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It’s a question of affordability

Mar 24, 2016 | Data Cleansing, Deceased Identification, National Deceased Register

The National Deceased Register has proven to deliver between 30% and 50% unique data when compared to other deceased suppression files available in the market. To give you some idea, a recent match to the customer base of a large and well known insurance company (who have been using other sources of deceased data for many years) revealed a further 135,000 deceased records on their customer database that they simply weren’t previously aware of, raising the following questions:-

  • Can you afford to continue mailing people who are dead on your database? For the above client this cost equated to over £400,000 per annum, not an amount to be sniffed at
  • What if just one of the relatives of those 135,000 people complains that you are continuing to mail their loved one long after they has passed away, causing them further upset. Can you afford that type of damage to your brand? Especially with a number of the mainstream press now highlighting the issue of mailing the deceased, this kind of pressure from the press has led UK banks to work harder to stop mailing the deceased as it’s a risk they can no longer afford to ignore
  • If your customer mailings contain any amount of personal and confidential information you could well be gifting identity thieves the means to fraudulently steal from your customer and their relatives. It’s the largest and fastest growing crime in the UK not something any of us can afford
  • What about your own customer analysis? All successfully businesses rely on the depth and quality of information contained within their customer base to make informed decisions and strategies to the benefit of their customers and themselves. So what if a large percentage of that customer base is dead or have moved – how does that affect your decision making?

Set against the relatively small cost of removing deceased and goneaways from your customer base is it really something that you can afford not to do and as The National Deceased Register contains so much unique data when compared to its 2 main competitors can you afford to ignore it and not run an evaluation of your own in order to find out for yourself?