HotData To Offer Data-Cleansing Service

HotData Inc. will introduce a service Monday that will helpbusinesses clean up customer data and enhance it with information such as demographics and business profiles. The vendor's HotData service will "scrub" data to fix errors such as misspelled names, duplicate names, incorrect addresses, or missing phone or fax numbers. It will also add customer information from more than a dozen sources, such as Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and the U.S. Postal Service.

Such information has been available for large companies, HotData says, but was out of the reach of small businesses. HotData offers those capabilities in a low-cost monthly service that doesn't require them to build databases that hold information from each data provider. "They don't have to have multiple relationships. They just have to have one with us," says Johnny Anderson, HotData's president and CEO.

The service, which starts at $20 per month for databases with fewer than 1,000 contact records, can load information directly into the business' chosen contact-management or customer-relationship management package. HotData has completed a plug-in for Symantec Act! 4.0 to make such integration possible, and will ready plug-ins for other products.