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, we have a SQL process that looks for duplicates in Advantage. Anything found with this process 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 ‘soundex’ match

• First Name 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

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.