GS1 Australia is a leading, not-for-profit organization that develops and maintains global standards for efficient business communication. Best known for the barcode used on products worldwide, GS1 standards and services improve the efficiency, safety, and visibility of supply chains in 25 industries. With local member organizations in 116 countries, 2 million user companies, and 6 billion transactions daily, the GS1 system of standards is the most widely used supply chain standards system in the world.
Situation
GS1 Australia has enjoyed a long-standing partnership with Experian. As a forward-thinking company, heavily focused on quality customer data, GS1 has developed robust data quality management strategy, of which Experian’s data validation solutions play an integral part.
Challenge
GS1 manages a wealth of customer data. Its Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system currently holds around 30,000 active business accounts, with around 150,000 active contact records.
Traditionally, the company relied upon postal address data to communicate with their customers, via direct mail campaigns, especially for financial purposes as part of their Annual Renewals. Over time, GS1 transitioned to email as their primary communication channel, often sending several email campaigns a week to their customer base. Email addresses are a key data component used to identify customers in their systems and associate relationships across our membership and services offered.
The team was committed to ensuring they had strong solutions in place to accurately capture and validate customer contact data and keep this data clean and up-to-date to effectively reach and engage with their customers.
Solution
GS1 implemented Experian’s address and email validation solutions at various data capture points on their corporate website, customer portal, and within their Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform.
Experian’s address and email validation APIs validate emails and addresses at the point of collection, instantly comparing against official data from Australia Post and email domain providers. The customer or employee is prompted to correct any misspellings before they are submitted. This all ensures the account and contact data gathered is accurate and complete, increasing postal and email deliverability rates.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
GS1 uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its CRM and Financial system. This provides a centralized solution to hold all their customer data, run their marketing campaigns, and manage their finance and invoicing processes. To ensure consistency, GS1 implemented Experian’s certified data validation app for Dynamics 365.
An approved Microsoft solution, Experian’s app seamlessly integrates into Dynamics 365, to quickly validate and standardize postal and email addresses whenever a user creates or updates a contact, lead, or account record. This ensures only accurate addresses and email addresses are captured.
Results
By choosing Experian’s address and email validation solutions, the organization has enjoyed the following results:
Before the data cleanse, the client experienced:
- Improved engagement with customers with enhanced email deliverability rates due to real-time email validation.
- Confidence that their data is always validated against the latest datasets.
- The ability to deliver a better customer experience by ensuring the data they hold is up-to-date, accurate, and complete.
- A significant reduction in manual effort to update, maintain, and cleanse customer CRM data as it is validated at the point of entry and regularly corrected via bulk cleansing.
What's next?
GS1 Australia continues to work closely with Experian to explore ways in which their existing data validation tools can be enhanced to maximize their full potential, as well as considering additional tools to further support their data quality strategy.
