CUSTOMER STORY • HOME SHOPPING
One customer, one golden record
How Chums uses Cygnus to reconcile orders arriving by web, phone and post, and to keep its customer data accurate and treated with care.
One golden record per customer, however they chose to order
Chums has been selling clothing and household goods by post since 1981. Aside from a small showroom at its head office in Prescot, there are no shops. Around half the business now comes through the website, but the other half still arrives the traditional way: a catalogue through the door, a phone call to the contact centre, an order form and sometimes a cheque in the post. The average customer is about seventy years of age and more than half the base is over seventy-five.
Every one of those routes is a chance for the same customer to end up recorded incorrectly, twice, or even ten times. The result of over-communicating or poor contact data management would damage the brand and the bottom line.
Chums uses Cygnus to ensure there is only one golden record per customer. A million accounts are reconciled every month, returned mail feeds an in-house suppression file and every mailing is screened through a waterfall of six external hygiene files for accuracy.
The story in brief
THE CHALLENGE
Many front doors, one customer
A customer might order online this month, ring the contact centre next month and post an order form the month after. Each of those routes creates or updates a record, and each is a chance for the details to drift apart. A postcode typed slightly differently, a name spelled as it sounded on the phone, a household where a husband and wife each have their own account. Left alone the picture of a loyal customer of twenty years splinters into three partial ones.
The visible consequence is several copies of the same catalogue landing on one doormat which looks careless, wastes money and irritates the very people you are trying to look after.
There is a second pressure that comes with this particular customer profile. People in their seventies and eighties move more often than most: in with family or into a care home and some sadly pass away. A record that was perfectly accurate last month may not be this month. For Chums, attempting to contact someone who has passed away antagonises a grieving family and they want to be very careful to minimise the chance of that happening.
“Rather than it being a blind, black box solution, you can go back and have a look to see what is going on. I have had experience of sending a file out and getting it back, and it being very difficult to get that level of detail.”
Andy Bryan, Head of Customer Insight, Chums
THE SOLUTION
Three jobs, all done in-house
Andy Bryan is Head of Customer Insight and supports the whole business, not just marketing. His team of three handles the modelling, scoring, segmentation and reporting along with all of the data processing underneath it, running Cygnus alongside the company’s Microsoft Dynamics and custom database solution.
Keeping data processing work in-house means Andy can see every step of the process, tune every match and deduplication setting to suit the unique customer base and investigate anything that looks wrong rather than waiting on someone else to explain it. If the volume drops somewhere unexpected there is a log to interrogate and a reason to find. If they chose to send the file out it would come back as an answer with the workings hidden. Cygnus makes the in-house route practical and it does three core jobs for Chums.
01
Reconciling every record, every month
Once a month, the whole customer base is pulled from the database and put through Cygnus. Every account is validated against the Postcode Address File, then matched at individual level to find the records that are genuinely the same person, whichever channel created them. The job runs across around a million accounts, takes five or six hours, and produces a clean list of records to be reunited so the customer’s history can be relied upon.
02
Managing an in-house suppression file
When mail is returned, Chums scan it, capture the information and that becomes an internal suppression file: people who have moved, people who no longer want to hear from the business, addresses that are no longer good. It is a record built from the company’s own experience of its own customers and Cygnus applies it to every selection alongside the external files.
03
A waterfall of hygiene files
An internal file only catches what has already changed, so the base is screened against external files as well. Cygnus lets Andy run those as a waterfall: four bereavement files and two mover files in a deliberate order based on cost effectiveness and their own experience of using each particular file.
IN PRACTICE
Households, scoring and the waterfall
Matching can be set at individual, family or address level, and tightened or loosened depending on what is being compared. Chums holds its own family-level identifier, so a household is recognised as a household rather than a list of separate people. Every customer is scored based on how they have shopped, and when Cygnus groups a household together it can rank the records by that score and keep the strongest one. So where a husband and wife each have an account, the catalogue goes to whichever of them is the stronger customer and they do not get multiple copies.
Each hygiene file has its own settings, from loose to tight, and its own hit rate. When a new file appears it goes into the sequence and is measured against what is already there. Adding two new files recently produced a visible reduction in returns, and Chums did not have to sign a contract with the file provider or negotiate terms. As part of Cygnus it was just available to use immediately.
The sequence is run in two stages. The full mailable base of around 800,000 goes through first to produce a report on the health of the file. Internal suppressions and contact rules then net it down, so external suppression is only ever bought for the people actually being contacted, not the whole database every time.
1M accounts matched monthly · 5–6 hours per run · 800,000 mailable base netted down before external suppression
“With Cygnus we can use multiple bereavement and goneaway flags, correlate them together and increase our confidence in each decision. We don’t have to worry about minimum volume commitments or anything like that which ultimately just means better quality data.”
Andy Bryan, Head of Customer Insight, Chums
The results
Chums runs a large and constantly changing customer base. Cygnus provides the critical infrastructure to keep that customer base up to date and as accurate as it can possibly be.
Accuracy
One golden record per customer, whichever way they chose to order, and a household reliably recognised as a household rather than a number of separate customers.
Confidence and control
Every setting can be tuned to the Chums customer base, with regular review of match confidence and continuous improvement built in.
Cost management
External hygiene data is bought only for the people actually being contacted, and no minimum volume commitments or separate file contracts ensures the best balance of cost against accuracy.
Brand protection
No stack of identical catalogues being delivered, and every reasonable step taken to avoid writing to someone who has passed away.