Maidenhead, UK 19 November 2012 - thomsonlocal.com Direct Marketing Services has deployed Talend’s data quality solutions to improve its data matching and cleansing capability, delivering greater customer insight and adding value to its already extensive range of business data products.

thomsonlocal.com has been operating in the UK for over 30 years, and is best known for its local business directories – the famous ‘blue book’.  In October 2010, thomsonlocal.com released its first mobile application for iPhone, allowing users to search for local businesses while on the move and demonstrating the company’s ongoing commitment in finding new ways to use technology to better serve its customers.

In the mid-1990s, thomsonlocal.com also started to sell business data to companies who were looking to market their services to a B2B audience. The extensive contact data held in The thomsonlocal.com Database of Businesses has proved invaluable for small and medium size enterprises and major licensees such as Google, Experian and Equifax alike.  With an increasing demand from their customers for data cleansing and matching, however, thomsonlocal.com found itself looking for a solution that was both quick and accurate, one that could match a client’s database with the 2.2 million records held on The thomsonlocal.com Database of Businesses.

Russell Wilmot, Account Director for thomsonlocal.com Direct Marketing Services explains, “We needed a solution that was easy to deploy and could be operated at a user level with minimal IT involvement.  We looked at five or six possible suppliers and chose four to evaluate in depth.  Of these, Talend stood out as the best solution, offering more comprehensive functionality at a highly competitive price.”

Talend created a tailor-made solution over a 3-4 week period that provided thomsonlocal.com with an intuitive tool with which to handle complex matching requirements.  Users were quickly trained and the modular design approach meant that taking advantage of other Talend data management functionality was a simple process.

Wilmot continues, “.  A key differentiator of the Talend solution is the way the matching logic works. Talend’s matching algorithms have powerful routines that are specifically designed to identify non-standard duplications like ‘Stephen’ and ‘Steven’. This capability meant that Talend could help us amend or add to the processing options for the future but in the short term we needed very little IT involvement. What we now have is a solution that can be accessed by non-technical users.”

Talend Enterprise Data Quality provides an intelligent matching process with comprehensive routines that in turn provides thomsonlocal.com Direct Marketing Services’ clients with much higher match rates at optimal confidence levels. For clients, this means more of their data is cleansed, reducing campaign wastage and brand damage associated with incorrect customer details – and more of their information can be enriched with thomsonlocal.com verified details, providing them with better data.

François Méro, Vice-President of Global Sales, Talend, concludes: “Talend data quality solutions are delivering to both thomsonlocal.com customers, and their clients, a simple yet effective data matching process with the knowledge that the results are accurate, adding value to the overall business process.  It can be used to maximum effect for increased up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. The fact that Talend is being used with minimal IT involvement is testament to its design of being functional and accurate yet simple to deploy, use and maintain.” 

About Talend

Talend is the recognized market leader in open source integration solutions.  The company’s holistic integration platform helps organizations minimize costs and maximise the value of data integration, ETL, data quality, master data management, application integration and business process management, while supporting their shift toward the Cloud and Big Data.  More than 3,500 paying customers worldwide, including eBay, ING, The Weather Channel, Deutsche Post and Allianz, subscribe to Talend’s solutions and services. With over 20 million downloads, Talend’s products are the most trusted integration solutions in the world. The company has major offices in North America, Europe and Asia, and a global network of technical and services partners.  For more information, please visit http://www.talend.com.

About thomsonlocal.com

thomsonlocal.com has been operating for 30 years and has established itself as the leading local media company in the UK, helping people find local businesses, no matter how they look for one. 

Today, business listings are available both in print and online following the launch of its local search website, www.thomsonlocal.com in 2003. In October 2010, thomsonlocal.com released its first mobile application for iPhone allowing users to search for local businesses whilst on the move.  This was followed by mobile apps for Android and Nokia in 2011.

thomsonlocal.com is powered by the most comprehensive database of its kind in the UK with over 1.8 million businesses listed plus additional content such as user reviews and ratings. 

thomsonlocal.com is a Google Premier SME Partner and the first Authorised Bing reseller in the UK.

The thomsonlocal.com directory is produced and delivered free of charge to over 22 million homes and businesses throughout the UK.

With its head office in Farnborough, Hampshire, thomsonlocal.com is an Investors in People Champion - Bronze, with regional sales offices across the UK.