Data Quality
LexisNexis: Enhancing Sales Campaign Support and Improving Data Quality
How Lexis Nexis enhanced their sales campaign support and improved data quality using an MDM solution from Siperian.
- By Steve Iddlings
- May 1, 2007
The Business
LexisNexis is a leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news, and business information services. In addition to its Web-based Lexis and Nexis research services, the company includes some of the world’s most respected legal publishers.
The Challenge
LexisNexis wanted to implement a master data management (MDM) solution that would enable its North American Legal Market (NALM) and U.S. Corporate and Public Markets (USCPM) groups to be more effective in the way they serve customers based on an aggregated view of over 5 million subscribers. The company wanted to establish a front-office environment to uniquely identify customers and improve the customer experience and effectiveness of marketing and sales functions.
The front-office environment was expected to make customer data available to support all users of those systems—sales, marketing, and support—and synchronize customer information maintained in the front office with the back office. Specifically, the company needed to aggregate customer master data from seven systems, including two sales-force automation applications, marketing data warehouses, business intelligence warehouses, and external data sources to provide better data to the front-office system for enhanced sales campaign support, and account and contact management.
At the same time, the company was upgrading the Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) system to leverage new capabilities. However, this would not address the fundamental problem of poor data reliability, since customer data was entered and managed in multiple systems across the organization. As it turned out, the previous implementation of Siebel had failed to deliver the full value of investments due to unconsolidated customer data dispersed across systems. To address this, LexisNexis required a comprehensive master data management solution that would provide a reliable aggregated view of more than 5 million subscribers.
The Siperian Solution
LexisNexis first considered the option of building a solution themselves. However, after careful evaluation of the requirements, the company realized the complexity of the needed solution and decided to invest in an MDM solution. After an exhaustive analysis of all available offerings, LexisNexis chose Siperian MDM Hub for its built-in data stewardship capabilities, its data model flexibility, the overall completeness of the product, and its ability to support any master data type and integrate with any data source or application. Siperian also has one of the most sophisticated, code-free match, merge, and deduplication capabilities, with proven rapid implementation.
In conjunction with the Siperian team, LexisNexis was able to implement the initial phase of the solution within eight months. Master data was integrated from seven different sources to create a hub of reliable master customer data as well as other data entities including location, accounts, firms, agreements, and contacts. Using Siperian MDM Hub, the company is able to create unique and actionable views of their vast customer base, synchronize this reliable data with front- and back-office systems in near–real time, and leverage a common data model throughout. This enables the company to align territories for optional effectiveness, and consolidate accounts and contacts on a nightly basis. This is a significant improvement, as consolidation used to take one month—resulting in poor communication among business units and lost up-sell opportunities. LexisNexis can now also identify which products their customers own across business units to minimize unnecessary or duplicate customer outreach efforts and identify possible product bundles based on actual user preferences.
Following the success of the initial implementation, LexisNexis extended the use of Siperian MDM Hub to include its online bookstore. By integrating the master data management hub into this self-service portal, more than half of all book orders are now fully automated, and greater automation is achieved for the remaining orders with the superior matching capabilities. Planning is already underway to further leverage Siperian to identify and manage product data to create a unified view of customers, products, and locations.
The Results
Siperian MDM Hub has become the cornerstone architecture for the company’s CRM initiatives. The solution enabled LexisNexis to provide a more accessible and reliable customer master data store to all of its business users in sales, marketing, and support. As a result, the company realized continuous data improvements and an increased emphasis and company-wide focus on data quality and data stewardship. More importantly, LexisNexis was able to enhance sales campaign support and increase revenue. With a reliable master data foundation for all of their applications, sales personnel are now able to avoid missed sales opportunities, and business users have access to the most trustworthy enterprise customer information.
About the Author
Steve Iddlings is the Manager of Application, Integration and Self-Services at Lexis Nexis.