Business Success And Cleaning House

An income statement measures the profitability of a business. The balance sheet shows a business’ financial health, measuring just how much is owed and owned. And the cash flow statement shows how much liquid cash a business has. Whilst there are also plenty of other ways to define business success, one thing that rings true for any type of organisation is that it can often be very hard to take a step back in order to objectively view things. This often requires a fresh pair of eyes. There are however some basic yet often overlooked ways to ensure everything is being done to ensure a company can function optimally. One general area requiring much improvement is that of data integrity and within that, something we here at Mitto see coming up time and again across the globe, are problems with client databases. This is where we come in.

Here at Mitto, we work with a large number of Enterprises globally and a great example of an organisation that springs immediately to mind as having needed our assistance was actually one from Scandinavia. A retailer we came across complained to us that the SMS-based marketing campaigns they were running simply weren’t being effective. The Enterprise was looking for a new Mobile Engagement supplier to turn things around for them.

We analysed the phone numbers in the retailer’s database and found that a scarcely believable 45% of the numbers they were sending content to were either disconnected mobile numbers, landlines (to which it is not possible to send SMS to in most countries) or plain and simple invalid. Only 55% were active mobile numbers!

This meant the Enterprise had been hemorrhaging Marketing budget, all whilst failing to connect and add value to their relationships with almost half of the people they had thought were clients of theirs. Just goes to show that size is not everything.

Mitto solved these problems rapidly through the implementation of a mobile verification process at the point of customer registration.

When a client was requested to enter their mobile number, checks were done to see if it was both a valid and active number. If it was, it passed validation and was subsequently entered into the client’s database of active customers. This seemingly simple process ensured the integrity of their database and dramatically improved the accuracy and therefore effectiveness of all ensuing campaigns. So how did we do this? By Mitto’s proprietary Mobile Intelligence solution in combination with verification of end users (i.e. verification of phone numbers).

Before 1997 if a mobile subscriber wanted to take advantage of a much better deal from another mobile network operator, they would lose their number moving over. This rather unsurprisingly put most people off. Mobile number portability (MNP) changed the game completely and countries which implemented it allowed their subscribers to take their number with them. The first country to introduce mobile number portability was Singapore in 1997, followed by Hong Kong, the Netherlands and the UK in 1999. Mobile Number Portability comes in two flavors: a centralized database (CDB) or a decentralized database approach. Most countries thankfully have gone down the CDB path and over the past 20 years, tens of millions of people globally have been able to take advantage of cheaper deals, porting their numbers.

With User Verification, simplicity is the key. The service only requires a mobile phone to be able to receive a supplementary login credential, a one-time PIN or password. A PIN or password is generated and relayed using our comprehensive global connectivity channels to deliver them to the destination subscribers. The key element here is that it verifies the Enterprises’ customers have a device linked to their account with them. Organisations which do not rapidly step up and understand that they need to deploy easy-to-use ways of verifying all mobile numbers entering their organisation (as well as verifying and purging some records in their databases as necessary to continually stay on top of things) will reduce their operational effectiveness, incur unnecessarily high Marketing costs and hurt their bottom line. Organisation need to have a fighting chance of being able to fire on all cylinders. Lack of data integrity is a critical issue on so many levels and if not addressed, an Enterprise’s competitors will use this weakness to their advantage.

Doing nothing is not an option and approaching the issue in a manner which relies exclusively on personnel trawling through databases, testing numbers manually, simply won’t cut it.

It is now an absolute necessity for Enterprises to maintain data integrity and Mitto is here to help you with all aspects of the client acquisition and retention journey.