Melissa Data Quality Reviews

Data merge, purge, quality, and append.

I was able to dedupe millions of records in the past, and append the most recent email.

• The flexibility of their products
• Services for all manner of data-driven organizations, no matter their size or budget.

Better email append coverage (but every vendor struggles with this).

No issues. Everything worked as expected, and exceeded expectations.

It depends on whether you can run extremely large lists on multiple servers. Any sort of dedupe or fuzzy match is processing intensive, regardless of the vendor.

I requested a hands-on webinar and received it the same day.

I will continue to use Discover RainKing, as well as D&B for firmographics, Synthio (formerly Social123), HG Data, Reachable, Smarte, GoodData. Each vendor has unique strengths and weaknesses. Melissa Data is often best for the price, quality, thoroughness, and speed.

For my particular need, it required about an hour to learn their online system, but they also provided a live webinar session – fantastic!

Be sure to determine how the data is priced (record-based versus credit-based or some hybrid of data and services).

Melissa's sales executives can be of tremendous value in pricing and best practices.

I still use D&B, Synthio, Discover.org and RainKing, but Melissa Data is always a contender for B2C data needs.

Regarding advice to others looking for similar solutions:

1. Explore Melissa's products and services online.
2. Speak with one of their sales reps.
3. Schedule an online demo.

I rate it a 10 out of 10, based on value, quality, speed, and features.

Start with Melissa Data, explore a few of their competitors, and then decide based on these factors: data type (B2B or B2C) / pricing / data quality / data fields / system utility / customer support.

We use Listware Online to get personal information from home addresses.

We have only been using this for about two months, but it has sped up our processing significantly. It makes data mining easy and fast. We don't have to spend an entire month gathering correct information on leads. With LWO, all we need is a list of home addresses, and in minutes we have names and phone numbers to increase our chance of these leads becoming customers.

It's most useful in getting us names of homeowners. The phone numbers also make it convenient and easy to contact potential leads. This allows us to personalize postcards to advertise our services.

I wish there was a way to do a "test run" and see what a particular format will give you.

No issues.

No issues.

We have not needed much help, but the help we have gotten has been quick and simple.

It was very simple and easy. I was able to do it with minimal assistance, as it is very easy to understand.

Be sure, before you spend your credits, that you have everything set up the way you want.

Zscrubber. Melissa Listware Online is much easier.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It gets us all the information we need quickly and easily. It's convenient to be able to simply upload a spreadsheet and use a predetermined template; it only takes a few minutes to process.

• Very straightforward installation & Configuration steps. We configured Personator & Match process and part of our daily SSIS ETL load process.
• Very Easy to use. 
• Procured missing customer information. We simply passed basic details of out customers like Name, Address, Phone Number and Personator application was able to append Emails, New Address if moved, Phone number, Geocode. Personator also standardizes existing customer information.
• Match process provided reliable single view of data. We used it for de-duplication, matching & mastering customer records.

• Data appends helped improve our Customer reach.
• Improved Address and Email Quality.

• Having Customer Primary and Secondary address will help us a lot as some Customers tend to use secondary addresses for business communication.
• Email Address Soft Ping should be made real time within Personator. 
• Overall there is a room for improvement in Customer Address Appends and Email Appends.

We use Melissa Data Listware for customer address verification.

I have only just started to use it at my current company so no improvements yet. In my previous role, we used Listware to reduce returned mail and reduce mailing costs.

Simplicity, ease of use, combined with overall accuracy of data.

The world is moving/has moved to the cloud. I get that. But it would be nice to easily integrate the solution with our own internal systems/processes in a way that keeps IT happy. Right now I live at a company with (exceedingly) tight IT policies, so integration of a cloud solution just doesn’t work. The on-premise version of Listware is too expensive relative to the cloud version.

No stability issues yet.

No scalability issues.

Average to below average. 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."

I have investigated but not used other solutions.

Easy enough. 

Cloud is very cheap. On-premise is expensive.

I can’t recall all the other solutions in detail; Trillium was one.

Trial subscriptions (via cloud) are very cheap and easy to use. It’s a great way to test Listware to see if you want to go deeper with integration.

We had a project where we had purchased data files. We ran a standard name, address, and zip code, internal dedupe between the different files we had, and we were able to quickly notify our vendor that they had tens of thousands of duplications that they were not even aware of, that we would have ended up paying for if we had not used the MatchUp software on the front end.

• Being able to open up large files
• The extensive merge/purge capabilities

We handle large amounts of data, in the terabytes. It's important to be able to have a program that can handle that large amount of data at one time, and effectively do internal dedupes of the data itself.

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 and the Melissa program kept crashing. It happened on two different occasions over a period of a few months. We were apparently the first firm that noticed it and reported it. They had problems figuring out what the problem was, so we had to drill down and spend a considerable amount of time, proving to them that it wasn't an issue on our end, but that it had something to do with the compatibility on their end with a Windows update. 

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. Two months is just too long to solve a problem on a program when we had just purchased the program earlier this year.

When there's a Windows update, they should check the program in detail to see if there are going to be any conflicts with that update, instead of waiting for their clients to spend countless hours solving the problem of why the program is crashing.

Also, it would be nice to be able to do a merge/purge of larger data sets. What I mean by larger data sets, data sets in the terabytes, without any crashing issues. But from talking to tech support, it's probably as good as it's going to get.

It was crashing a lot, that was one of the problems, it was crashing non-stop. It took them a couple of months, after we had conveyed to them what the specific problems were, but they finally got it fixed where it was no longer crashing.

It has good capability. It probably has about as good a capability as what it's ever going to have.

The tech support people are very accommodating. They're very receptive, they're very knowledgeable.

When you're learning any software program, it takes a little while, but we've used several programs from Melissa over years, MatchUp, Personator, RightFielder, Dirty Harry. MatchUp is fairly straightforward as far as how to use it. It's probably simpler to learn than most of your other merge/purge type programs that are available out there.

We just researched on the internet. There weren't a lot of choices - we're going back probably 13 years - back then as there are now. 

I know Melissa has gone the route where everything is going to the cloud, where you have to pay an ongoing annual fee. We specifically want to use a desktop solution, not a cloud solution - which is the direction many other firms are going, they're going to a cloud solution. But we prefer using a standalone desktop solution, where we are purchasing the software program one time, plus occasional updates, as opposed to having to use the cloud, based on the volume of use.

In terms of advice to others, if you have a large file with many, many terabytes, break it down into smaller files, the program will typically process it a lot quicker.

The best way to learn is try some small test files to see if it's working the way you want it to work, as far as your math logic. A lot of times you have to set up your own unique math logic combinations in order to get the results that you want.

I give it an eight out of 10 overall, because it does involve the cloud, and it can handle unusually large data files.

However, it's not a 10 because, if you don't have the threads set correctly - they have a multi-thread option - if you don't have those threads set correctly it will, in certain instances, cause your program to crash.

The SSIS workflow component has been valuable for me to recommend for enterprise-level production work.

I was contacted by a products distribution company about using their technology. I was able to answer their questions, and then refer them to Melissa Data for further product support.

The use case I'm familiar with is for a merchant who was contrasting this technology with data from Dun and Bradstreet: so my recommendation is that Melissa Data purchase Dun and Bradstreet to combine their data breadth.

Both services have complementary but not identical databases: functionally, people should contact the sales teams at both organizations, see what trial they can get and to what degree the data satisfies their use case.

Customer service was excellent, and their technical team provides top support for people wanting to use the technology.

Their technical team provides top support for people wanting to use the technology.

Contact Address Verify Component.

Helped us to correct all the invalid addresses in our DB.

License tracking.

4 months

No. It was very easy to install on configure.

No. It is very reliable.

No.

Excellent.

No, this was first one we have used. We evaluated other products but MD was better.

Yes. Very easy to install and configure.

In-house.

We are very pleased with the pricing but they need to have some good licence tracking mechanism.

It is easy to install and configure. Integrates well with Visual Studio Data Tools. Generates a unique key for every address it processes. Generates correct error codes whenever it corrects a address. Finally, it is very reliable.

We use Melissa Data Web Service during our freight bill entry process. We check Melissa Data to determine if a ship-to address is a residential address. If so, we add a residential delivery charge to the invoice.

Previously, we had to rely on the driver of the delivery to mark a shipment as residential. If they forgot or were not sure, the delivery would not be marked and we would potentially lose revenue from the residential delivery.

We use a Melissa API to access the data, so it easy to use, accurate, and fast.

There are some companies out there using Google or other sources to check/confirm if addresses are residential. If Melissa is not doing this, that could be an improvement.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Tech support is fine.

We did not previously use a different product.

Straightforward. Melissa provided instructions on how to use the APIs, login information; it was very easy to set up.

Understand how may transactions you will be processing so that you can get the right tier pricing.

Follow normal IT processes to design what you need; build, test, and implement.