The Advantage database contains a lot of duplicate accounts - one reason for this is because our order forms do not require a customer to log in to purchase.  Any changes the customer makes to their name and/or address or other information could cause a new account to be created.  Below is more information about how dupe consolidations work.

Quarterly Consolidations

Every three months we send out our entire database for dupe set creations, along with National Change of Address (NCOA) and other address hygiene.  We get back dupe sets from MMI and Global Z, outside data hygiene vendors, and they are consolidated in Advantage on this quarterly schedule.

MMI and Global Z have more complex dupe matching than what’s available in Advantage and can find more duplicates than we can here.  They can find matches like Richard/Dick, Mary/Elizabeth, or matches where the fields don’t match one-to-one. (for example, part of the address is in Address Line 1 and part in Address Line 2) Advantage is a straight match for match, comparing a certain number of characters in each field to the same field on another account.

Advantage Consolidations

In between these quarterly consolidations, there are special dupe selects looking for duplicates in Advantage.  Anything found during this time is also consolidated.  These run continuously until it’s time to run the quarterly updates.  

The process that creates the sets in Advantage takes between 2-3 days to run as it’s going through millions of records.  Once it creates the sets, the accounts are consolidated – the time frame for when the accounts are consolidated can vary depending on the number of sets created as well as other processes and maintenance.  Once the process is complete, it starts over again.  We have selects for US, Canada, and Rest of World duplicates.

This is the match criteria Advantage uses for US customers:

• Last Name First 5 positions
• First Name First 4 positions
• Address Line1 First 4 positions
• Zip Code First 5 positions

Consolidation Problems

There are accounts that can’t be consolidated for a number of reasons.  These generally occur if there are 2 accounts that contain the same membership or the same item on auto-ship bookclub.  In these cases, the accounts need to be manually fixed to be consolidated.  Either the membership needs to be cancelled from the wrong account, or the bookclub needs to be cancelled.