Print-Plus: Keeping Your House in Order

When a customer makes a repeat purchase, it's important to access the same record again. In other words, caution needs to be taken not to assign a new customer number to a previous purchaser. Not doing so will result in file duplicates, which could cause several problems, including sending multiple mail pieces to a customer, being unable to get a true snapshot of a consolidated customer profile, among other things. If you're using a third-party service bureau to maintain your housefile, in some cases you can choose (or be forced) to have your file updated — i.e., duplicate records identified and consolidated — using a match code, which is a value that's calculated based on a combination of each customer record's name and address attributes. In such scenarios, some service bureaus offer flexible matching logic that can be tweaked to your unique requirements.