Mercury Insurance In the Drivers Seat
Mercury Insurance is the leading independent broker and agency
writer of automobile insurance in California and has been one of the
fastest growing automobile insurers in the nation. It is ranked as
the third largest private passenger automobile insurer in
California, with total assets over $3 billion. Mercury also writes
automobile insurance in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma,
New York, Virginia, New Jersey and Arizona. Every day more than
1,000 drivers make the switch to Mercury, adding to its database of
more than 1.3 million auto policyholders.
Mercury subscribes to Melissa Data’s Data Address Object to validate
customer data in real time from applications and Web forms. An
address submitted is matched against a recent U.S. Postal Service
database for validation, correction and standardized and returned in
less than a second. The address clean-up activity level is about
22,000 records per month, says Loki Efaw, IT Manager in Mercury’s
Brea, CA office.
As a high- volume mailer of statements and letters to policyholders,
Mercury relies on postal data correction and standardization to help
reduce postage and printing costs.
In addition, Mercury uses Melissa Data’s geo-coder data to determine
the distance between a submitted address and the closest independent
agent. Auto insurance shoppers may visit Mercury’s Web site, input
their ZIP Code, and receive a list of agents in their area. Address
validation is also used to support requests for quotes on the Web
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In Tune With Musician’s Friend Catalog
With an inventory of more than 36,000 products, Musician’s Friend is
the world’s largest direct marketer of music gear. Guitars,
keyboards, percussion instruments, amps, as well as recording,
lighting, and mixing equipment can be purchased through a mail-order
catalog or the popular musiciansfriend.com Web site. Guitars are the
best selling instruments, and on an average day Musician’s Friend
will take more than 4,000 phones or Web orders. Until recently, the
direct marketer had no way of verifying the accuracy of shipping
addresses taken at its call center. Among the common problems with
customer addresses were missing elements and incorrect ZIP codes.
Bad addresses can mean penalties levied by carriers who must correct
the address in the field.
“One of our concerns was the $5 charge-back we were paying to UPS
per occurrence for correcting an address,” said Greg Snider, lead
programmer. Snider began to search for an address verification
solution. At the top of his wish list was one that would integrate
easily with his existing order-entry system. He found Melissa Data’s
Data Quality Web Service to be a perfect match with his needs. “With
Melissa Data we were able to get up and running within a week and
didn’t have to make any modifications to our base software,” he
said. Contact data is now sent via XML protocol to Melissa Data’s
servers, verified and corrected, and returned in an instant.
“Another advantage of using the Web Service is that there’s nothing
to update or maintain, because we don’t have to store the USPS
postal databases on our servers,” he said. |
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