Mini case study

Managing data quality at the Lo-cost Airline Company

The daily data processing needed for a major international company such as the Lo-cost Airline Company is significant. Each year over 20 million passengers book flights on over 200 routes serving 60 airports. These include both consumer and business bookings. Since its inception, the Lo-cost Airline has created a database of 80 million customer profiles each containing detailed information such as:

¦ Names and addresses
¦ Travel type - business or personal
¦ Inference of travel type - city breaks, stag-nights, packaged holidays, business travel, etc.
¦ Number of tickets in booking
¦ Frequency of routes flown
¦ Booking of related services such as travel packages, car hire and insurance

The company also holds customer communication preferences such as those who opt-in for the company e-newsletter or postal mailings and investor relations.

Customer data is captured through the Website (90% of bookings) or by phone bookings and then fed into an online database known as the ‘Customer Information System' (CIS). The system screens for data quality. On average, 20 per cent of postal addresses are returned as un-mailable and a further 10 per cent are incomplete. Many of the e-mail addresses or postal addresses are incorrectly entered first time. In these cases a manual follow-up by phone is then completed to correct details where appropriate. If these details are not accurate then some of the millions of dol- lars used for direct marketing by post, e-mail and the website are wasted, either due to messages not getting through or the offers not being relevant.

The attention that the Lo-cost Airline attaches to data quality is indicated by these additional measures to improve data quality:

¦ Defined responsibilities for data quality assigned to a customer data manager who is part of a small customer intelligence team
¦ Training courses on data quality are part of all staff inductions
¦ Data quality targets are used for staff in the call-centre
¦ Data quality for customer profiles collected on the Website is reported and continuously improved
¦ Quarterly CRM mini-boards for senior managers
¦ Quarterly data quality steering groups
¦ Reporting of responsiveness of customers to direct mail and e-mail offering promotions with RFM analysis of customers (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value and also category of bookings)
¦ Follow-up procedures for when e-mail addresses or postal addresses become invalid (e-mail bounce-backs).