New Experian software helps public sector to enhance single citizen view projects

Contact:
Rachael Taylor
PR Manager, Experian QAS
+44 (0) 207 819 5368 Tel
rachael.taylor@qas.com Email

NEW EXPERIAN SOFTWARE HELPS PUBLIC SECTOR TO

ENHANCE SINGLE CITIZEN VIEW PROJECTS

Birmingham City Council adopts QAS Identify for transformation programme

London, UK, 24th February 2009 - Experian^®, the global information services company, today launched new software providing public sector organisations with a vital new tool to locate and link disparate citizen data records for single citizen view projects.  Powered by Experian’s data and analytics, QAS Identify has been adopted by Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, to improve its customer service delivery.

A single citizen view provides an accurate and up-to-date view on all of a person’s interactions with government. Each year, 7.8 million people in the UK move house and hundreds of thousands of people change their name.  As a result, one of the greatest challenges for a single citizen view project is identifying and linking up citizen records, particularly when records often use numerous formats and different spellings.

QAS Identify has been specifically developed for public sector organisations to help them reduce the timescales and costs associated with creating a single citizen view. The software uses Experian’s vast consumer data sources alongside advanced matching algorithms to match citizen records. As the data passes through QAS Identify, each citizen record is automatically cleaned and given a numerical ‘key’ unique to that person. Operators can then use the key to retrieve all of the records held for a citizen to gain a complete view on every contact they have had with the organisation and its various departments.

QAS Identify’s features also include:

-         ‘Person’ keys allocated to tag duplicate contact records across various databases.

-         ‘Household’ and ‘Family’ keys allocated to determine links between family members and individuals living at the same address.

-         The ability to update contact data, where an address or name change has occurred, for all the records that have been flagged for that individual.

Paul Higgins, Assistant Director of Customer Services at Birmingham City Council, commented: “We have undertaken a transformation programme to help us achieve world class standards of customer service and move towards a single citizen view. What this means for Birmingham City Council is faster completion of customer transactions, improved standards of customer handling and empowerment of staff. A key part of this is ensuring we have accurate data. QAS Identify helps us to accurately integrate citizen data held across a number of legacy systems within the council.”

Stuart Johnston, UK Managing Director for Experian QAS added: “We work with the majority of local, regional and central government bodies and understand the constant challenges they face in keeping millions of citizen data records accurate and up-to-date. QAS Identify will help these organisations to create and maintain a single view of their citizens – a key priority for local and central government. Through our innovation in contact data management, the public sector will be able to harness citizen data to become more efficient, improve costs, and provide a better service to the UK population.”