Your CRM is undeniably a valuable asset to your company however, what happens when the data inside this expensive investment isn’t cared for?
Forbes reported 84% of CEO’s are concerned about the quality of the data that they are basing business decisions on. With a suspected $3.1 trillion annually lost in the US alone due to poor data quality it’s no wonder.
High quality data decreases the risk of poor business decisions and enhances confidence in your data, but what does it cost you to not maintain your data and let it decay?
Whilst there’s obvious costs that come with low quality customer data such as paying extra for CRM storage containing dead, duplicated or incorrectly formatted data. There’s also many hidden risks that initially, you may not even see.
The hidden costs of poor-quality Customer Data
Campaigns to obsolete customer data
The accuracy and validity of customer data is essential for your marketing team to ensure their work is optimised for best results. When they’ve spent days or even months creating campaigns it can be incredibly disheartening to see email bounce backs and unopened mail. It doesn’t matter how good a campaign is, if you’re reaching out to outdated data your reports will be inaccurate and your ROI will suffer.
Wasting time on inaccurate leads
Your sales team rely on accurate customer data to ensure they’re well informed on potential prospects and can deliver their best sales pitch. If they’re using incomplete data, they miss valuable opportunities. Whilst they’re calling an old phone number, they could have been emailing the ideal potential customer. Wasting time on dead leads will slow down your sales pipeline in turn demotivating your sales team.
Decline in brand reputation
Brand reputation is invaluable, but if you’re sending multiple catalogues to people or spelling their name wrong in an email it can quickly impact how your business is perceived. Your company having negative connotations connected to it affects the value of your business and can have disastrous results like deterring potential new customers.
Loss of repeat service
PWC reported in a recent study 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. Many of these mistakes are easily preventable. Having a single customer view so you can see all the information about a customer in one place is a simple solution. It will ensure your customers only receive information they want and removes risks like duplicate mail to the same person.
How to eliminate the risk of these hidden costs
The cost of low quality customer data may be high, but the good news is it’s easily remediated. Your CRM is expensive and investing in CRM deduplication software is a good idea. Solutions that are easy to install, configure and highlight the dependencies in your data sets are far more readily available, and provide you duplicate free and correctly formatted customer data. Check out our solutions here.
If you’re only just becoming aware of your CRM data quality challenges and don’t know where to begin in remedying the issues our DQ Discovery Call is a great place to start. Designed to surface Data Quality issues within your CRM, this is ideal if you know your customer data is no longer fit for business use, but aren’t quite sure where to kick off the fixing process.
