Don't get spooked by bad data

“Boo!” Is that a ghost or ghoul? No—it’s something much spookier: bad customer contact data. Did you know that less than half of retailers trust their data to make important business decisions? In fact, 57 percent of retailers say that they rely on educated guesses or gut feelings to make decisions based on their data. While blood and guts may have a place in horror movies, gut feelings are simply not enough to go on for important business decisions. Accurate, reliable data to drive decision-making is a far stronger retail strategy.

Villains constantly work to undermine the hero in your favorite books and movies, but inaccurate data should not be undermining your success. And yet, 54 percent of retailers agree that inaccurate data is undermining their ability to provide excellent customer experience. The fact that more than half of all retailers agree that inaccurate data is hindering customer service is a bit hair-raising, isn’t it? In today’s highly competitive retail landscape, great customer experience is critical to maintaining loyalty and growing your business.

Poor decisions made on outdated, inaccurate data can spoil your success at the most critical time of the year: the holiday season. But don’t let bad data scare you—Experian Data Quality can help you take control of your data. Instead of allowing data quality issues to skulk in the shadows, it’s time to bring them to light. Our tools can help you to validate, clean, profile, and monitor the information that you base critical decisions off of. Clean, accurate contact data is foundational to understanding who your customers are and to being able to effectively communicate with them.

While the holidays are right around the corner, and many of you are ready to lock your systems until after the new year, a batch list cleanse is a quick and easy way to rid your customer data of decayed information. Cleaning your email, address, and phone contact data helps you ensure that you are reaching as many customers as possible with your holiday marketing. With the popularity of online shopping (and especially when it comes to those last-minute shoppers), you want to be sure that each final purchase reaches its intended recipient in time for the holiday. A late or unfulfilled delivery due to an incorrect or incomplete address can spell disaster for the gift giver and also for your business.

In our latest infographic, “Don’t let bad data haunt your holidays,” we explore more spine-chilling statistics that make it clear that when it comes to quality data to inform decisions, some retailers are really in trouble.

Check it out