How to deliver an all-important single citizen view (SCV)

With public sector budgets under significant strain due to high inflation and cutbacks post-pandemic, it has never been more important to ensure precious budgets are efficiently spent.

A good place to begin to ensure they are effectively disbursed is to gain insight, a single citizen view (SCV), of those on your database. This will enable the personalisation of communications, improvement to the delivery of services and overall user experience, along with greater operational efficiency. It will also help reduce the opportunity for fraud.

Unfortunately, data decay is one of the biggest challenges to obtaining a SCV, with user contact data degrading at 25 percent a year without regular intervention, as people move home, get married, for example. Also, when it comes to collecting contact data at the user onboarding stage, it’s important to realise that 20 percent of addresses entered online contain errors. These include spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, and incorrect postcodes, that are primarily caused by people mistyping their details into small keyboards on their mobile devices.

The good news is that incorrect contact data can be easily fixed, to help deliver a SCV, usually with simple and cost-effective changes as part of your data quality regime.

This should involve cleansing and standardising held user data to deliver data quality in batch, as well as when new data is collected, in real-time. Furthermore, the cleansing tools used in this process should be able to enhance the data by filling in any missing contact details.

Autocomplete prevents input errors

Technology, such as address autocomplete or lookup, are vital in ensuring those in the public sector gather accurate address data in real-time at the onboarding stage by providing a properly formatted, correct address when the user starts to input theirs. It also enables convenience by reducing the number of keystrokes required, by up to 81 percent, when typing an address. This speeds up the onboarding process and reduces the probability of the user not completing an application to access a service.

The first point of contact verification can be extended to email and phone so that these valuable contact data channels can also be verified in real-time. This ensures the ability to communicate effectively with users, not just on the first occasion but on an ongoing basis, and support the delivery of a SCV.

Match and dedupe

It’s vital to undertake data deduplication, with the average database containing 8 – 10 percent duplicate records. Duplicate data is commonly caused when two departments merge their data and mistakes in contact data collection occur at different touchpoints.

Duplication adds cost in terms of time and money, particularly with printed communications, the distribution of which can also adversely impact the sender’s reputation. Recipients will see this excess as a waste of public money, particularly at a challenging time for public sector finances.

To prevent such waste, utilise an advanced fuzzy matching tool to deduplicate data. It can merge and purge the most challenging records, making it possible to create a ‘single user record’ and obtain an optimum SCV. Organising contact data this way will also maximise efficiency and cost reduction because multiple outreach efforts will not be made to the same person. Additionally, the potential for fraud is reduced by establishing a unified record for each citizen.

Enrichment

The data cleaning tools used should be able to fill in any gaps in the contact data, such as a missing telephone number, as well as correct them where required, which in turn will improve personalisation. This additional, accurate data will also aid those in the public sector to make learnings about their citizens, to further improve communications and their experience.

SaaS powers today’s data quality efforts

It has never been easier or more cost-effective to manage data quality in real-time. Today, you can access a scalable data cleaning software as a service (SaaS) platform that requires no code, integration or training. Simply plug in and benefit immediately. It’s technology that instantly cleanses and corrects names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers worldwide. It matches records in real-time, ensuring no duplication, and delivers data profiling to help identify issues for further action. A single, intuitive interface provides tools for data standardisation, validation, and enrichment, resulting in high-quality contact information across multiple databases that will help deliver a SCV.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Once public bodies have undertaken the basics to ensure accurate customer data, artificial intelligence (AI) can add even greater value to the data they hold. For example, a type of machine learning called semantic technology can readily deliver high value, in-depth intelligence on users of your services. Semantic technology, or semtech, associate’s words with meanings and recognises the relationships between them. It works by delivering powerful real-time connections between records, combining the missing pieces of data to support an informed decision about the content of a communication to a user.

Those in the public sector need to prioritise the delivery of a SCV at a time when their budgets are under huge pressure. Ensuring contact data quality is at the heart of this. By doing so they will be able to personalise communications, improve the provision of services and overall user experience. They will also deliver greater operational efficiency and reduce the opportunity for costly fraud.