Fairytale Brownies Bakes in Experian QAS to Help Customers Live Happily Ever After

Market Wire, June, 2008

Experian QAS, a part of Experian ® (LSE: EXPN) specializing in customer data quality software and services, today announced that Fairytale Brownies, a $10M multichannel retailer shipping more than 200,000 orders annually and long time Experian QAS customer, has achieved significant cost savings while improving customer service by using Experian QAS data quality solutions. The company has saved $30,000 annually in address correction fees and $100,000 in unnecessary shipping expenses.

Founded in 1992, Fairytale Brownies began with a 49-year-old secret family recipe and a dream to spread joy to the world through gourmet chocolate brownies backed with extraordinary customer service. As its retail operations grew from coffee houses to catalogs, the company increasingly incurred costs when customers provided incomplete shipping addresses. Since choosing to work with Experian QAS in 2004 to prevent these costs and improve its customers' purchasing experience, Fairytale Brownies and data quality solutions from Experian QAS have helped more than 800,000 gifts reach their destination. With addresses corrected before packages ship, Fairytale Brownies has reduced the amount of time it takes to get the gift of chocolate to its customers, translating to an improved customer experience and helping the company to become a three-time BizRate Circle of Excellence Gold Honoree .

"We are in the gift-giving business where timeliness is critical and address errors very quickly translate into lost revenue and unhappy customers," said David Kravetz, co-founder of Fairytale Brownies. "Thanks to Experian QAS verifying our address data during every point across our business we are seeing a dramatic decline in the number of address errors and the fees associated with them. At the same time, we are experiencing improved customer satisfaction and an overall more effective ordering process."

Fairytale Brownies initially tried to develop its own solution to the problem of incorrect address entries, but over time this solution proved insufficient. After extensive market research, the company turned to QAS Pro to assist their call center and implemented the product after several months of rigorous testing. Fairytale Brownies recorded an immediate decline in the number of bad addresses it received though its call center, but felt the number of bad addresses taken via their Website was still unacceptably high. To resolve this challenge the company added QAS Pro Web and, later on, selected QAS Batch to handle large corporate gift orders.

"Fairytale Brownies is an ideal example of how Experian QAS solutions quickly have a direct impact on a company's bottom line while improving the customer experience," said Joel Curry, chief operating officer, Experian QAS. "Our entire suite of data quality solutions can meet one specific need or meet all the needs of an entire organization. Fairytale Brownies has proven that with the QAS suite of products, you can't stop at just one."

The Experian QAS product portfolio includes:

--  QAS Pro for point-of-entry validation, cleansing and standardization
    of important contact information such as name and address.
--  QAS Pro Web for address validation on web sites and intranets.
--  QAS Batch for cleansing, completing and verifying addresses in
    existing customer databases.
--  QAS matchIT for de-duplicating addresses in existing customer
    databases and mailing lists or at point-of-entry.
--  QAS Names to match a person with an address and spell a name correctly
    at point of entry into most CRM and customer database applications.
    

About Experian QAS

Experian QAS is an address data quality software pioneer. The company's products capture, validate, cleanse, standardize and enrich customer contact information. Experian QAS provides solutions to more than 10,000 customers worldwide in retail, education, healthcare, insurance, finance, government and other sectors. The company was established in 1990 and has offices throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit http://www.qas.com .

The word "Experian" is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries and is owned by Experian Ltd. and/or its associated companies.

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Contacts: Chas Kielt Senior Director of Marketing Experian QAS (888) 322-6201 us.press@qas.com Rick Sheehy Emerge PR (617) 729-3190 rsheehy@emergepr.com