Client Profile.
The France based data aggregation and market intelligence company collects, analyzes, and manages hospitality data to help businesses win in the fragmented and fast-moving hospitality industry. Their sales acceleration solution turns prospects into customers with strategic targeting, informed sales conversation, enhanced sales and effective marketing campaigns for enhanced productivity.
Business Need.
The data aggregator company hosted voluminous data on its portal and was struggling with time consuming and costly task of maintaining high volume of records to keep the database constantly accurate and updated.
To have a robust and high performing database, they were looking to have an agile data standardization process to improve the quality of their data. This would include meticulous verification and validation of 14.5 million records with 50 attributes each, from across 60 countries, available on disparate data sources. The data sets would also need to be enriched and appended with latest information.
HitechDigital was approached to standardize, validate and enrich data fields with multiple complexities to help their clients increase market share and conversion rates.
Challenges.
- Transition from client’s in-house data management set-up to HitechDigital at short notice.
- Hiring and training a team of data specialists with extensive experience of working on hospitality projects.
- Integrating 50 fields for every single record collected from multiple unstructured and structured sources.
- Maintaining a 12-hour cycle to deliver cleansed and enriched leads database.
- Accommodating frequent changes based on shifts in business priorities.
HitechDigital’s Solution.
Developed and deployed a data consolidation framework and an automated data cleansing process using macros, scheduled bots and rule-based scripts to scrape and validate data, quality check it and prepare it to be sent to client.
Approach.
After initial assessment of client’s existing data management process, team of data professionals at HitechDigital documented a workflow to expedite data collection, validation and enrichment using a mix of manual and automated steps.
The data sets were cleansed and enriched through a meticulous five-step process:
Check table:
- Validating 14.5 million records against an existing master repository using scripted macros
- Set aside junk data (5-10%) for manual validation before integrating it with the clean data pool.
- Fuzzy or low confidence data pushed further down in the workflow funnel for rule-based validation.
Web research:
- Programmable and scheduled bots used to scrape online data sources
- Real-time authentication of 2 million plus records every year, against data available online.
- Data professionals would call up relevant contacts to ascertain validity – as and when required.
Segmentation:
- Segmenting more than 1 million records to assign industry codes based on client defined logic and standards of hospitality industry.
Audit and review:
- Thorough quality check process involving de-duplication, re-validation etc. through programmable macros and scripts to ensure data integrity.
- Data before being sent to the client was prioritized according to predefined rules and relevant to the marketing campaign.
Dispatch and delivery:
- Automated upload of data files, after cleansing, validation and enrichment, on the FTP servers
- Reports/dashboards with insights on amount of data processed and data demographics shared with client
Technology Used.
Microsoft Excel, Custom tools, Macros, Bots and Scripts
Business Impact.
2 million verified records pushed into CRM every year
Increased accuracy of CRM database
Improved customer experience
Enhanced sales revenues and marketing ROI
