We recently sat down with Kyle Blanchard, Product Manager with Business Information Services to ask him a few questions about Experian’s improved OneSearch technology.
What is OneSearch?
OneSearch is a lot of things at its core. OneSearch is the ability for a customer to find a business, but the story of OneSearch is much bigger than that. OneSearch is Experian’s technological advancement and journey on how we’re bringing all of our innovations to drive improvements for our customers.
So, our customers can find businesses today, but at Experian we had to ask the question, how can we make this better? And with OneSearch, we’re providing the ability for our customers to find businesses faster, and for them to find a more exact match and a more precise business every single time.
What should Experian clients expect?
Our clients can expect a variety of changes. Those changes won’t come in terms of the products or services you’re using today, but more about the experience you’re having. So whether you’re using BusinessIQ, or you’re getting files in batch, the only experience difference you’re going to feel is you’re going to get better match results, more match results, and you’re going to get them at a faster speed. So your experience is going to improve. This is going to be free of charge. This is just an internal improvement that we’re making for you. But, every way you interface with our applications or your services will not change at all.
Why does OneSearch matter to our clients?
This matters a lot to our clients. Their first experience and every experience they have with us starts with finding the right business. So, we stepped back and we asked ourselves, how can we improve this experience for our customers and how can we make it better? And so, we looked at all technologies available and we did an evaluation, and what we had was a deterministic solution but where we really needed to be was a probabilistic one.
But the investment that the company or that we needed to make to get there is significant. But we saw that this is an important investment to make because of the improvements that it can drive for our customers, and the improvements it could drive for our customers are wide and varied. Whether it be an improved ROI because you’re finding more businesses, or a faster processing time so you can do more jobs even quicker.
Why is Experian investing in innovation and technology?
Experian is investing in innovation and technology for two reasons. One, it’s part of our culture, we’re always investing in innovation and technology, whether it be this probabilistic search match algorithm, whether it be machine learning or whether it be A.I. We’re always trying to innovate and always trying to drive new best practices in technology.
Finally, we know the importance from our customer perspective. This is fundamental to their experience. And not only that, we recently partnered with Forrester to do a research study and found that over 85% of risk managers are looking to improve their risk management practices. 75% of those are willing to invest and purchase a solution within the next year. So we know how important this is to our customers, and the only way to get there is to innovate and always drive new technology.
