0121 355 8662
0121 355 8662

Why is Clean Data Important?

Business operations and decision-making are increasingly data-driven, as organisations look to use data analytics to help improve business performance and gain competitive advantages over rivals. As a result, clean data is a must for BI and data science teams, business executives, marketing managers, sales reps and operational workers.

Done well, data cleansing provides the following business and data management benefits:

      • Improved decision-making
      • More effective marketing and sales
      • Increased use of data
      • Reduced data costs

118 Group can use our up-to-date UK B2B dataset to cleanse your data as well as in-house tools written to amend formatting issues, re-align data fields, flag duplicates and of course enhance with any of our 550 data fields.

Segmenting our Data

118 Group’s database can be segmented (‘cut’) in many ways, producing bespoke datasets for your use case. Here are a few of the more common ones, but do ask us for any others:

Geography

We can segment by:

      • Town
      • Post area, district or sector (LS, LS2, LS2 3)
      • Local authority limits
      • County & Country
      • Drive time
      • Radius from any point
      • Science & Business Parks

 

Industry

With over 2400 directory-style classifications, we can supply an extremely precise dataset. We also use SICs 2003 and 2007, NAICS and bespoke identifiers.

Employees and Sites

We track on-site and national employee numbers so that you can create datasets by size. Linked to this is the number of sites a group has.

Turnover

Fresh from Companies House if incorporated, or using a sophisticated model that utilises multiple variables and is updated overnight.

 

 

 

 

Age and Trading Style

If you need to include or exclude businesses of a certain length of trading, or if you need to focus on Ltd/Plc types, these form the backbone of our records.

 

Others

Here are just a few others, but there are more available on request:

  • Do they have a website or not?
  • VAT registered or not.
  • FCA registered or not.
  • Sells to Businesses, consumers or both.

Data Matching

The 118 Group matching process is unique. It uses software that we have developed in-house and is built on over 50 years of experience in data matching for customers.

Our software programs interrogate company name, contact name, postcode and telephone number individually and in nearly 90 combinations. They intelligently manage record content where there is an entire field or only a partial field population and where data is incomplete or presented differently (in content and format) to those records that we hold within our database.

There are, of course, occasions where customer data is more complex. In such instances, we use our extensive expertise and experience in data matching to reconfigure our coding to establish further reliable matches and add value to the project.

Matching is mainly used for:
        • Identifying a match to a client record & filling any gaps.
        • Creating a suppression list so that any new data supply doesn’t contain the client’s existing records.
        • Flagging duplicates and making them very easy to remove within internal systems.
        • Creating ‘lookalike’ lists.
        • Overlaying client data with the full UK B2B universe to show penetration and help identify gaps/opportunities.

Enhancement

 

If you have your own datasets, whether they cover customer data or prospect data, 118 Group can use unique matching processes to match your data to our UK B2B data and enhance with any of our 550 fields of data including industry sector definitions, latitude/longitudes, local authority districts, business rates, end of tenancy date. Even down to whether a company has a kitchen, an outdoor eating area, how many covers they have or how many parking spaces. If you need it just ask, we’ll either already have it or be able to get it for you.

We can even save you the task of spending weeks deduping your data and merging records. An output of our enhancing process can group duplicate records and show you which record to keep as the master.

Insights

Do you know what your customers look like and how to find more of them? We do. We use our data insights to get an in-depth understanding of your datasets to derive trends accurately and find other unique characteristics to back up decision-making. Data insights can optimise processes, help you to discover new markets and help you understand your customers and their buying cycles.

At 118 Group, we have 2 levels of data insight to offer:

 

Data Audit

This report is generated after we run a match of your data records against ours and can tell you the following information:

    • Any data quality issues that you have.
    • How many duplicate records are contained.
    • % population of each of the key fields required for matching.
    • How many records match to our UK B2B datasets including marketable, analytical and goneaways.
    • How many contacts you have that match our televerified contact data as well as how many new contact records we can add to your data.
    • How many telephone numbers within your full file match to the TPS/CTPS lists and therefore should not be called for marketing purposes.
    • How many of our 550 fields of data we can append to help you with segmentation or to load back into your internal systems.
    • Finally, we can show you what your target market looks like using SIC codes or our own Market Sectors, many of our customers have been surprised by what they see once this is complete. From this information we can show you how many more ‘look-a-like’ company records we can provide to you for a targeted sales and marketing campaign.
Data Penetration Report

This report gives you the information included with a Data Audit, but with more of a granular breakdown also looking at the geography of your database, size of organisation, location type and whether you hold mainly head office records, branches or single sites. You can also use the output to drill down further into the available target market of ‘look-a-likes’ that we can offer to you using our z-score penetration results.

If, as a company, you maintain multiple internal datasets, like most of our customers, feel free to send us all of the exports and we can run the above reports on each dataset or combined to show you the overlap between systems.

Aggregated Data Report

Available at a frequency to suit you or as one-off reports for specific projects, 118 Group’s aggregated reports allow you to analyse patterns and changes across the UK’s businesses by any number of variables.

Examples of reports include:
      • District Council-level – quarterly report on changes to businesses by industry.
      • Parliamentary MP ‘seats’ – monthly report on businesses moving in and out of the area.
      • College catchment area – a one-off report into local businesses likely to accept apprenticeships.
      • Retail planning – a one-off report on small businesses and competitors who would compete for basket spending in the local area.
      • Utility planning – a national report broken into large towns and their suburbs, showing sizes & types of businesses on a map.