Clients

Harte-Hanks Ltd. Crystallizes Customer Information for European Clients
Commentary by Bruce Richards, IT Director, Harte-Hanks Ltd.

Your old neighborhood retailer knew the secret to successful customer relationship management (CRM) long before it became one of the hottest concepts for marketing in the late 90s—know as much as possible about your customers and market to their needs.

The data collection and marketing techniques in today’s information economy have changed from the old days, but the basics remain very much the same. CRM initiatives are designed to strengthen and expand ties with customers by tapping the full potential of a company’s existing customer base. However, organizations worldwide are discovering that achieving the goals of CRM—providing customers with relevant choices, building loyalty, marketing new services to existing customers, creating customer-centric strategies—requires a firm base of quality data.

But everything depends on the critical first step: cleaning and transforming the raw data generated by customer interactions. At Harte-Hanks Ltd., a leading provider of CRM solutions, IT director Bruce Richards and his team process huge volumes of customer data—increasingly from e-business channels—using The Trillium Software System®, Harte-Hanks’ award winning data quality product. This enables them to unearth the wealth of strategic information that fuels the CRM services the company provides its clients.

Data Quality is Key

Clean, dependable data is essential to a successful CRM solution. Because ensuring data quality and integrity is both crucial and difficult, many organizations outsource this early step in their CRM implementation.

Harte-Hanks Ltd., a European division of the US-based marketing giant Harte-Hanks, addresses the needs of these organizations directly. Harte-Hanks Ltd. brings to the table years of experience, creativity, and a huge investment in CRM-related technology. Based in London, Harte-Hanks Ltd. specializes in providing CRM services, database and e-business solutions, and other marketing-related products and services to clients across many industries, including insurance companies, utilities, newspapers, and telecommunications firms. Currently a majority of Harte-Hanks Ltd. clients are in the UK, but the company is rapidly making inroads into mainland Europe.

Creating a Single View of the Customer

Richards, a 20-year veteran of information technology, oversees a department of about 15 engineers. For their CRM data management functions, they use a Solaris platform on a variety of Sun enterprise-class hardware.

The creation of single, integrated views of customers is a vital step in any CRM implementation and is a large part of Richards’ responsibilities. Many companies have too many sources of data. A large company that has acquired several financial institutions, for example, has no simple way to know whether the same customer has holdings in more than one of its acquired companies because the underlying databases are fundamentally dissimilar. There is no single customer view.

"Much of what we do involves matching individuals and households," Richards explains. "A client may have four or five databases arranged around different products or different institutions they have acquired. They can’t easily identify all the information for a single customer across all lines of their business."

Richards typically receives a number of multi-gigabyte flat files from a client. Each file contains differing fields, layouts, and record lengths. To identify the key fields that define a single customer, Richards, his technical support team, and a team of engineers dedicated to constructing marketing databases, sort the files in numerous ways and compare them in great detail on many different keys using The Trillium Software System. Ultimately, the consolidated data file records result in single customer views across all business lines in an enterprise. "It’s an incredible challenge, which is why many companies choose to outsource it to us rather than do it themselves," observes Richards.

High-Performance Sorting

Achieving single customer views is extremely demanding of data processing resources. A single sort job at Harte-Hanks Ltd. can involve tens of millions of 3000-byte records that need to be sorted many times. Sorting, especially on multiple keys, is one of the most resource-intensive data processing functions, so maximizing sorting speed and efficiency is essential.

To meet the need for high-performance sorting, Richards relies on SyncSort UNIX (Syncsort, Inc., Woodcliff Lake, NJ). "Choosing SyncSort was a no-brainer for us," Richards says. "We had other problems to solve, and we didn’t want to have to tackle the sorting problem. We needed a sorting tool that was going to be industrial-strength, that would do the job efficiently, and that would give us few headaches. SyncSort absolutely does the job we have it for. And we don’t experience problems with it although we use it every day."

Although SyncSort is a key component in creating single customer views, it is also used for other processes such as data enhancement. For example, a Harte-Hanks client might have customer data in three separate files that are in three different formats. After identifying the unique customer keys, Richards’ team uses SyncSort to sort the files on those keys, making it easy to merge the data and to identify data discrepancies among the files.

"Our data volumes are huge. We looked at the standard UNIX sort and decided very quickly it wouldn’t suit our needs," Richards notes. "Without a high-performance sort like SyncSort, our business couldn’t operate nearly as efficiently."

Building Strategic Solutions

Creating single views of customers is just one of the many services that Harte-Hanks Ltd. offers. Depending on client needs, experts at Harte-Hanks can provide any number of additional services: they cleanse, geocode, and enrich the data; they develop customized databases, which they can host or use to populate a data warehouse; and they provide all levels of marketing activities around the databases developed for clients. "We can take it as far as actually running marketing campaigns against the database if that’s what our client should want," Richards explains.

In response to client demand, a dynamic business environment, and evolving technologies, Harte-Hanks continues to expand its portfolio of CRM solutions. Processing relational databases is becoming increasingly important, and Richards expects SyncSort to be valuable for pre-processing the input data. "As we move more into relational databases," Richards notes, "we anticipate using SyncSort to presort files for fast bulk loading." Richards also plans to capitalize on today’s multiprocessor architectures. "We expect our next performance gain to come from using SyncSort’s parallel processing capabilities," he says. SyncSort can run many sorts simultaneously with no degradation in performance.

Harte-Hanks clients recognize that an upfront investment in data quality is fundamental to acquiring strategic knowledge of each customer and the overall customer base. As CRM, both in traditional and e-commerce environments, becomes critical to business success, Harte-Hanks has the tools in place to help its clients respond to the challenge.

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5410