Imagine opening your mailbox and seeing a letter addressed to “current resident,” or having your financial institution’s AI powered digital assistant inform you that your replacement card is on its way to your old address.

Most people would take this impersonal letter, throw it in the trash, and go about their day. Consumers would likely start associating the sender with junk mail. If the sender places little effort in getting to know them, why should they read their message? Having to call your bank to request the cancellation of a new card, update the AI records, and then post this mail to a new address is sure to achieve the exact opposite desired customer experience. Marketers, CX professionals and business leaders should be groaning by this point. Their two worst nightmares are unfolding: dilution of their brand equity and wasted resources.

This effect only amplifies as more communication channels are added to a campaign. Qualifying the effectiveness of a campaign is a common challenge across organizations. Budget, analytics tools and new tactics are always the first line of defense for improvements, but do you ever question your data? Smart applications designed to enhance our experiences and make our lives easier depend on the quality of the date we feed them.

Changing consumer expectations

For typical marketing campaigns, 20 to 40 percent of customer profiles or records are duplicates. Assuming it has 1 million customer records and invests $1 per customer, an organization could be spending around $400,000 on redundancies alone.

Organizations must get smarter – understanding that trusted, visible data can help us make simple decisions that make big impacts on the bottom line and on customers. Companies who are digitally mature set the bar high for customer service by personalizing the experience at every turn.

Another contributing factor to changing customer expectations is the rising use of AI. It transforms business models across different industries, and according to Gartner, by 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.

An example of this is Opendoor, an online house-flipping startup disrupting the real estate industry with AI algorithms to automate all-cash offers to sellers. On the other hand, Booking.com uses IP based Geolocation Personalization to create customized recommendations from people that are located in the same area as the user. In fact, customers who engage with those recommendations have 70 percent higher purchase rates and outperform generic/static recommendations by 170 percent.

To attain digital transformation maturity, organizations must build a foundation of trusted customer data based on Master Data Management solutions, and those solutions nearly always rely on some kind of ETL technologies to load data into or extract data out of it. Loqate’s global address verification and geocode solutions power Address Verification Interface (AVI) within IBM QualityStage, and in turn, QualityStage is a key component of IBM DataStage – the market leading data transformation tool that delivers in-line data quality while running Extract, transform, load (ETL) and enrichment jobs. This is designed to support data quality, Master Data Management and governance initiatives. IBM and Loqate have been Strategic Partners since 2009, and Loqate is a leading developer of Global Location Data Solutions, including global Address Verification and Geocode. Loqate offers front-end Address Capture as new data is being entered at check-out on a website, into ERP or CRM, or back-office Global Address Verification which is capable of parsing, matching, formatting, transliterating and enhancing millions of records per hour.

QualityStage (with AVI built-in) enables customers to:

• investigate, cleanse and manage data helping maintain consistent views of key entities including customers, vendors, locations and products.
• Deliver quality data for big data, business intelligence, data warehousing, application migration and master data management projects.

Data transformation with in-line data quality delivers business ready data for AI initiatives

Loqate is IBM’s location data expert and trusted resource with the collaboration involving development of features and solutions all the way to sales enablement and marketing support. As IBM DataStage on Cloud Pak for Data takes center stage, Loqate’s global location data solutions with address reference data for over 245 countries and territories will be a key part of enriching the solution.

“As organizations look to accelerate their journey to the cloud leveraging AI to transform how their business operates, they will look to solutions like IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Loqate will be there supporting IBM and powering the location data components of the platform. Loqate is focused on being IBM’s location data expert, so they don’t have to be,” says Justin Duling, Senior VP at Loqate.

Continue learning about AVI and how data quality is a critical component of IBM DataStage on Cloud Pak for Data, a foundational platform running RedHat Openshift for deploying information architecture for AI, on any cloud. Watch the video here:

Learn more about IBM DataStage.

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