Schwan’s Experiences a 25% Decrease in New Customer Duplicate Data

Schwan’s Home Service, the home delivery business of The Schwan Food Company, has nearly 500 sales and distribution centers in the United States. Given the vast scope of business, it needed to manage thousands of customer records entering their system per day. Records are entered from various touch points as customers place orders online, by phone, or directly from the Customer Service Manager at their doorstep. With multiple customer touch points, it was easy to overwhelm the system with duplicate data of customer records. Recognizing this process presented significant challenges for coordinating orders and scheduling deliveries, the company implemented the Precisely Spectrum.

A potential home delivery customer registering for an account at Schwans.com or through the call center would be assigned a customer number. Meanwhile, the local depot would be alerted to schedule service for the potential customer. A Customer Service Manager (CSM) would then visit the customer and re-enter their information into a handheld device used to collect sales orders, deliveries and track inventory. This disconnect between customer touch points resulted in the creation of two separate records for the same customer, which led to missed sales, overlapping delivery cycles, duplicate mailings, and ultimately, customer dissatisfaction. The company needed a comprehensive data quality solution to help improve customer service and depot efficiency.

The Spectrum technology seamlessly integrates with Schwan’s Home Service’s web store, call center application and the handheld devices used by Customer Service Managers (CSMs) in the field. When the web store registers a new customer, the data quality solution standardizes the address and attempts to match it to an existing customer record— thereby preventing the creation of duplicate records.

Customer address validation and standardization is performed in real-time while new addresses are being entered into the system. Addresses that are not able to be validated or standardized in real-time are automatically submitted for the daily address scrubbing process. While in the field, CSM handheld devices run in a disconnected mode, uploading customer data at the end of each day to corporate headquarters.

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