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Remove duplicate records from your database

Remove duplicate contacts from existing databases

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Highlight and remove duplicate records from databases

  • Retrospectively remove duplicate records at any time
  • Take control of your data, in-house
  • Get a single customer view

The challenge of duplicate contacts

"Over half of all organisations said that more than 5% of the data they regularly mail could be duplicates."

'Making sense of a crowded nation'. An Experian QAS whitepaper, November 2008

QAS Unify is a de-duplication tool which allows you to remove duplicate contact records in bulk from your database on a regular basis. Allowing you to:

  • Achieve accurate duplicate matching - Helping you to achieve a single customer view and a positive brand perception. Accurate data will prevent you mailing the same person twice.
  • Achieve smoother business processes - As an in-house and low risk solution, QAS Unify allows you to retain control of your data, whilst removing the need for you to send it off-site.
  • Benefit from better financial expenditure - Organisations waste an average of 19% as a result of poor data. Removing duplicates can also give you a competitive and cost saving advantage.
  • Find duplicate contacts in bulk - Identify duplicate contact records in bulk within your database, or in comparison with an external data source.
  • Check various data sources - such as a purchased contact list against your own database.

Removing duplicates in bulk

Features of QAS Unify include:

  • The option to export lists - to highlight those to keep and records to remove or flag as duplicates.
  • Achieve accurate duplicate matching - tailored to your data by defining how different data fields are weighted.
  • A variety of matching techniques - to ensure matching is successful and accurate. Phonetic, fuzzy and alias matching available.
  • De-dupes any type of information - Find matches across names, businesses and addresses, as well as dates of birth and national insurance numbers. The full range of elements that can be matched means more accurate de-duping.

QAS Match

QAS Unify also works seamlessly alongside QAS Match. If you're using QAS Match to prevent duplicates entering your system at the point of capture, QAS Unify can work in conjunction to identify duplicates in an existing database and ensure the ongoing maintenance of data quality.

QAS Professional Services

With the assistance of QAS Professional Services, your de-duplication processes can be automated and scheduled periodically or be performed as a one-off bulk de-duplication run to fit in with your business workflow.

QAS Unify v1.5, released 18th September 2009 in the UK.

In essence, QAS Unify's record merge capability, allows the best bits of information from several duplicates to be merged together into a single, more complete and higher-value record. As each customer's needs will differ, this is driven by business rules.

The September release of QAS Unify (version 1.5) makes it easier to remove duplicates from your contact data in three new ways:

1. More control over selecting the record to keep

When a group of duplicate or highly similar records is identified, Unify automatically suggest the one record to keep from the group - the "survivor record". A flexible new rule builder allows you to define one or more conditions to determine which is the best record to keep.

As a simple example, if your record contains a "Last Modified" date, you can choose to keep the record in the group of duplicates that was updated most recently.

2. Introducing record merge

Record merge lets you take the best fields from a group of duplicate or highly similar records to create a single, high-value record. You can then use this merged record as the foundation of your organisation's Single Customer View. As the assessment of which fields are "best" differs according to information available in your contact records, a flexible rule builder is provided to tailor Unify to your specific data and business needs.

3. Additional operating system and database support

In addition to existing support, QAS Unify can now take advantage of Microsoft® Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 database. Hardware recommendations are available on request.

Experian QAS Professional Services' expertise in understanding each customer's needs and defining business rules are available to help.


"Beyond the obvious costs associated with the lack of a 'single view' of data, businesses waste opportunities to increase revenue and profits, reduce time to market, become more efficient, improve customer service, and reduce business and IT complexity."

Predicts 2008: Master Data Management, Gartner February 2008

Identifying and removing duplicates in databases is essential to making the most effective use of a contact data and maintaining data quality.

Use our online tool to calculate how much your duplicates could be costing you. Calculate ROI by highlighting how much you could save with QAS Unify.