Right about now a lot of retailers are looking back at the holiday season trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. For a lot of them that's going to be hard to do because the performance benchmarks between this year and last year are so far out of whack. The simple fact is that most folks did not have as much money to spend this year, so that circumstance had an adverse effect on how they might respond to any given offer.

That said, a lot of retailers are reporting that their traditional catalog business did better than expected, which many of them attribute to the simple fact that there are too many offers cluttering potential customers' online inbox. The printed catalog, by contrast, is more expensive to produce and mail, but seems to do a better job of capturing a customer's attention once it gets into the right hands.

The problem is that there are still a lot of inefficiencies in the printed catalog business, especially when it comes to sending multiple catalogs to the same customer because the database of names that the company is using is not all that clean. As a result, slight variations in a name or address can result n two or even three of the same catalogs being sent to the same customer.

Helping retailers clean up their customer databases is the goal of a Web service from a company called Melissa Data, which provides an online service that helps companies verify names and addresses. On the face of it, Melissa Data provides a relatively simple service that leverages data services provided by the United States Post Office and other sources to verify names and addresses. It then applies a filter to that data using an algorithm based on some proprietary Fuzzy Logic to identify duplicate names and addresses as well as finding the names of people who no longer live at a particular address. The results of all that processing can then be slipstreamed back into any enterprise application that a customer is using to manage the mailing process via a documented API that Melissa Data uses to expose its online service.

The service, which starts as low a $1,000 per year, can basically pay for itself by reducing the amount of undelivered mail that companies send out. The U. S. Post Office provides a discount based on the volume of mail delivered for each customer. But if the customer winds up sending out a lot of mail that is undelivered, the costs can go up. Right now, some estimates say the U.S. Post Office winds up billing customers for about $2 billion worth of undelivered mail a year.

Beyond the mailing costs, retailers should also expected to benefit from having to produce fewer catalogs and, of course, fewer catalogs means less pressure on recycling this time of year.

There are a lot more inefficiency in the retail business than just the catalog segment. But most of the things that would need to be done to fix them would require significant changes to existing business processes. The nice thing about the Melissa Data offering is that as a service it basically can be folded into any existing business process with a minimal amount of disruption. Solutions like that to any number of business challenges, unfortunately, are still too far and in between.