support
Send this page to a friend 
Subscribe to our eNewsletterChildren's Art Project adopts point-of-entry address validation
182 KB
Situation
Children's Art Project sells young patients' artwork to provide more than $18.5 million in programs for cancer patients. They were struggling with an inaccurate customer database, resulting in $5 in UPS charges every time a package had an incorrectly-formatted address. Managers knew they needed to stop losing precious dollars to these surcharges.
Solution
QAS for Ecometry validates addresses as they are entered into an Ecometry database. The seamless integration with Ecometry, familiar user interface, and point-of-entry validation make it easy for users to get addresses right, right from the start. By entering addresses automatically, QAS software also reduces data entry time, boosting productivity.
Results
- A 20% reduction in returned catalogs
- A time savings of 30 seconds per address entered
- The correction and validation of 12,500 addresses previously identified as incomplete or incorrect
For more than thirty years, the Children's Art Project at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has helped improve the lives of children with cancer. Through the sale of young patients' original artwork, the project has funded more than $18.5 million in educational, recreational and emotional programs benefiting cancer patients and their families.
Children's Art Project products are sold in more than 2,500 retail stores. In addition to retail outlets, a large percentage of sales are through direct mail. More than one million catalogs and other mailing pieces are distributed and more than 25,000 packages are shipped annually.
When marketing staff for the Children's Art Project wanted to increase awareness and improve overall efficiency, they turned to QAS.
The problem: Dated database meets dirty data
According to Angela Hartnett, Direct Marketing Manager for the Children's Art Project, their Ecometry customer database contains more than 250,000 names. "With new names and addresses continually coming in, a lot of information in our database was erroneous or incomplete." In fact, according to Hartnett, the Children's Art Project database had not been thoroughly cleaned in nearly 15 years.
In addition, as temporary help was hired to deal with seasonal demand, Hartnett noticed a large number of inconsistencies in the format of the data entered. "Everyone had their own way of inputting information into the database," Hartnett explained. "For example, some street names were abbreviated while others were not. Ultimately, some 1,500 addresses couldn't even be matched."
The solution: QAS improves data accuracy
In the summer of 2004, Hartnett attended a conference sponsored by Ecometry. "We were not actively seeking a new product solution at that time," Hartnett pointed out. "However, when we viewed a product demonstration from QAS, we quickly realized how helpful this software could be for us."
QAS develops the superior line of address validation software. By partnering with leading database and customer relationship management providers such as Ecometry, QAS is able to provide best-of-breed address validation without requiring customers to change pre-existing systems and processes.
During the initial stages of implementation Children's Art Project utilized the QAS Batch solution to cleanse their database of any spelling or formatting errors. "It was very user-friendly and easy to install," Hartnett commented. QAS software cleanses databases by matching customer addresses against official USPS® records.
Once existing errors had been corrected, QAS helped the Children's Art Project ensure that all future addresses entered into the database would be correct. QAS validates addresses as they are entered into the system, eliminating bad addresses going forward.
The results
When the Children's Art Project implemented QAS in August of 2004, 5% of the database, or 12,500 customer addresses, were identified as incomplete or incorrect.
"With QAS Pro, we noticed an immediate visible result," stated Hartnett. "Already, we can report a reduction of at least 20% returned catalogs and packages." Hartnett reports that, by automatically entering valid addresses from just a few keystrokes, QAS software shaves, on average, 30 critical seconds off the time it takes to enter each address.
"From reducing the number of keystrokes at point-of-entry to improving overall data accuracy, this solution has helped the Children's Art Project enormously," Hartnett continued. "Since we have implemented QAS' address verification solution to cleanse our data, we do not expect we will need to cleanse it again."
QAS for Ecometry
The QAS suite of products is fully integrated with Ecometry Software. A partner of QAS, Escalate Retail is a premier provider of customer-focused software solutions, including the Ecometry Commerce Suite, that completely automate the front- and back-end operations of consumer-centric retailers.
