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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. |
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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.
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In between these quarterly consolidations, there are special dupe selects looking we have a SQL process that looks for duplicates in Advantage. Anything Anything found during with 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 duplicatesprocess is added for consolidation creating the duplicate sets. A report is generated in Advantage for review and then consolidation is run to complete the consolidations. These processes run daily. Note this is only run for US customers.
This is the match criteria Advantage uses for US customers:
Last Name First 5 positions‘soundex’ match
First Name First 4 positions
Address Line1 First 4 positions
Zip Code First 5 positions
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match on first character
Address line1 match first 5 characters to either Address line1 or Address line2
Zip Code match on first 5 characters
Email address match
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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.
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