Written by Damon Amador
Is it a Person or a Business?
If the name field says “Church” is the record a person or a religious institution?
No customer database is perfect; there will always be records that don’t belong, or were entered incorrectly. In order to identify a person’s ethnicity, we need to first identify that a record is, in fact, a person. A record with the name “Gonzales Auto Center” is not a Hispanic person and won’t respond to your offer in the same way as Juan Gonzales would.
E-Tech looks for words that are unique to businesses. Words and phrases like Automobile, Dental, Academy, and Incorporated are clear indicators that the record is not a person.
But what about when words by themselves won’t help? Church is a fairly common last name in the United States. We wouldn’t want to filter out people with this last name. John Church is a person. However, if the full name of this record is St John Evangelist Church, that’s not a person! We look for added phrasal clues such as “Evangelist Church” so as to not confuse the people named Church with religious institutions.
We use our extensive knowledge of names across many ethnicities to enhance this filtering, making sure people don’t get removed. Words like man, urban, shore, hawks, and gala can point towards business records. However, they are also actually names used by people of various ethnicities, some of them pronounced differently from the English words as you first read them. These intricate distinctions contribute to E-Tech’s market-leading accuracy in multicultural identification.