in the first place. Most of the time, a customer’s address arrives as part of a purchase, which makes the capturing process even more important. Not only are you about to find out who this consumer (perhaps a repeat customer) is, but the address will also be essential to validate payment and, of course, to deliver any physical goods to the right place.

4. Play with it!

Being a small business has so many advantages when it comes to big data. The main one being that we have the time to experiment and play around with our data without being confined to a rigid strategy or red-rape that inhibits some large businesses.

Just taking the time to sit down and mess about with your own data without any particular goal in mind can result in discovering really cool things you didn’t even know you had. In fact, that’s probably how many of our products at Postcode Anywhere were created!

Any investment an SME decides to make with regards to developing a solid, working big data management system will see a return. After all, insight is priceless and smaller start-ups and SMEs should always be looking to maximise the potential of big data and the huge selection of insider information it offers.

Your data is your greatest asset: you just don’t realise it yet!

Think I’ve missed something? Join the debate over on Twitter using the hashtag #PCAchat

This is your chance to get the tips, tactics, knowhow, and everything you need to recover lost sales and increase repeat purchases.

Whether you’re looking to take your cart recovery strategy up a notch, or if you’re just getting started, this session drills down into the details of cart recovery, offering examples and tips guaranteed to capture additional revenue.

Why is the checkout process so important?

• Average shopping cart abandonment across all devices is 72%
• Most delivery problems originate from a poorly optimised checkout
• 50% of customers will not shop with you again if you do not deliver on time

All of this and much more will be discussed in a brief webinar hosted by Postcode Anywhere’s senior account manager Tom Gurney  and Sam Rutley at PushON.

Reserve your free space at the 10 Essential Tips To Improve Your Checkout webinar here.

We hope you can join us for what will be a highly informative webinar!

The ambitious promotional video was created by the St Paul’s Creative Writing group and its purpose was to highlight and raise awareness of the many issues of homelessness. The content of the programme was also intended to explore the different ways the hostel helps and encourages clients to integrate back into the community.

Postcode Anywhere gave St Paul’s funding as a contribution towards the purchase of a video camera to enable them to film and edit the 10 hours of raw footage and ultimately create the final, completed DVD.

It all started when our technical support manager, Alex Schofield told us that his girlfriend Laura Frampton was a volunteer at St Paul’s and was also doing her university dissertation on the subject of homelessness. She was also involved in supporting the Creative Writing group.

Laura appealed to us for help during her time as a volunteer at St. Paul’s as we already knew them quite well through our CSR work in the community. Last year we provided help in the kitchen, serving food to clients at their evening meal sessions. As a result of this relationship, we couldn’t help but be impressed by the extent and scope of work they do for homeless people.

The project was really successful and St. Paul’s Creative Writing group and everyone else that has helped towards the completion of the final DVD should all be congratulated.

Giving something back

The Creative Writing group consists of a handful of committed and enthusiastic St. Paul’s clients who are all at various stages of being helped towards greater independence and wish “to give something back” to the hostel. The DVD is in 2 parts; the 1^st part shows the group asking questions and sharing their own experiences.

One member of the group reveals the support he received in enabling him to move forward with his life. For example the film shows him taking part in the Good Soil project and how the hostel helped him with his resettlement programme. The film depicts the group at the hostel explaining how important it is to them to receive the on-going help and encouragement from the committed and dedicated staff at St. Paul’s.

The 2^nd part of the DVD reveals how staff help clients move forwards once they are ready for change and provide counselling services, volunteering opportunities as well as training in the hostel kitchen. It also highlights other recreational activities that are provided by volunteers such as dragon boat racing for example. Additionally, volunteers help clients with literacy and numeracy, art workshops and the opportunity for them to work at the hostel allotment.

St. Paul’s DVD was completed in December 2012 and the hostel hopes to continue with more exciting projects illuminating its life and good works. It is very important for St. Paul’s to raise awareness of the valuable work it does. With the severity of the cutbacks in government funding and the current difficult economic climate, there has never been a more critical time to support the problem of homelessness.

Homelessness is a nationwide issue that is beginning to rise and it is not going to go away. As the impact of the economic downturn and the long term housing shortage take hold, advice services have seen greater demand for help from people having lost or are under threat of losing their homes.

Worryingly statistics in general show an increase in the number of homeless people including a rise in street homelessness. The Government’s recent over haul of the welfare and benefits system and cuts  to affordable housing budgets is going to  compound the problem and therefore it is likely to get progressively worse.

Now is an appropriate time for St. Pauls to continue to raise the awareness of homelessness and the DVD provides an ideal medium to do this. Support & Development Co-Ordinator, Sharon van Antwerpe has used the DVD in some of the presentations she does in the community and has already received really good feedback.

Cloudforce is a rolling series of one-day events that for the past eight years has brought the excitement of its annual user conference, Dreamforce, to the local level. I have attended the last four Cloudforce London events where Benioff’s team of evangelists have inspired folks like me, year after year. It is such a shame he no longer attends!

Customer companies

Last year, it was all about Social Enterprise and the idea that businesses need to become social if they want to stay competitive. This year Salesforce have reinvented the event and reoriented themselves around the idea of helping enterprises to become “customer companies”.

According to the firm a customer company is one that has connected customers, connected employees, connected partners and connected products. Customer companies use the latest technology trends – social, local, touch, big data, identity, ecosystems and communities – to better connect their customers, employees, partners and products. The common theme is that too many companies focus on internal processes and metrics and don’t focus on the customer. So these might just sound like a load of old buzzwords, but they’re really not. Amid all the Californian razzle-dazzle there is a decent amount of meaningful, forward-thinking content. And if you still need convincing I suggest you check out this video.

Benioff’s message of a customer company resonates with Postcode Anywhere’s beliefs on customer centricity. For years now, we have all tried to work around the age-old adage “the customer is always right”.

According to Salesforce, “businesses around the world are turning to social and mobile cloud technologies to connect with their customers in entirely new ways.” But customer connections are completely redundant without the correct data in the first place. The Salesforce platform supports many of the capabilities to enable different ways of connecting with customers; however companies are still facing major challenges handling their enterprise customer data.

And this is where we come in!

Postcode Anywhere will be exhibiting at the Customer Company Tour (stand 122) demonstrating our address validation tool Capture+. Using Capture+, Salesforce users can type any fragment of an address and return a complete and fully validated record in seconds, making customer, contact and lead relationship management much simpler.

You can’t be a customer company without customer data. Good data is the backbone of any business. Without accurate data, a business cannot understand their customer and prospect relationships, which is the main reason to implement a CRM system like Salesforce in the first place.

If you’re planning on attending the Salesforce Customer Company Tour this year get in touch.

The picture uploaded by the deceased man’s son-in-law went viral and sparked some good old fashioned British outrage – and rightly so!

 “I’m really sorry for my father-in-law not paying his bill last month, but what with him being dead and all, it’s probably slipped his mind. Some people, eh?

I might pay it if you can prove to me he’s been watching any of your channels in heaven, but given that British Sky Broadcasting is beamed in directly from the clouds I think he’s much more likely to be enjoying that.”

Humbling apologies

The company in question has since issued a humbling apology following the embarrassing incident, refunded the cash, donated money to a hospice and vowed to get to the bottom of the matter. But to me and to most other marketers, the cause will be painstakingly obvious: poor data.

Data cleansing is one of the most important components of managing customer and marketing communications. Without exception, it makes good commercial sense when corresponding with customers or embarking on marketing campaigns to keep mailing lists up to date with changes among the UK population to prevent unnecessary distress to the bereaved families, environmental waste, not to mention considerable amounts of money.

Fortunately in the UK we have an excellent dataset from Mortascreen. The file contains the names and address details of over 10 million deceased individuals, with around 50,000 new records collected each month.

When a file is cleansed against Mortascreen any records that are matched as deceased will be suppressed (removed) from the file, or, if the client so wishes, flagged. When a record is flagged by Mortascreen it remains in the file allowing the client to take any other appropriate action they feel necessary.

Something of a puzzle

You could be forgiven for thinking that with software like this readily available, the UK database marketing industry would have the basic of data hygiene well and truly nailed and nice, clean shiny, up to date databases would be par for the course. But the reality, unfortunately, is that this is still very far from the case, as this news story so evidentially demonstrates.

For me this is something of a puzzle, given the accessibility and affordability of data cleansing solutions.

Companies that fail to keep their mailing lists suppressed for movers or the deceased will be continually and publically criticised creating completely avoidable negativity, which will result in financial loss.

In today’s society people can easily broadcast their views to millions and unfortunately for this company their failure to update their database for the deceased has been exposed all over social networks.

With up to 5,000 address changes taking place every 24 hours to the 29 million records in Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF®), the database is not a static file and is constantly changing to reflect new builds, updates and deletions. Daily updates will significantly improve the accuracy of customer data. But what is UDPRN and why is it important?

What does UDPRN stand for?

The Unique Delivery Point Reference Number.

What is it?

UDPRN is an 8 digit code that uniquely identifies each postal address of the Royal Mail PAF® database.

Why is it important?

The UDPRN allows you to identify an individual delivery point even if the postal address details change. As part of the normal maintenance of the PAF®, data address details may change over time – spelling errors are fixed, company names can change, and postcodes are modified or even removed. At that point the delivery point is also deleted from PAF®, assuring that each number remains uniquely correlated to a delivery point.

The UDPRN allows us to keep a constant reference that remains uniquely tied to the physical delivery point regardless of any changes in the address.

Who needs it?

UDPRN is a dataset well-suited for anyone who requires a unique premise identifier. It is particularly valuable for organisations working in delivery and logistics, shipments, utilities and pretty much anyone who needs to identify a delivery point correctly the first time, every time.

What are the benefits of using it?

Using UDPRN ensures first-time precision in identifying an address. This is critical for deliveries, service works, installation or site work.

How can Postcode Anywhere customers make the most of it?

All of our addressing software, including Capture+, contains UDPRN as standard. We get updates to the data daily from Royal Mail which we can then pass on straight to our customers without them having to lift a finger!

But for financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, the luxury of ignoring data quality is not there. They live or die by the quality of their data – its accuracy, completeness and currency.

Interest rates

Like any business interested in its success and bottom line, financial institutions have a vested interest in improving data quality. Better data quality reduces poor business decisions based on inaccurate and duplicate data; reduces missed revenue and increased costs in repetitive and ineffective processes; allows greater reliance to be placed on financial and business reports; and improves customer satisfaction through correct and timely interaction with them based on full and accurate data.

Yet financial institutions have even greater incentives for achieving the highest levels of data quality. The personal finances held and managed by them are very close to the hearts of their customers, who do not tolerate errors. More than in other industries, a full 360 or single customer view is essential for understanding and managing the interactions, sales and marketing with each customer, and to make sound financial decisions, at the same time allowing sound risk management.

More than this is the high level of regulatory compliance required from the financial sector. Governmental laws, as well as voluntary accords such as Basel II/III and Solvency II, increasingly set stringent requirements which can only be met when data accuracy and quality are high. Institutions are also required to take measures to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and other fraud.

Just a few days ago the consequences of data quality problems for financial institutions was amply illustrated when a night time process at the ING, The Netherlands’ largest bank, failed and was restarted, causing debits and payments to be made twice. This, together with a tardy response from the bank, caused immense problems. Embarrassed queues of customers at the supermarkets were unable to pay for their food as their accounts had apparently been emptied. Twitter and Facebook glowed incandescently with distress and opprobrium. Questions were asked in parliament and of the financial regulator, and the bank’s CEO had to make a rapid and grovelling apology. This simple error has not only provided the bank with the headache of how to roll back the errors created in its data, it must also manage a massive public relations and regulatory disaster.

Insure your assets

In the insurance industry, collecting non-validated addresses across a number of entry and contact points can create operational problems in various departments, such as underwriting, customer services and claims. Poorly formatted and incomplete addresses can negatively affect processes such as rating, for which location is often an essential component, and customer interaction. Without a complete overview of the customer and their socio-economic and locational information, expensive errors are inevitable. Incorrect addressing causes inefficiency in operations that depend on addresses but do not wait for them to be validated; decreased rating accuracy for each policy holder; lost policy and claim documentation, with the associated costs of rectifying the problems; delays in revenue collection and reduced customer satisfaction.

On another level, banks must make efforts to reduce the damage through lower level crime, such as card and identity theft, and phishing. At contact points, interaction between customer and institution set more onerous security gateways than other businesses need to do, and even relatively routine requests, such as for a change of address, require more work on the side of both bank and customer.

Failures in data quality and governance in the financial sector, and the huge costs and major consequences they bring with them, have been forced into the public eye in the past years, and demonstrate the importance of data quality in every business.

In the finance industry it’s not a matter of choice – without data quality banks and insurers cannot survive.