Imperial War Museum
IWM was founded on 5 March 1917 when the War Cabinet approved a proposal by Sir Alfred Mond MP for the creation of a national war museum to record the events still taking place during the Great War. Museum address validation resulted in IWM providing a smoother experience for their supporters and visitors.
The intention was to collect and display material as a record of everyone’s experiences during that war – civilian and military – and to commemorate the sacrifices of all sections of society. Today, there are several museums, including London, Salford, Duxford as well as the Churchill War Rooms and HMS Belfast.
Challenge
IWM were already using Data8 Postcode Lookup within their Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment to ensure data quality and reduce the time to enter an address. This service was working smoothly and effectively ensuring correctly formatted address data and eliminating spelling mistakes within its member database. Recently, the museum decided to migrate to Dynamics 365 and as a result, took the opportunity to assess our Predictive Address service.
Solution
Data8 PredictiveAddress is a more advanced service than Postcode Lookup in that in addition to being able to use postcode to find an address, it has the advantage that the user can start typing from any part of an address and the service uses its AI engine to provide a picklist of correct addresses even if the user makes spelling errors. As more information is typed, Predictive Address automatically refines the list of choices available, including multiple residence addresses. Once the correct address is selected, PredictiveAddress then populates the correct fields in Dynamics, in the right format and error-free.
Results
The biggest advantage of using Predictive Address has been an increase in speed in entering new member details into Dynamics accurately which provides an enhanced user experience. The advantage of being able to use any part of the address to validate (even with minor spelling errors) means that IWM do not have to rely solely on entering the correct postcode for both new and existing members; they can very quickly insert and update accurate data within CRM and maintain a high quality database that is right up-to-date to Royal Mail PAF standards.
Data8 have worked in partnership with IWM for over three years to maximise the data quality within their CRM database. IWM have been particularly impressed with the standard of customer service and a dedicated account manager who works closely with the Head of CRM at the Museum. They have been so impressed with service levels that they have now explored other solutions from Data8 and have recently decided to implement Duplicare, our advanced de-dupe and merge solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365.
We highly value the regular account updates from Jack and the knowledge that support is available whenever we need it. With Predictive Address now implemented in Dynamics, we're excited about the implementation of Data8 Duplicare to further enhance the data quality of our member database.
