What have tins and labels got to do with data? Think of the tin as your organisation and the label as the way people see it or how they think of you. From inside the tin, everything seems fine because you can’t actually see the label on the outside and you’re not aware of whether there’s anything wrong with it.
Recognising a Bad Data Label
If a member of the public phoned to complain that the item they ordered had gone all round the houses before it arrived a week late, someone whose ears had been bent might let you know in no uncertain terms. If you knew that one of your former customers had received four copies of your last direct mail campaign, you might have an inkling about your label. Keep an eye on the social networking sites. These sorts of things get around very quickly.
When you send out marketing messages which are inaccurate, incomplete or duplicated, the label on the tin is severely tarnished. Why would that happen? There’s a problem with your data quality and you almost certainly have bad data.
Achieving a Quality Data Label
It’s a good idea to get your data checked. If you find you have less than clean data, what you need to do is change the way the contents of the tin are communicated by setting up master data management and doing some data scrubbing.
Establish rules for the way it is entered or merged and use some of our data quality tools to help. A small investment in deduplication software, address verification software, fuzzy matching software will be recouped over and over again.
If you want a sparkling label on your tin, your marketers need the best help they can get from your data. Put our data cleansing software to work automatically or on a regular basis for data that looks after the outside of your tin – your profile – as well as its contents.
