The high value in this tool is its relatively low cost, ease of use, tight integration with SSIS, superior performance (compared to competitors), and attribute-level advanced survivor-ship logic.
We ran a standard name, address, and zip code, internal dedupe between the different files we had purchased, and we were able to quickly notify our vendor that they had tens of thousands of duplications that they were not even aware of.
By using Melissa Data, we are able to scrub and verify, then better validate the end customer's address to ensure a more consistent delivery of products.
It gives me an assessed value of the property in question. My partner and I are property investors, and it's good to get an assessed value to cull out properties that we're not interested in.
We mainly communicate with our customers via email, so we primarily use it to find a phone number so we can contact them more efficiently. This allows us to talk to them and resolve their issues much more quickly.
Developer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Jan 3, 2018
It saves a huge amount of time. Before using this service, we used a vendor that manually ran our lists through this NCOA list, which might have taken one to three business days to return the file. This was a huge bottleneck in our process, and the data returned was not always accurate. After switching to Melissa Data’s SmartMover, the process has been reduced to between ten minutes and three hours, depending on the amount of records sent.
The tool needs to provide resizable forms/windows like all other SSIS windows. Vendor claims its an SSIS limitation however all SSIS components are resizable so that isn't true. This is just an annoyance but needless.
One of the problems that we ran into this year was we probably spent over 40 hours finding and trying to drill down to where specific bugs were in the program, which was a tremendous waste of time for us. There were a couple of updates to Windows this year, the program kept crashing. It happened on two different occasions over a period of a few months. Once we told them what the problem was - even though their tech support is great to work with - it literally took probably about two months to fix the issue where we could actually use the program the way we needed to use it.
It really hasn't given us a phone number for the owner of the property, and that's one thing I'd really like to be getting. Either a phone number or email.
We would appreciate it if there was a larger database so that we could find information more often. For example, we can search for 10 people and only find the information for three of them, if we are lucky.
Operations and Business Technology Leader at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Jan 7, 2018
Tech support at Melissa Data was very quick to wash their hands of an issue and say it's IT policies on my side that are causing the issue. There was no offer to try and find a work-around. Just an overwhelming attitude of "it’s not our problem."
