Guest Insight Starts with Address, Email & Phone Number Accuracy

A version of this article was first written by the writing staff of Loqate GBG and was first published on their blog.

There’s a new feature in Galaxy 7.8: Galaxy Contact Validation. This service ensures the accuracy of your guests’ demographic data by auto-populating and/or validating their address, phone and email information as they enter it online or as it’s entered at your gates. With auto-complete and validation, you can optimize the online user experience, enable more effective personalized marketing campaigns, see a decrease in the number of failed email and postal deliveries, and ultimately see an increase in sales. Galaxy Contact Validation is powered by GBG Loqate, so we partnered with them to find out why accurate guest contact data is so important. .

In today’s digital ecosystem, the importance of collecting accurate guest contact data has never been more amplified. With more and more of our guests purchasing their tickets online and a big surge in consumer demand for self-service options, the ability to collect accurate addresses, emails and phone numbers without errors falls increasingly beyond our control. But why is it so important that this data be accurate?

The Benefit of Accurate Guest Contact Data

Whether taking an order on your web store or selling a membership at your gate, your guest’s mailing address, email and phone number is a primary input. Here, total accuracy is critical in numerous ways. First, attractions need to make certain that their customer relationship management (CRM) system maintains the golden record of their guests starting with correct contact data.

Second, contact data is the pivot point in providing a 360-degree view of your guest and allowing you to personalize every guest experience. It starts with gathering the right data at the initial transaction. If accurate data is input during every subsequent transaction, then all of those touchpoints can be accurately aggregated into that guest’s contact record in your CRM and used to help personalize their visiting experience in the future. If at any point incorrect contact data is input, you risk not associating that transaction with the record (almost as if it never happened). Or, another record might be created for the same person, leading your system to believe one guest is actually two separate people.

For example, if you have transaction records for a guest purchasing a membership or pass for three years in a row, each purchase will register on that guest’s contact record in your CRM if their contact data is entered accurately each time. If it’s not, there may be two, or even three guests in your system that each purchased a membership/pass once. Why is this important? Let’s say you want to run a campaign reaching out to your most loyal guests asking for a donation. Someone who has purchased a membership three years in a row is probably a good candidate to reach out to. But they won’t even show up on the list if your system thinks they are three people who have never renewed a membership.

And that leads to another benefit: the email or print mail you send with the donation request, or the phone call you make, won’t ever even reach that guest if they didn’t enter the right contact info in the first place.

With all this transaction information aggregated under one accurate guest account, you can send personalized promotions and make each visit feel like a personal touchpoint. This is a concept we call Made-to-Measure Excitement.

How Does The Galaxy Contact Validation Solution Work

Let’s look at the solutions in detail. Galaxy Contact Validation is powered by GBG Loqate. Loqate’s Global Parsing Engine consists of proprietary lexicon and context parsing rules created specifically for each country and territory around the world. The parsing engine standardizes and corrects addresses from unstructured and semi-structured data, automatically placing elements into the correct fields and eliminating erroneous non-address data. How often have you seen “Main Street” misspelled as “Mane or Maine Street”?

There is a component for real-time or batch verification needs, capable of processing more than three million records per hour. This component will indicate the validity of each address value input into an address field. A second component is a type-ahead predictive technology that will suggest addresses as a user types, making it easier to get accurate address information as it’s being typed. A third component can validate the format of entered email addresses or phone numbers.

The aim is to improve user experience, minimize abandonment and improve data quality, all helping to meet the overall goal of increasing revenue. Accurate contact data ensures promotions hit the right households and give them the best chance to convert.

And another thing: Note too that sometimes your “customer” isn’t always your guest, but an internal team member. Weather they’re inputting guest data at the membership station or at your F&B operations, you want to leave them with a high degree of confidence that the data they entered is accurate.

Creating a Golden Record

Let’s also look at another use case where accurate contact data is particularly acute: when you’re switching or merging new systems. You may be migrating guest data to a new email service provider, you may be switching CRMs, onboarding new donor management or accounting software. Your corporation may have purchased a new theme park. Merging systems is not a simple exercise. How do you know which guest records are joint and may contain overlapping incorrect info?

Addresses are usually invariant, but not standardized across systems. As are email addresses or phone numbers. But if it’s inaccurate in one system, then matching customer databases becomes difficult and presents risk of duplication, miss-fielded data and simple misspellings. When this happens you lose all the benefits of accurate guest data listed above and have a nightmare of a system merge or migration.

If you’d like to use Galaxy Contact Validation at your attraction, reach out to your Business Solutions Manager or contact us at info@gatewayticketing.com