Melissa Nazar

Believe it or not, the holiday season is upon us. Both grandmothers and companies alike are thinking about shipping goods and holiday cards through the mail—a fact that likely makes your local postal worker fall into a cold sweat.

The volume of mail during the holidays and throughout the year has the USPS® looking for help. This assistance comes from organizations that are committed to making their addresses make sense. CASSTM certification is an example of this.  

Football season is in full swing. If you’re like me, you’re working to perfect your fantasy football line up. And if you’re a true fantasy football guru, you know all too well that a  good offense will score you many more points that a strong defense—that’s why you’ll find benches stacked with wide receivers and quarterbacks rather than defensive lines.

The same holds true when you look at data quality strategy. Yes, I did make a football/data quality analogy—tis the season. Being on the offensive with your data quality will put you in a stronger position than constantly investing in your defensive line.

What’s top of mind for today’s retailers? The EDQ crew is back from a trip to Philadelphia for this year’s Shop.org conference, the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) event specifically for digital and multichannel retailers. The floor was busy with conversation, but so was the social sphere: the conference Twitter hashtag #shoporg15 revealed a few common themes and insights on the mind of modern digital retailers today.

To make best use of your data asset across your organization, it is essential to have a solid data quality framework to ensure that your data is accurate and complete. But all data quality management models are not created equal: different organizations have different levels of data quality maturity, depending on organizational priorities and needs.

I’m just getting back from a pretty amazing conference: MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, held this week at the [ridiculously gorgeous] Stein Erickson Lodge in Park City, Utah. It was a great chance to get to know some of the most innovative thinkers in the email marketing world, and truly nerd out over all things email. The fabulous mountain views and plentiful skiing opportunities didn’t hurt either.

From hearing how a 100+ year old organization completely transformed its digital presence to understanding how exactly to market bacon cheeseburgers via email, there were a number of experts in the email space sharing insights to learn from, and lots to take away. I wanted to share the top three things I took home with me from Utah (minus a few snowboarding-induced bruises):

In our new video series “What’s up Wednesday,” we’ll give you a quick video overview of a concept that we often get questions about at Experian Data Quality.

What’s up with…invalid email addresses? Have you ever thought about how many email addresses you collect annually? Invalid email addresses could be costing you big bucks.

Halloween: A time of tricks, treats and non-stop horror flicks playing on television. I don’t consider myself a scary movie aficionado by any means, but I've watched enough of these films to learn certain facts: don’t ever investigate scary noises alone, kids who see ghosts should be taken seriously and there is never cell phone service during paranormal events.

As a marketer, this got me thinking: horror movies are ripe with certain clichés storylines, just like certain scary themes that seem to recur for marketers. I’m talking about the unexpected, fear-inducing issues that can pop up and derail email marketing efforts, monsters living in your email list that quickly drive your engagement rates and other metrics into the ground.

Having nightmares yet? Check out my list of the most common scary stories we see related to email marketing.

The first two stages of data quality boot camp helped teach you how to collect better contact data on your website and in call centers, but your work isn't over yet! There are many more places where you can collect customer information, including the good old fashioned in-person experience.

Brick-and-mortar woes

Thirty-nine percent of organizations collect customer contact data at physical locations. Data is typically collected by an employee at the point of sale, but can also be entered into a kiosk by customers. In either case, human error is the number one culprit of bad contact data being collected.

In our first blog post in this three-part series, we discussed how you can take the first steps in your data quality boot camp program: tackling bad data collected through your website. But how do you manage issues within other channels? Here we’ll focus on managing data quality in your call centers.

Calling out call centers

No matter what type of organization or industry you’re in, at some point, a customer may need to reach out to a call center. But because of disparate systems, a customer can have an entirely different experience with your company on a website vs. when they call you.

Did you know that on average, U.S. companies are collecting data from customers in more than three different channels? With all that data coming in from different places in different formats, it’s no surprise that 85 percent of U.S. companies believe their bottom line is affected by data issues.

Kicking your data into shape

Our databases are hiding a dirty secret—bad data. In this three-part blog series, we will explore three channels where bad data is collected and share how you can kick your data quality strategy into shape.