Melissa Data Quality Reviews

The SSIS workflow component has been valuable for me to recommend for enterprise-level production work.

I was contacted by a products distribution company about using their technology. I was able to answer their questions, and then refer them to Melissa Data for further product support.

The use case I'm familiar with is for a merchant who was contrasting this technology with data from Dun and Bradstreet: so my recommendation is that Melissa Data purchase Dun and Bradstreet to combine their data breadth.

Both services have complementary but not identical databases: functionally, people should contact the sales teams at both organizations, see what trial they can get and to what degree the data satisfies their use case.

Customer service was excellent, and their technical team provides top support for people wanting to use the technology.

Their technical team provides top support for people wanting to use the technology.

We have a large volume of customers (millions) and this suite is the best priced for what we need.

We use the cloud version for NCOA and the on-premise version for the normal batch processing from our POS systems. The two components we use are the Contact Verify and MatchUp components.

Contact Verify: Ability to cleanse the name, phone, & address information. The codes that accompany the output record helps our system determine whose address is accurate and if not, what are the issues with the address. This software assists in more complete analysis of our customers.

MatchUp: Ability to "DeDupe" and retrieve possible customer matches which keeps our customer master clean and accurate.

Before we used DQSand an algorithm for matching and only updated valid address information quarterly. This caused returned mailing and upset customers. This suite has monthly updates to ensure we are up to date with recent new home construction and gives us the ability to modify the matching rules to our needs. We have seen a reduction of calls and returned mail.

I was referring to two different components: Contact Verify and MatchUp.
Contact Verify: Our company runs campaigns for our membership and needs accurate address information. We previously "cleansed" and matched the incoming customer addresses but did not necessarily know if the address is valid until we ran our quarterly National Change Of Address process. Melissa Data's contact verify component is updated monthly with national addresses. When the address runs through the component the output is not only "cleansed" but tells if the address is valid (Cass certified) or if there is some other issue with the address.

MatchUp: The matching component has rules that can be modified to look at address or combo of columns to match.

Not in order of importance:

1. Ability to multi-thread. Currently we have to split the data into different paths to try to quicken processing time. In all fairness, we do have a very large customer master to match against.

2. Data types default to ANSI. If you add a column and you have everything else set to Unicode, you sometimes need to either redo the component or do a type conversion step after the output.

2. The ability to resize the selection windows in the components to see the entire field name.

3. Although you can get the component running rather quickly, to do the more complex matching takes more knowledge of the tool. Documentation & videos on the on-premise version is not very helpful. It takes some trial/error to see what the tool is actually doing.

4. License keys gave us problems this past year (previous years were fine). We were sent expired keys and keys that did not match our components. The environment variable does not always pick up so to ensure non-interruption the key needs to be typed in the configuration text files as well.

5. We log SSIS errors and information to assist in abends and audit. We capture only the 110 & 120 messages. If every output stream pin in the MatchUp output filter is not assigned, the SSIS log file fills with "110: Household Process:Warning: The output column "cass_first_name" (49) on output "OLE DB Source Output" (43) and component "Existing Households" (32) is not subsequently used in the Data Flow task. Removing this unused output column can increase Data Flow task performance." for each unused output stream.

Three years

Normal SSIS deployment of packages that contain components. The Melissa Data software itself, however, takes a lot of space on the hard drive so be aware of the space needs. There isn't any real clear instructions on doing an upgrade (it does not seem to delete the older, no longer needed files). Also make sure you have enough memory.

No issues with stability

We had found a bug that only appeared when trying to match over 94,000 records. The process hung and we could not identify without a lot of testing what was going on. Their support team worked with me to determine the issue.

We get timely update notices and address data file notices. Very responsive if an issue or question arises.

Technical support during normal work hours has been very good. The developers are very attentive and will answer questions quickly.

Whenever we find a bug their support team diligently works with us to determine the issue and to get it fixed. It is for this reason I agreed to assist them in rating their software.

DQS / Custom Algorithm - limitation on number of customers it can process and stale data.

Documentation & videos on the on-premise version is not very helpful. It takes some trial/error to see what the tool is actually doing.

We have in-house SSIS experts.

More accurate address information, less returned mail, less customer calls.

The pricing is very competitive and the product is robust enough to get the job done. Be sure you know what you are licensing. There are components that have similar functions but may not be what you need. As mentioned, we have everything we need in just the two components.

We were not thrilled with the "phone home" requirement as we are skittish about opening a port and allowing 3rd party software to pass files. Luckily we found out it was required for the Geocoder component which we do not use. See link below for more information:

http://wiki.melissadata.com/in...

Data cleansing and geo coding.

Reduced direct mail errors

Update feature

2 years

Database version issues

Great

Great

Contact Address Verify Component.

Helped us to correct all the invalid addresses in our DB.

License tracking.

4 months

No. It was very easy to install on configure.

No. It is very reliable.

No.

Excellent.

No, this was first one we have used. We evaluated other products but MD was better.

Yes. Very easy to install and configure.

In-house.

We are very pleased with the pricing but they need to have some good licence tracking mechanism.

It is easy to install and configure. Integrates well with Visual Studio Data Tools. Generates a unique key for every address it processes. Generates correct error codes whenever it corrects a address. Finally, it is very reliable.

• Very straightforward installation & Configuration steps. We configured Personator & Match process and part of our daily SSIS ETL load process.
• Very Easy to use. 
• Procured missing customer information. We simply passed basic details of out customers like Name, Address, Phone Number and Personator application was able to append Emails, New Address if moved, Phone number, Geocode. Personator also standardizes existing customer information.
• Match process provided reliable single view of data. We used it for de-duplication, matching & mastering customer records.

• Data appends helped improve our Customer reach.
• Improved Address and Email Quality.

• Having Customer Primary and Secondary address will help us a lot as some Customers tend to use secondary addresses for business communication.
• Email Address Soft Ping should be made real time within Personator. 
• Overall there is a room for improvement in Customer Address Appends and Email Appends.

Ease of use.

Better and standardized addresses in our systems.

Need to POC point of entry validation.

< 1Month

Easy to deploy with the help of my DBAs and Melissa Data tech support.

NA

Never tried.

Excellent.

9/10

No.

It was easy. In the installation documentation, they should mention that SQL server instance should be on the same server where Melissa Data software is installed.

In-house.

If we go ahead and buy the software, I am expecting <6 months.

Yes, I cannot name other vendors.

• Spelling of names
• Email addresses

We now have less errors on catalog address labels.

It changes names to what it thinks it should be when the spelling is different. It should not do this.

I’ve been using it for three years.

We have had no issues with the performance.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

Very good, although a lot of the time they were not aware of a problem that we were experiencing.

We wrote our own edits and looked at each card.

It was easy to implement.

Be sure you know how much service you need so you don't pay more than you should.

Do a free trial.

Melissa Data Contact Verify

When we plugin the contact verify component in the ETL from Source Systems, it will greatly help in standardizing and cleansing the source data and help keep the downstream systems clean.

It would be great if the product can be expanded to standardize and clean Telephone Numbers and TaxID’s/SSN’s.

1 year

We didn't encounter issues

We didn't encounter issues

We didn't encounter issues

Good

Good

This was the first solution we used after the POC.

Straightforward but had some pain points while plugging it in the ETL.

We did it internally. Had to call them for some support.

Improved data quality by 30%

Worth looking into it, if you have data quality issues and want cleaned data in your warehouse or applications.