Accurate Data Drives Online Ordering for Global Retailers with Maui Jim

Company Background

Maui Jim is a global eyewear company that specializes in the unique ability to combine industry-leading technology, the culture and spirit of Hawaii, and all the benefits of an independently owned business.

A leader in the industry and third-largest producer of sunglasses in the world, Maui Jim sells over 125 styles of polarized sunglasses in over 100 countries to consumers and retailers across the globe.

Looking to provide retailers with a more convenient prescription eyewear ordering experience, Maui Jim was developing a user interface for an online ordering platform commonly used in the optical industry. This platform would also support more order entry automation at the benefit of both Maui Jim and its retailers.

Project Background

What seemed like a simple task quickly introduced numerous data matching challenges. Orders received via the online platform would reference a new unique customer identification number, rather than the Maui Jim customer account number, if one existed at all.

The difficulty was compounded by nuances of the optical industry that anyone working with customer data can relate to: matching. A customer name stored in one system would mistakenly reference the trade name of the business, while another database might reference the doctor’s name or the legal entity name.

“For example, “Family Vision,” “Dr. John Smith, OD,” and “Smith Optometric P.C.” might all be acceptable names for the same underlying business,” explains Hoffman. “Additionally, office locations of optical practices are frequently found in medical office complexes, hospitals, or shared office buildings, which means in some cases the address of two unrelated customers might differ by only one or two characters in the suite or unit number.”

Implementation Highlights

As Hoffman observed, “accuracy of the customer matching was extremely important.” At Maui Jim’s scale, the negative impact of inaccurate customer matching is substantial. Accepting a customer order, matching it to the wrong customer number, and shipping that order to an en- tirely different customer results in a poor customer experience and a costly drain on resources.

Challenges

• The ability to match data sources with different formats or conventions, such as phone numbers or zip codes input in different formats.
• Accurate data matching results with complex, nuanced data.
• An understandable, intuitive user interface that allowed the solution to be deployed to business users rather than solely to technical IT team members.
• A quick deployment and implementation, since Maui Jim was working on a tight timeline.

For Syniti’s team of experts, the answer was simple: Maui Jim needed an advanced matching platform with an accessible user interface. With a drag-and-drop canvas layered over Syniti’s intelligent matching software, users can quickly and easily save and share complex workflows with step configuration options, meeting the needs of bothbusiness users and technical users alike.

Results

The flexibility of Syniti’s matching platform and advanced contextual scoring matrix made it easy to segregate high-confidence results that needed little review from lower-confidence results that required closer analysis, fine-tuning the matching logic using multiple passes.

• Hundreds of hours of manual data matching effort were avoided.
• Instances of improper order shipments due to inaccurate customer matching have become extremely rare.
• Exceeded launch deadline for the customer online ordering platform.

“The Customer Success Team at Syniti played an extremely important role in helping to optimize the configuration of the software to Maui Jim’s specific needs,” Hoffman noted. “The combination of strong software capabilities with caring, and knowledgeable human resources to assist with the implementation and execution was highly beneficial.