THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE

HSW-FR wanted to consolidate its customer databases. In the course of time, the school's customer databases have grown considerably. Since there was no central CRM system and different people maintained and updated contacts, duplicates, different data structures and formats resulted. "Due to the trilingual environment of our school, the employees define differently how they enter information, which leads to inconsistently maintained data," explains Hanspeter Geisseler, head of the school's communications department.

"When sending an e-mail campaign, we first had to collect all customer databases from different departments. Since most of them used different structures, we also had to create a number of contact lists in our campaign system. This was quite time consuming and often we sent the same email twice to the same person".

It was the right time to move all databases to a central database. "We knew that a manual approach was not an option for us because of the enormous effort involved. Keeping employees away from their workplaces does not make sense. [...] The team decided on an automated solution. That's why we turned to Onedot."

HOW ONEDOT HELPED

Onedot helped HSW-FR to integrate customer information from all available sources. This included various databases, information from marketing campaigns and new contacts from other departments that were not previously available to the marketing and communications team.

Earlier databases were not divided into explicit segments. After integrating all databases into one and assigning the data to a specific target structure, the customer ended up with a coherent customer view with more than 80 attributes. "Our customers are divided according to specific segmentation profiles, but can be in several groups at the same time. Now our marketing team can run personalized campaigns with multiple channels".

In order to have the latest data available, Onedot's software identifies duplicates and provides the most up-to-date information. "Otherwise we send out several mailings and spend more money to have less influence," explains Hanspeter. "We also benefit from better relationships with our customers. For example, how would you react to three e-mails with different spellings of your name from the same organization?"

A large part of the data preparation process involved normalizing the contact information of all customers, such as telephone numbers, cities, postal codes, etc. "Since this is a trilingual organization, our databases had different values for the same records. For example, if a German-speaking employee would add the city name Fribourg, a French-speaking employee would add Fribourg. So we needed a coherent source.

Many of the contacts in the customer databases had multiple records in one cell. For example, a contact would have more than one phone number or e-mail address. "When we upload our contact lists to our campaign system, the records with multiple emails are not uploaded. The reason for this is that the system recognizes them as not valid. Often we simply omit these contacts because we had to manually update the list one by one". Onedot's software identified multiple records in one cell with minimal effort on the part of the user, providing richer data.

THE RESULT

Onedot has ensured that HSW-FR has access to the most up-to-date and complete view of its available customer information.

"We have taken control of our customer data and are therefore now able to work effectively towards our ambitious marketing goals. Thanks to Onedot, we have doubled our campaign reach and increased the opening rate of our mailings".

"Customer data is one of the most valuable assets for a company. We now have an easy-to-manage customer database so we can quickly identify and take action to further increase the conversion rate of our sales funnel". Hanspeter wholeheartedly recommends Onedot's data preparation software. "Especially for those who want to invest in a highly scalable customer database."