In this issue:

• Experian Acquires QAS
• Harvesting High-Quality Customer Data from Your Website
• Insurance Industry Best Practices Presentation from Allenbrook
• Ecometry Talks Shop
• Ask QAS Tech Support
• QAS Quiz

Experian Acquires QAS

Acquisition of UK address management software provider creates the UK’s market leader in data integrity services

London - October 5, 2004 - Experian®, the global information solutions company, has acquired QAS, the developer of the QuickAddress range of international address management software, for £106 million, which includes £16 million of cash. With revenues of £49 million in the year to June 2004 and 8,800 customers worldwide, QAS will further strengthen Experian's Marketing Services division and trade as QAS, an Experian Company.

Announcing the acquisition, David Coupe, Managing Director of Experian's Marketing Services division, said:

"Experian invests in successful businesses and QAS is a market leading company that has achieved consistently strong growth since it was established in 1990. Experian has acquired QAS because there is a strong strategic fit between the two organizations: QAS is the UK's leading address management software provider and Experian offers the most comprehensive range of data quality services in the marketplace. Working together, both companies will bring to the market sophisticated data integrity solutions - further enhancing the quality of our clients' data."

"Together, Experian and QAS are a leader in data integrity, supporting over 10,000 clients in the UK alone. No other company can offer the scope, scale and range of consistent data integrity services across so many industry sectors."

Simon Worth, CEO of QAS, who will continue to head the business, added:

"Clients will benefit from the synergies created by bringing the two companies together. QuickAddress software captures accurate personal details at the first point of contact."

"Experian's data integrity services keep personal records accurate and up-to-date throughout the course of the customer life cycle."

"This combination offers organizations a consistent approach to data integrity for the first time - protecting them against the financial, regulatory and brand image risks posed by poor data quality."

The acquisition is consistent with Experian's global strategy of acquiring complementary businesses that provide new products, new data or entry into new vertical or regional markets, while leveraging the core assets of Experian.

This press release can be found online in the QAS News Archive

For further press information, please contact:
James Russell
Press Relations Manager, Marketing Services
Tel: 0207 664 1139
E-mail: james.russell@uk.experian.com

About Experian

The word 'Experian' is a registered trademark in the EU and other countries and is owned by Experian Ltd and/or its associated companies.

About Experian's Marketing Services division
Since 1980 Experian's Marketing Services division has been the UK's most successful direct marketing services provider. Experian's award-winning products and services help blue-chip organisations acquire new customers, improve data integrity and enhance customer value. Experian's Marketing Services division is based in Nottingham and London in the UK, and has international offices in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands and Ireland.

About QAS

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"Harvesting High-Quality Customer Data from Your Site"

by Jonathan Hulford-Funnell
Chief Operating Officer
QAS

So I was online, looking for tickets to the Britney Spears show for my wife and myself. Why, you ask, would a couple in their late-30s want to see Britney Spears? Long story. I’ll explain later.

Anyway, it occurred to me that if it weren’t for the Web, I wouldn’t be buying the tickets. My wife and I like concerts, but we only go if we can find great seats. On the Web, I can view the theater layout and see exactly where my prospective seats are located. I absolutely spend more money because of the Web.

Scott Silverman, Executive Director of Shop.org, says I’m not alone. “We have discovered that a full 36% of retailers’ online customers are entirely new to the retailers whose sites they are shopping. That’s a very strong statement that the Web channel is generating incremental sales.”

U.S. Web-channel sales increased 51%, to $114 billion, in 2003 (source:The State of Retailing Online 7.0, by Forrester Research and Shop.org, May 2004). With more people buying online every year, the Web-buying public is no longer the early-adopting, tech-savvy bunch it once was. The broader online marketplace presents challenges when it comes to harvesting accurate, high-quality customer data from a retail site, and it also makes inaccurate data a more expensive prospect.

Beam me up
Website visitors have been known to use fake names and addresses when registering on commercial sites. I call this the “Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise” phenomenon. False or inaccurate customer records can be an enormous drain on profits.

A few years ago, I was working with a European car manufacturer who ran an innovative promotion: register on their site, and access artistic shots of the latest car models. They followed up with a direct-mail campaign to all registrants.

They were shocked to discover that a full 40% of the registrations they received were bogus, from people interested only in accessing the photos. Unfortunately, management didn’t discover the problem until they received hundreds of returned mail packages containing the expensive four-color brochures they had shipped.

Address errors occur by accident, too. America is the great melting pot, which is reflected in its multi-lingual street and town names. With a full 17% of the U.S. population moving each year, some customers are unfamiliar with the address details of their own homes. Hurried customers may leave directionals (“Main Street North”), fractions (“50 ½ Second Street”), or apartment numbers off of Web forms when they buy online. Gift-givers may guess at critical portions of recipients’ addresses, such as ZIP codes.

Linking cyberspace and profits
Simply put, the address is the bridge, the physical link, between cyberspace and profits. When shipping products, you don’t have a sale without a valid address. We should be doing everything we can to make it easy for customers to provide us with accurate addresses.

Are we succeeding? Clearly not. According to a 2002 U.S. Postal Service and PricewaterhouseCoopers report, 23.6% of all mail sent in the U.S. is inaccurately addressed, 17% is delayed, and 2.7%, or over two billion pieces, is ultimately destroyed due to address problems.

Consumer preferences in shipping, packaging, and product selection also make accurate addresses critical. Free shipping is a hugely popular website promotion that increases sales, but also transfers the direct cost of address errors to the retailer. As the buying public becomes more comfortable with on-line shopping, Web sales of jewelry, other luxury items, and apparel have grown.

“The bar is being raised when it comes to shipping, too” said Silverman. “Nicer packaging is becoming critical.” Losing expensive products, packed in expensive boxes, through the mail gets, well, expensive.

How expensive? The Data Warehousing Institute estimates that poor-quality customer data costs U.S. businesses a staggering $611 billion a year in postage, printing, and staff overhead.

Why do they persist?
With customers entering their own addresses over websites, address errors in the company database may be even more likely to occur now than they were a decade ago.

Oh, we’ve all tried to tackle the issue. Microsoft Passport and the “Digital ID” project attempt to store customer data in central databases, accessible by all commercial sites. Yet, with users concerned about security and privacy problems, central repositories face an uphill battle.

Online retailers are also creating their own contact information repositories: customer profiles that site visitors retrieve by entering usernames and passwords. Unfortunately, users tend to forget their numerous name and password combinations, and may fill out the same account information every time they buy. If a customer makes even slight changes to an address abbreviation or punctuation, he or she may create profit-gobbling duplicate records in your database.

Some companies are still trying to address the problem from the back-end, with “cleansing” software. Yet the moment the cleansing process is completed, dirty address data starts re-entering the database all over again.

Automatic, real-time address validation is the obvious solution. By validating an address as the customer enters it via your site, you ensure that you get valid, accurate data without asking customers to work too hard or provide too much information. Standardized addresses help you avoid duplicate records in your database and maintain a single view of all transactions for a given customer, making it easier to market to them in the future.

More than a destination
Of course, an address tells you much more about a person than where to send his mail. It’s also the easiest, simplest way to get a fix on your customer’s demographic. A Texan visiting a hardware site probably doesn’t need a snow-blower. A homeowner from the Main Line in Philadelphia is probably not interested in used furniture. Getting accurate addresses into your database can help you organize your site around sales-centric principles.

Taking the profiling-through-addresses approach even further are new services and products that provide geo-demographical information based on addresses. Whether you’re customizing content for an individual customer or using third-party software to analyze your customer base, don’t bet the shop on address data that in all likelihood is nearly a quarter inaccurate. Because the address is the key to selling from the Web, adopting a simple address validation program leverages all your other investments in a Web channel.

Conclusion
As websites grow in sophistication, the need for address validation at the point of entry becomes even more urgent. The more a company “bets” on a site, the more there is to gain from taking the simple step of ensuring that the addresses it collects are valid, accurate, and formatted in a standardized way.

And as for Britney Spears? Hey. My wife likes to dance.

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Insurance Industry Best Practices Presentation from Allenbrook

QAS and Allenbrook Offer a Winning Combination for Insurance Companies

Join our partner, Allenbrook, for "Winning New Business" an Industry Best Practices traveling presentation for insurance carriers held in nine cities nationwide (Providence, New York, Atlanta, Ft. Lauderdale, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, Chicago, and Cincinnati Metro Area) beginning Oct. 27. In business since 1988, Allenbrook is one of the industry's leading Property and Casualty insurance software and service providers.

With over 20 years of experience in the insurance industry, featured speaker Melinda Lloyd will share ideas relevant to insurance carriers for building new business in today's tight market.

Topics covered during each informative two hour session include:

• Agency Automation: a summary of progress we've made (or not) as an industry.
• Winning Business: What drives agents' decisions to place business with you?
• Competing with the Majors: How do regional and smaller carriers level the playing field.
• Web Self Service: Real life issues and solutions.
• ROI: Where do quantifiable/qualitative benefits really come from for your business?
• Today's Technology Landscape: .NET, XML, ACORD and the transition to Service Oriented Architecture.

Refreshments will also be served. This event is an opportunity to ask questions and speak with other insurance industry executives as well as Allenbrook President, Chuck Peck, and Dave Moran, Director of New Product Development.

Special Offer - all registered participants who attend will be entered in a drawing to win two free airline tickets to anywhere in the Continental US.

> Register online now to attend

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Ecometry Talks Shop

Jane Ward of QAS sat down with John Marrah, President (pictured), and Sally Renko, Product Manager, of Ecometry recently to discuss trends in data quality management, and the QuickAddress for Ecometry solution.

QAS: Why did you folks consider partnering with QAS on developing QuickAddress for Ecometry? What was the benefit to your customers?

JM: The Ecometry system enables retailers to take orders from many channels, always maintaining a single view of the customer and his or her buying history. If you duplicate records for one customer, either because he’s entered his address differently over the Web at different times, or because the call center operator she ordered from took misspelled the street name, you’re not going to get the full merchandising and marketing value that Ecometry’s system provides.

QAS: So QuickAddress helps your customers leverage their investment in Ecometry?

JM: Yes.

SR: QuickAddress for Ecometry can help prevent mailing duplicate or undeliverable catalogs. If a call center rep misspells the street name of a customer, and then when the customer calls again, the rep enters the information correctly, it can result in multiple customer records if the call center doesn’t encourage reps to merge customers. It’s possible for incorrect address information to cause undeliverable catalogs or to have multiple catalogs mailed to the same customer. That can be expensive.

JM: Another huge benefit that QuickAddress brings to our customer is productivity, especially in the call center. As any call center manager knows, every keystroke is important. To be able to save one keystroke is critical. Once you start typing in an address, QuickAddress automatically fills it in, saving 10 or more keystrokes. That’s huge, for a call center.

QAS: Can we get technical for a moment? Tell me about the integration between QuickAddress and Ecometry. I’ve heard it called “seamless.” What does that mean, exactly?

SR: We wrote the integration so that launching QuickAddress is just a matter of calling it up from within Ecometry after some minimal setup. To the user, the interface is intuitive.

JM: When you get to a certain point in the order-taking process in Ecometry, QuickAddress automatically comes up. Then, when you reach the end of the address in the QuickAddress interface, it automatically sends the address into Ecometry, after validating it. The integration itself is actually a bit complicated, but as far as what the user sees, there’s not a lot happening on the screen.

QAS: QuickAddress is really a data-quality software. Can you talk about data quality, and trends you’ve seen in that area?

JM: Over the last two years, there has been a noticeable impact from the data-quality side. The Web is driving that. You can train call center staff to take addresses in a certain format. You have zero control over how people enter addresses via the Web. So people have started noticing how data quality affects their businesses.

QAS: What about overall trends in technology for retailers?

JM: The biggest trend we see is consolidation of channels. 20 years ago, if I had a store, I might also have a catalog, but they were operated completely separately – different customer databases, different merchandising systems, different fulfillment processes.

Nowadays, retailers know they need a single, uniform view of the customer across all channels. I can walk into a store today and say, “I bought a shirt on your website, and now I need the pants that match,” and the store staff can immediately help.

QAS: Sure. I just went to my mall to return some clothes I’d bought online. It was no problem, and it would have been unthinkable five years ago.

JM: Yes. And the integration of those customer, marketing, and inventory systems depends on high-quality data. Without great data, you could have the most sophisticated systems in the world, but they won’t work well.

About Ecometry

Ecometry Corporation serves as the premier provider of customer focused enterprise solutions for the multi-channel retail industry. Ecometry software products are currently in use by hundreds of companies in seventeen countries throughout the world.

www.ecometry.com

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Ask QAS Tech Support:

Question: I have installed QuickAddress Pro, but sometimes my users forget to use it when they are entering addresses. How can I ensure that my staff are using QuickAddress Pro for every address they enter?

Answer: There are a number of ways to automate and ensure the use of QuickAddress Pro. One of the easiest to implement is called QUSHOWN and it can be set up in minutes by inserting only a few lines of programming code!

Why use QUSHOWN?
QUSHOWN allows your underlying address entry application to automatically invoke, or “pop up” QuickAddress Pro at the appropriate time (i.e., when the cursor enters the address field). It makes it almost impossible for your users to forget to use QuickAddress Pro.

It’s easy!
A single line of code is all it takes to call QUSHOWN from your application. It’s supported by virtually any programming language. Here’s a sample of the call, in Visual Basic:

id = Shell("C:\QAS\\Pro4.02\qushown qaprown 1 Address1,USA", vbNormal)

For sample code in other languages, and further technical help, contact support on (888) 712-3332.

Requirements
QUSHOWN can only be used if you have access to your application’s source code or your application’s scripting language. Remember, QUSHOWN allows your underlying address entry application to automatically invoke QuickAddress Pro, so your underlying application must be programmed to do so.

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QAS Quiz: Win a $25 gift certificate to iTunes!

Roughly how many letters end up at the recovery centers of the U.S. Postal Service® each year, due to inaccurate addresses?

1. Just over 39,000
2. Just over 390,000
3. Just over 3.9 million
4. Just over 39 million

(Hint: The answer can be found in a previous QAS eNewsletter)

If you think you have the answer, email us now. Be sure to include your name and address, so we can send you your prize if you win.

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