Business & Retail
Company: National chain with a 1,500 member co-operative of hardware & home improvement retailers.
Dilemma: Originally the co-ops used to manage customer relationships independently. This created inconsistency in marketing to the company's most loyal and valuable customers since some co-ops performed well while others did not. All of them lacked economy of scale and the benefits of co-marketing directly to these MVP relationships as a national organization. However, any centralization would likely be met with resistance because the co-ops were accustomed to working independently and managing those key relationships on a personal level. The initiative represented a significant change in customer relationship management and to some extent a shift in company culture — less independence for the co-ops.
Pushing forward, they centralized customer relationship management to their corporate offices in Illinois. Part of the solution included using a Canadian data capture company to receive the loyalty program enrollment forms from the individual co-ops (via PO Box) and key from paper the relevant data.
The initiative did not perform as expected — a significant backlog accumulated, data quality was poor, and key customer relationships were suffering — as a result, individual co-ops were becoming increasingly frustrated with the corporate initiative. If frustrations went unchecked it could lead to individual stores opting out of the project — losing both cost savings and potential revenues for the company.
Solution: The partnership with MetaSource began when the companies Canada-based data entry partner abruptly gave notice that it was exiting the data entry business. MetaSource was approached as a potential solution to their problems. Due to the pending closing of their Canadian sub-contractor, MetaSource had two weeks to implement the program — take over PO Box management, prepare and scan all loyalty enrollments, and begin full-volume data capture. The 1,500 store owners had previously captured loyalty program information in-store and were, therefore, very critical and vocal about any data entry errors. Thus, the company was considering an imaging system to cost-effectively retrieve and deliver an image of the form to complaining store owners. To help offset the cost of imaging the enrollment forms; MetaSource provided offshore labor rates.
Outcome: MetaSource took over PO Box management, introduced imaging, and completed key-from-image data capture on-time — 2 weeks from selection to production. Costs of the loyalty program has decrease substantially, reliability (OTIF delivery) has increased, and data quality is well above SLA's. Partnering with MetaSource has dramatically reduced complaints from the 1,500 member companies about errors and allowed them to effectively centralize the management of their key customers — reducing costs and generating more revenue.
Company: National retail clothing chain that has found tremendous success as a mall-based retailer that sells casual apparel targeted primarily at the young adult demographic. It operates more than 900 retail stores in the US and Canada with aggressive future plans of expansion.
Dilemma: The need for a national launch of its customer loyalty program to increase revenues from the companies strongest customer base. Initially, they considered an incumbent data entry vendor but in whom they were dissatisfied because of a sense lack of urgency, care, and the need to bring new and creative ideas to meet their needs. As a company with aggressive growth plans and one that was establishing dominance in the crowded retail clothing space, failure to drive dollar amounts of purchases up would open the door to the competitors they were seeking to displace. A successful loyalty program would continue to allow them to gain market share and continue expansion — thus, continuing to fuel stock value increases and favorable market capitalization.
Solution: By demonstrating the attributes that they valued, MetaSource was selected as their outsource partner. Since the implementation, MetaSoruce has continued to deliver on these values through innovations like:
- MetaSource measures its accuracy by seeding QC batches into production, not by ineffective sample and review methods.
- MetaSource has high performance driven systems. For example, it pays its operators an hourly wage with quality and production bonuses to provide incentive for error-free data entry rather than using an outmoded piece-rate system that encourages the wrong behavior — i.e. speed over accuracy.
- MetaSource continues to innovate to drive value as evidenced by rolling out new services to enhance the loyalty program. MetaSource will run the enrollee addresses against CASS-certified address correction software and append ZIP+4 to valid addresses. Records without a ZIP+4 are suspect; therefore, they will be queued to an exceptions file for blind key verification of the street address. Clients get the benefit of full address key verification at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately this service concept includes providing "heads up" operators to perform Advanced Address Repair services where the analysts use web-based tools to find, interpret, and repair "bad" addresses. The point is not simply to capture data, but to find and validate the customer relationship so that AE can market to this key customer segment.
Outcome: The loyalty program has been hugely successful — it has maintained pace with dramatic volume surges at program inception without suffering in reliability (OTIF delivery) and accuracy. MetaSource processed more than 6,500,000 enrollments in the first year. Using the Advanced Address Repair process, 1.6 million addresses were repaired for successful customer contact. This segment is a group that is traditionally lost to the company as the data is incorrect when received from the customer. When customers call to resolve their missing loyalty program benefits, it costs 10 times more than repairing the record upfront using the Advanced Address Repair service. Furthermore, customers who don't make that expensive call are simply lost to the program forever.
Company: A leading International provider of limited-edition collectibles partnered with MetaSource to accomplish the data entry activities for mail/online orders.
Dilemma: The provider of limited-edition collectibles was looking to partner with a company that could provide them with a comprehensive solution that incorporated a customer management solution, imaging solution, and data capture services.
Solution: MetaSource has delivered this by:
- Providing ongoing process and technological enhancements.
- Servicing real-time online keying of data into the client's mainframe.
- Providing The Bradford Group with a customer management system that tracks all paper communications from their customers as well as additional actions performed by their customer support group.
- Setting up scanners onsite and training of staff on scanning techniques and scanner maintenance.
- Installing the necessary hardware/software to allows the imaging of all incoming orders and transmit them to MetaSource for data capture.
- Providing offshore data capture services for a wide variety of order forms with completion of the work the same day as the receipt of images.
- Providing technical and operational expertise and aiding to expand their service offering into new vertical markets such as check printing and customization.
Outcome: Today, MetaSource captures collectibles order information for more than 500,000 orders in addition to their new business line of custom check printing. The partnership has allowed rapid fulfillment to their clients as well as decrease processing time and increase customer satisfaction.
Company: The largest seller of magazines in the world. They market products (magazines, small gifts, software, videos, etc) through credit card statements, post-catalog sale offers, and other methods.
Dilemma: MetaSource was chosen as its third data entry vendor to capture product order information from paper. They had a policy of using multiple vendors for mission critical processes. Their existing vendors couldn't handle the increased order volumes while still meeting turnaround requirements and was content to process work using antiquated processes and technology. Millions of dollars were being lost in customer returns, late processed orders, and a significant WIPXXXXXwhat is this.
Solution: MetaSource's practice of working with clients to ensure continuous process improvements has changed the initial relationship dramatically over the years. The partnership has proven to be an exceptional one, as we have worked together to change and refine processes to improve reliability, increase accuracy, lower costs, and add value. For example:
- MetaSource implemented quarterly business reviews to report ongoing process improvements and to set future goals
- MetaSource is the sole source scanning & data entry provider, providing consistent timely turnaround and redundant facilities
- MetaSource creates an image of every order which has many benefits:
- Eliminates transportation cost to near-shore data capture facility
- Reliable order storage and retrieval
- Abolishes paper storage costs and risks
- Provides disaster recovery with back-up image copies
- Enables bar code and OCR data capture
- MetaSource quickly and successfully migrated data entry offshore from it Utah facility to its Mexico facility — resulting in substantial cost savings
- MetaSource provides Looking Glass image retrieval system allowing customer service agents to access orders real-time to answer customer queries (50% of refuted charges end successfully).
- MetaSource implemented real-time record lookups to Finder Files, resulting in lower cost per order, higher accuracy, and repair of missing order information
- MetaSource implemented process to improve "hit" rate due to database hygiene
- MetaSource converts dozens of order files every month to the proper format for submission to their order system and other value-add technical services.
- As the nature of their business has changed, MetaSource has continued to provide new solutions including:
- Receiving, processing and warehousing of returned merchandise
- Advanced - issuing credits and change of address directly into Synapse billing system
- Advanced customer support — White-mail and legal issue resolution
Outcome: MetaSource is the sole data capture partner, scanning approximately 18 million documents per year, while always searching for ways to reduce costs, increase turnaround time, increase accuracy, and add value through continuous process improvement and technological leadership. MetaSource's continuous improvements and flexibility to take a constant stream of new marketing campaigns has allowed them to replace revenues lost in traditional magazine subscriptions with a variety of product introductions.
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