You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression
The old expression ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’ rings especially true when it comes to customer data. First impressions do count, and initial interactions are crucial to setting the tone for your entire customer experience.
Whilst cleaning up your data might get pushed back to the end of a long to-do list, there can be major consequences of poor-quality data. Here are just a few examples:
- Dear (Deceased)
Welcome emails are important and set the tone. Name mistakes do happen (especially at the local coffee shop), but messy data can impact your business in many ways and arguably none is more damaging than addressing communication to someone who has died. This damages your brand alongside wasting time and money.
Good data must be complete and accurate. By using customer data, you can trust you can remove contacts that are obsolete including inactive, outdated, and duplicate contacts.
- Dear Mr Sarah
Have all fields been filled out fully? If they are left blank or incomplete, this can lead to Mr Sarah or Mrs Robert being contacted by your business. This can create a bad impression towards your sales and marketing teams and negatively impact your company’s relationship with clients and potential customers.
Mistakes in your CRM simply undermine your efforts elsewhere, successful marketing starts with clean data. If you take the time to keep your data clean, you will create a positive impression.
- Wrong D.O.B
If data is inputted in inconsistent ways, or stored in different formats, systems can struggle to recognise items that belong in the same category. Dates of birth are a common stumbling block, European and US-style systems differ, and time-zones wreak havoc on which day a birthday falls.
D.O.B details are collected for both marketing and legal reasons. Whether it is to access a young person’s discount, permission to seek personal data, or another reason, it is essential that all parts of data across your business are consistent and accurate.
- Incorrect phone or email
Email addresses and phone numbers provide the best way to directly communicate with customers, having incorrect details also has knock-on consequences. Inaccurate email addresses will mean that emails get sent to the wrong person or are bounced. High email bounce rates negatively impact your deliverability rate and damage your domain reputation.
Incorrect phone numbers – whether that is through wrong digits or incorrectly formatted numbers – this also negatively impacts communication with customers. Preventing immediate contact and having your sales team wasting valuable time chasing cold leads.
- No SCV (Single Customer View)
If you have two or more records for the same person, it can be difficult to obtain an accurate view of your customer behaviour. Each interaction may be recorded against a different record, so from a sales or marketing perspective it can be hard to see what stage of the sales process you are at, which leads to poor decision-making.
By consolidating every piece of information, you have about a customer in one central location, you have a powerful overview of them, to make accurate and well-informed business decisions.
- Time wasted
Data cleansing is essential because it improves the quality of your data and in doing so allows your team to save time, so they are not wading through outdated documents tracking down records, or remediating data unnecessarily, manually.
Data cleansing leaves you with the highest quality information, so your colleagues or employees can maximise their working hours and productivity levels.
Not sure where to start? Book a DQ Discovery Call
Looking to unlock the full potential of your customer data, but struggling with data quality issues? Our DQ Discovery Call service is here to help! Our team of experts will analyze the root causes of your data quality challenges and provide you with practical solutions to transform your customer data into a powerful tool for success.
