How to stop data quality from undermining your customer experience

If you sit within the customer experience or marketing arm of your organization, it’s likely the current crisis is prompting asks to reduce spend, streamline operations for cost savings and efficiency, and strategize new campaigns to address changing consumer behaviors. And simply put: In times of uncertainty for your consumers, brands that put customer trust and needs first will be the ones to course-correct downward-trending sales.

But with nearly one-third of customer and prospect data believed to be inaccurate, delivering personalized product offerings and critical consumer goods can be a hurdle. We’re here to help you with a strategy for quickly addressing growing volumes of inaccurate data so you can meet the pressing real-time needs of your customers.

Steps you can take to deliver on customer experience—and fix bad data.

1. Diagnose your data quality issues.
Bad data leads to wasted time, increased costs, weaker decision-making, and it can further amplify downward sales, especially in times of crisis. To turn this ship around and to improve your data quality for personalized customer solutions and marketing, quantify the time, resources, and costs spent on remediating bad data and document how bad data is impeding your ability to deliver on real-time customer needs. What’s the opportunity cost ahead if you can mitigate these issues?

“Data offers today’s marketers an extraordinary advantage and is key for improving customer understanding and engagement,” said Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution in a press release. “But data is only as valuable as the insights it produces, the actions it influences, and the results it fosters. Without the ability to ensure data integrity, marketers are relinquishing their most powerful tool—and a massive competitive advantage.”

Understanding the associated risk and opportunity costs will help you devise a plan for reducing poor-quality data and where to prioritize creating efficiencies, both in the immediate future and long-term.

2. Invest in a self-service data quality solution.
Remediating poor-quality data takes time, and as you’re looking to create efficiencies and quickly deliver customer solutions, time and ROI is of the essence. However, it’s likely bad data is hurting ROI and your ability to leverage artificial intelligence or prepare data for analytics. Our research shows 78 percent of organizations report data debt, or the accumulated cost of suboptimal governance of data, as a moderate or significant problem, and more than one-third of businesses aren’t able to get value from new technology.

Start with streamlining your approach to address your data quality issues so you can improve your insights and quickly deliver on evolving consumer needs. Investing in a self-service data quality and enrichment solution can help accelerate ROI and quickly empower your remote team with a trusted view of customers.

With profiling and enrichment capabilities, you’re able to understand the scope of your data quality issues in real time and leverage machine-learning capabilities. This way, you can automate rules and workflows to clean, standardize, and enrich data, all while saving you time and creating efficiency. This investment will be critical to efficiently managing data volume, quality, and accuracy, empowering you to fully leverage your consumer insights.

3. Democratize secure access to trusted data.
A decentralized customer data infrastructure makes it difficult for your new remote workforce to deliver on KPIs. Data silos create challenges not only for getting a clear view of your records but also for collaboration in tackling data quality issues, which is really an organization-wide issue. An investment in a data quality solution helps you quickly empower your new remote workforce with access to trusted customer data.

When assessing a data quality vendor, look for a user-friendly platform with secure and dedicated spaces for collaboration so you can provide both tech users and the decision-makers on the front line of your customer experience and marketing efforts with real-time access to trusted data. A complete view of your customers will give your team the context they need to better serve customers quickly during times of crisis.

In the current climate, access to quality, complete, and accurate data is the only way to show you really know and care about your customers. It’s mission critical for your organization to make every dollar count, starting with ensuring bad data doesn’t lead to wasted media spend, inaccurate targeting, and lost customers and revenue. An investment in data quality is an investment in customer trust and needs—and your bottom line and future.

Need helping making the business case for data quality at your organization? We can help with that.

Learn more