QAS, an Experian Co.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

Contact data impacts many aspects of the retailer/customer relationship. If that data is inaccurate, future sales could be inhibited.

Contact data quality plays an important role in the retail market as it touches every part of the business, from package delivery to decisions around new store locations. But when contact data is managed incorrectly, costs are wasted and customer relationships are damaged.

In its recent webinar, How Casual Male Keeps Customers Coming Back, international name and address software provider QAS, an Experian company, provided insight on how the multichannel merchant has profited from front-end address verification software and how the collection of incorrect address data can cause significant problems. Geoff McGehee, director of database marketing for the Casual Male Retail Group, reeled off several things his company has learned from acquiring customer addresses accurately and efficiently at the point of sale. Here are some of his observations. 1. Customer experience comes first. Customers want to receive the information they’ve signed up to receive, whether it be

Businesses in the United States lose 7.3 percent of annual revenue due to poor management of customer data, according to a recent survey by QAS, an address management solutions provider. Other data revealed by the survey: * 79 percent of companies around the world have three individuals take ownership of data throughout the organization, meaning responsibility is fragmented. * 60 percent of companies have the head of information technology (IT) take ownership of customer data. * 50 percent of companies have an administrator take ownership of customer data. * 47 percent of companies have an IT manager take ownership of customer data. * 42

By Gabrielle Mosquera Northern Tool and Equipment Co.'s U.K. call center used to ship its products based on little more than good faith. Until May 2001, the cataloger, which sells tools and equipment to consumers and businesses, had no address-verification tools in place for the U.K. shipping region. As a result, returns from incorrect addresses (along with shipping costs) began piling up. "We ship everything from tractors to work gloves," says Todd Wermerson, Northern Tool's president of information technology. "It's very expensive to ship that stuff across the U.K., and then ship it back." In fact, returns numbered so many that