EQUIFAX ENHANCES ITS CONSUMER TRACING SERVICE TO
HELP BUSINESSES KEEP TRACK OF THEIR CUSTOMERS
London, 7th June 2005 – With consumer bad debt at record levels, the need for effective consumer tracing services has become critical. To help businesses address this need, Equifax Plc has significantly enhanced and re-launched its online consumer tracing product, Locate. Since the re-launch, Equifax has seen a dramatic increase in the number of individuals that can be successfully traced to another address.
Steve Taylor, Product Strategy Director of Equifax comments, “Keeping track of customers is vital to the successful operation of many businesses. Equifax Locate offers the quickest, most reliable and flexible way for businesses to trace gone-away customers and re-establish contact with them. Regardless of whether individuals have genuinely moved and have failed to inform an organisation of their change of address, or are pretending to move but remain active at their current residence, not knowing their whereabouts can directly affect an organisation’s business.”
Utilising a database of over 500 million up-to-date and live records derived from an extensive range of data sources, Equifax Locate can reveal addresses linked to an individual through a single search. Equifax Locate will also show movement in and out of the supplied address. Furthermore, the introduction of a name and date of birth search capability means that a much wider range of linked addresses can be found, enabling customers to find previously untraceable individuals. In addition, Equifax Locate is usually able to append a date of birth when one is not supplied. Other product enhancements include a Residency Report option indicating if an individual is “active” at the address they claim to have left and offering the option to screen against deceased files and append telephone numbers for revealed addresses.
Steve Taylor concludes, “Gone-away customers pose a very real threat to many of today’s businesses, whether they are a credit grantor, a debt collection agency or one of the many other bodies that are dependent upon up-to-date and accurate details on the location of individuals. Equifax Locate provides these businesses with a highly effective consumer tracing tool, helping them find and re-establish contact with gone-away customers”.
