Yamaha Motor Company Limited is a Japanese manufacturer of motorcycles, marine products such as boats and outboard motors, and more. Established in 1955 upon its separation from Yamaha Corporation, Yamaha Motor is headquartered in Iwata, Shizuoka, Japan.
In addition to being the world leader in water vehicle sales and boasting the second-largest motorcycle sales in the world, Yamaha is also involved in the import and sales of various types of products, requiring them to compile their customer data from several different sources.
For Yamaha, coordinated, reliable, and customer-centered care is reliant on access to quality customer data. They depend on an extensive dealer network to sell products and submit customer registration details, however, many of these dealers are independent operators.
By running that address through Loqate, we can correct it and standardize it, then we can see that we have two records for the same person and we can de-duplicate our database and keep it accurate.Moninder Manic
Consequently, customer names, addresses and other important details enter the database from multiple sources, leaving Yamaha’s customer data vulnerable to duplicates and discrepancies.
According to Moninder Manic of Yamaha Motor, “It is common for the same person to be registered via multiple dealers, and those records are often not exactly aligned. For example, one dealer might enter the street as Maple Lane, while another one enters it as Maple Court. Now we have two different address records, but it is actually the same customer. As time progressed, data got further and further from the truth.”
To help solve their data management challenges, Yamaha partnered with Oracle and Loqate to create an enhanced address verification solution.
Prior to the implementation of Oracle and Loqate technology, Yamaha experienced complications and incompatibilities with their legacy systems. For a two-year period, data became unreliable as administrators were forced to manually input bi-monthly data and cross-check with the latest customer information, most of which was inaccurate due to failed updates and a lack of email verification software.
This process proved to be both time-consuming and inefficient, ultimately driving Yamaha to search for a more effective solution. In 2016 they elected Oracle’s EDQ, powered by Loqate’s Global Address Verification software, as their new data management system. Additionally, Yamaha Motor now uses Loqate’s e-mail verification solution.
Oracle’s proven capability in data warehousing and business intelligence coupled with Loqate’s address lookup software and rapid data capture greatly improved the quality of Yamaha’s records.
I think Loqate is very helpful in terms of the real-time application. Without leveraging EDQ and Loqate to standardize addresses and create good quality data the matching process didn’t work correctly. With registration, for example, we can match if that customer has already previously bought in the system, whereas before it was very difficult to do that. All these little things add up to seconds that save us time and money. Moninder Manic
As a leading manufacturer of motorized products, Yamaha handles occurrences of product recalls, manufacturing defects, and warranty claims as part of their standard business practice. In these instances, they are obligated to inform customers in order to remain compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.
To accomplish this, Yamaha must rely on accurate and complete customer registration data to ensure notices and reports are deliverable. Yamaha opted to integrate Loqate’s email validation software as its source of real-time verification for email addresses being recorded by their dealers.
We installed OEDQ six months prior to implementing the full Oracle Universal Customer Master toolset. That has helped us tremendously improve the quality of our data and the quality of the addresses that we have. That is paramount for us, especially from a recall and email verification perspective. We have leveraged the email verification API so that during registration, if dealers input a false or incorrect email address, the API triggers immediately and notifies the dealer in real-time that the information is invalid. The dealer then corrects that data with the nearby customer.
Loqate’s easy-to-integrate software can verify email addresses up-front or en masse, validating the domain and the username via SMTP authentication. The result is a decline in false registrations, an increase in email deliverability and an improvement in sender reputation.
Both the address and email verification have been very important for us. The service side and call centers are seeing the benefits of clean data. The marketing teams are also seeing the benefits of having this verified data, and the amount of undeliverable or return mail is reduced ultimately lowering the cost involved.
Moninder Manic
With the support of Oracle and Loqate, there has not only been an improvement in Yamaha’s customer service but the increase in quality data has also brought relief to its call center teams and strengthened operational efficiency.
In the call centers, Yamaha turned to Loqate’s type-ahead functionality as a means of accelerating the data capture process as well as insuring customer service operators are entering correct and verified customer information.
Moninder explains, “We are using Loqate’s type-ahead functionality to provide an improved Customer Service experience. In our call centers, when a customer is identifying themselves, our operator is using Loqate in real-time to enter an accurate address. As the operator is entering the address, a pick list appears of valid addresses that match the input so far. This makes the data capture process much faster, as well as ensures we are entering the correct information. Now all the downstream processes we use that address and email for are going to be more accurate, and the overall experience for our customer is improved.”
For Yamaha, understanding the patterns of their customers is a high priority — how often does someone purchase another product or purchase from a different Yamaha division? But, this analysis depends on the construction of an accurate, verified and true customer database.
“We are very interested in understanding the ‘re-buy’ patterns of our customers. But for this analysis to be useful, we need accurate customer data. Going back to the earlier example, if we have one customer in our database at two different addresses (Maple Lane and Maple Court), we don’t know that he or she is actually the same customer. To our data, this looks like two different customers. So, if they purchase something else, depending on which address record they use when registering, we may not realize this is actually a repeat customer. Or worse, this time their address might come in as Maple Street; now we’ve got three records for the same person,” says Moninder.
Preceding OEDQ, Yamaha sported a database filled with between 200 and 400,000 duplicate or incorrect contacts. Loqate’s address verification solution resolved the fundamental challenge of address data management by negating the need to manually correct customer data and driving accurate intelligence reports for customer insight, profiling, and targeting.
By using Loqate we can verify any incorrect data and have one golden record for each customer. Then we can do accurate ‘re-buy’ analysis and fine-tune our marketing based on that data. It saves us from creating inaccurate contacts, helps reduce duplicates in the system, and just helps us keep a cleaner picture of the world and our customers. Moninder Manic
