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Your Favorite Holiday Characters and Data Quality

The holidays are upon us. One of the busiest seasons for many businesses, particularly in the consumer sector. According to the National Retail Federation, as much as 40 percent of annual sales for small to medium-sized businesses takes place in the last two months of the year. And in 2015, consumers spent a record amount of money on gifts and other purchases celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa.

Part of what makes this time of year special for consumers is the lore surrounding the holidays, in timeless stories that get passed down from generation to generation. So in the spirit of the season, Service Objects thought we would take a look at some of your favorite holiday characters and see what they are up to nowadays it the world of data quality. Here is what a few of them are doing in the 21st century:

Jack Frost is no longer nipping at your nose – now he is freezing your credit because you’ve been getting too many chargebacks. Why? Because your holiday packages keep getting sent to wrong addresses provided by your fat-fingered customers. And before long, you learn that a little bit of automated address verification would warm things up nicely.

The Grinch doesn’t have to climb down chimneys to steal presents anymore – these days, he’s into online fraud. And if you don’t start validating his credit information, or checking into why his North Pole IP address doesn’t match his shipping location, you’ll keep getting tricked into making his balance sheet a lot greener.

Rudolph the Reindeer has long since stopped leading Santa around on Christmas Eve, ever since they started making headlights for sleighs. Instead, his nose now lights up red when bad contact data shows up on the list of naughty and nice children on Santa’s CRM database, using a direct UI interface that taps into extensive contact databases in the US and Canada. Which means that Santa now has a lot fewer surprises dropping off presents compared with the past.

The Little Drummer Boy is now all grown up, and a corporate consultant beating the drum for greater service quality and competitive advantage. And one of the first places he swings his drumsticks towards nowadays is leveraging your contact data as an asset, by continually improving your data quality.

Scrooge is no longer a miser who exploits his workers at Christmas time. Now redeemed by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, today he saves money by reducing your marketing expenses – starting with validating every lead’s contact information and getting lead quality rankings ranging from “Bah, humbug!” to 100, to reduce your top line costs and manpower.

Service Objects spreads holiday cheer all year round by reducing the waste, fraud and poor customer service caused by bad data. We hope you have a very happy holiday season!