Got a mutual interest with another business? Let us help you integrate your data safely and effectively.
Both business and government are recognising that sharing data between two or more organisations can benefit marketing capabilities and customer service in a big way.
In recent times the Productivity Commission recommended Australia overhauled its approach to data, including data sharing, so agencies can better ‘reap the benefits’ of data as an asset.
On the commercial front, businesses are successfully finding ways to securely integrate data for mutual benefit, including through enhancing customer offerings and being more relevant to customers.
For example, Qantas and Tourism Australia recently announced a data sharing deal in line with their common interest of getting more tourists to Australia. It’s too early for results yet, but watch this space.
Sharing data in order to gain customer and market insights is a sound concept. But how can you make it happen and with the right safeguards in place?
At DCA, we can act as the independent third party data solution provider that enables two or more organisations that want to leverage each other’s databases.
Think of us as a ‘Data Switzerland’ if you like.
Why integrate your data?
Our clients ask us to manage data integration of two or more separate databases for both commercial and marketing reasons, and also for business structure changes, such as in a merger or acquisition.
At a basic level, an example of data integration for commercial or marketing purposes could be when a company becomes a major sponsor of a sports team. On signing a deal, it may want to benchmark its investment by tracking how its exposure as a sponsor influences customer growth.
DCA can match the sponsor and sports team’s database to get an initial benchmark of how many shared customers they have. We can then continue the process to show the year-on-year correlation.
While in a post-merger situation, data integration identifies those customers who have a relationship with both organisations, and integrates this data to create a single customer view of those customers to drive better decision-making and corporate responsiveness.
How do we do it?
The following steps summarise how we at DCA typically manage a data integration project:
- Understand core business requirements.
- Acquire a complete understanding of the databases involved.
- Determine the data management and security requirements.
- Get to work on preparing the data across all databases.
- Perform the data matching.
- Provide insights and prepare deliverables.
Enhancement: We improve before we move
Before any integration or data sharing happens, we make sure data from the companies involved is put through our data enhancement process. This ensures customer information is as up to date as possible by validating the databases against third party knowledge bases.
Data is checked, updated and appended — including postal and email addresses, postcodes, phone numbers and do-not-call registers — to a client’s database.
What about privacy and data security?
DCA has supplied secure credit-card processing services both in data content and secure data delivery to the financial sector since 2005. DCA worked with internal and external security specialists to provide required controls and an environment to satisfy all security standards. These security standards have been maintained and enhanced to meet continually evolving requirements and are aligned with world’s best practice standards.
We hold Certificates of Compliance in the following categories:
- Service Provider
- Merchant
DCA’s PCI DSS certification provides a high level of reassurance as to the security, integrity and reliability of our systems and processes, specifically relating to:
- Applications/Software
- Hardware
- Physical Space (co-location)
- Storage
- Security Services
- Customer Data Integration
- Data Preparation
- Records Management
- Mail/Telephone Order (MOTO)
If you think that you could benefit from integrating and sharing your data, or enhancing it, get in touch…
