CPP aims to improve customer targeting through master data management

CPP uses master data management software to boost business intelligence approach

'Golden keys' or master records eliminate duplicates and help with customer retention, says CPP

The fact that marketing companies are looking for ways to use master data management (MDM) software to hone their campaigns may be a source of worry to those on the receiving end of them, but many of these firms are leading the way in developing business intelligence strategies from which other organisations can also learn.

International marketing services organisation CPP offers customer management products to financial giants, including HSBC, Citibank and MBNA, aiming to increase credit card customers’ loyalty by providing them with additional "life assistance" services based around personal security – credit card protection, identity fraud prevention – insurance and discounts on travel and hotel bookings.

With offices in York, Chesterfield, Dublin, continental Europe, the Far East and the US, CPP retains contact and credit card details of over 10 million customers and 200 partner organisations worldwide. It recently implemented an MDM programme designed to collate all of that information into a single data repository.

Before creating that repository, CPP needed to be certain the data it was putting into it was accurate, and that duplicate information was eliminated to prevent customers or business partners receiving the same marketing material twice.

The company was previously outsourcing its customer data integration (CDI) processes to marketing services provider Acxiom, but decided to bring them back in-house and implement DataFlux’s qMDM software.

“We wanted to implement full MDM not just the CDI piece and it was clear from our discussions with Acxiom that it did not have quite what we wanted,” says Charles Blyth, CPP head of business intelligence.

The software extracts data from CPP’s policy, sales and customer relationship management (CRM) systems and Oracle data warehouse environment, matching details and using selection algorithms to create a unique master record from the entities it finds.

“You always get a small percentage of data that cannot be matched, but it is more accurate than what we were using before,” says Blyth.

The initial software investment was significant, but CPP had no trouble convincing the board that it was worth the money.

“We were quite lucky that we run the whole datacentre for the global CPP organisations, which means there is a very powerful operational environment there and clear data requirements that justified the investment,” says Blyth.

CPP estimates it is on course to save around £500,000 per year by not having to pay third parties to process customer and partner details on its behalf, while pertinent information can now be retrieved and used to good effect much more quickly.

And while bringing CDI back in-house has added to the workload, no extra personnel have yet had to be taken on to handle the new software, though one man has been promoted to the role of data architect and CPP may appoint a junior member of staff in the future.

“Most of the savings come from in-house efficiencies and improvements in customer matching, as well as a reduction in the time it takes to get to the customer data, which has been reduced from months to weeks in some cases,” says Blyth. “The data is already better quality, which leads to better marketing initiatives being realised.”

So far, CPP has migrated all its customer and business partner policy data to the master data repository. Phases two and three of the implementation will add more demographic information into the data itself, then link it back into the company’s core enterprise resource planning and CRM systems.

“We will monitor the information and measure the information going in and coming out, while qMDM is capable of providing quality reports on top of that,” says Blyth.

When this is done, Blyth predicts that more accurate data will deliver improved conversion rates for its top customers, leading to better customer retention and improved interaction with its retail partners. Using qMDM can also make that data more easily available to other CPP marketing initiatives.

“Providing accurate information back to our business partners is the unique selling point,” said Blyth.