Published on May 28th, 2017 | by Guest

Is incorrect data affecting your customer relationships?

Customer information comes from various touch points such as referrals, websites, relationships and social websites. This data turns out to be the daily bread and butter for the users. However, if not used properly, data can be contaminated similar to real blood ultimately leaving your organization suffer.

Good data has never been more critical to a business’ operations. It is the key to capture & keep customer details and identify prospects for future growth. But, with the influx of channels in this digital age – from websites to social media, on top of the traditional direct mail and contact centres – businesses are now challenged more than ever to keep track of data, and prevent that good data from going bad.

No matter how sophisticated your customer relationship management (CRM) systems are, if there is inaccurate or duplicate data in the system, it is guaranteed to uproot that entire process.

Inaccurate data is prevalent

Inaccurate customer data probably means the data that have been duplicated across multiple departments for various actions. Maybe the data is incomplete, mislabelled or wrong. For example, credit card industry. How many times the same company does approached you offering credit card services? Or in a reverse scenario if you approach a customer helpline, how many times do you have to repeat the same query to different customer care representatives? All these scenarios proves that the customer data is inaccurate in some way. Another issue related with “Inaccurate Data” is typos and syntax errors. This can demolish client-company relationships as well as can result in loss of time, efforts and profits for your organization.

Is your data good or bad?

The issue with inaccurate data is that it go undiscovered for such a long period that the damage can affect organization’s sales and customer relationships. It is for sure that if you have data, you will definitely have bad data too. The causes behind this can be mislabelled fields, incorrect entries by customers, inability to understand specific syntax entries. The result of having bad data can lead to poor customer experiences that in turn will result in loss of confidence and loyalty towards your organization.

Data filtration is next to good customer relationships

Many organizations still sort the customer data manually to figure out common mistakes and errors in the data. However, this procedure is time consuming, expensive and again it may lead to few additional errors due to human intervention. Fortunately, various tools are available to help organizations to filter their data and create a comprehensive view of customer data across the teams and organizations. The available tools can help organizations to store more consistent data and share across all departments. Once you have clean data, your sales team and customer service agents’ responsiveness increases, which in turn help you to gain customer confidence and loyalty.

3 Ways of maximizing your customer relationship effectiveness:

Obscure 360-Degree view of your customer

Incomplete, duplicate information, and even false information, are all common issues that organizations face while collecting customer data. Such bad data results in a fragmented view of a business’ customers, which in turn, can result in a poor experience on the customer’s end.

With the right data quality and engagement solutions, a clean, enriched and ultimately complete view of your customer data can thoroughly change your organization’s ability to understand prospects and customers, and enable you to be more agile and responsive in your customer approach.

Uplift your brand reputation

A comprehensive customer view goes hand-in-hand with a better brand reputation. A company spends its extensive time and money to build a respectable reputation. However, a single bad customer experience resulting from incorrect data can hamper a company’s reputation.

By implementing solutions to create a more accurate, comprehensive view of customers, sales and marketing teams will be empowered to deliver a better customer experience that will continue to build a strong brand reputation with both customers and prospects, and also maximize their opportunities for growth.

Boost Cross-Selling

If the opted CRM and customer engagement solutions are not effective, different areas of an organization can fall into a pattern of operating independently without realizing the situation. These organizational and technical factors can wreak havoc on the customer journey, especially when the bad data goes unnoticed and is being used in different teams of the organization.

Proper planning and unified efforts by sales and marketing teams can help organization in collaborative output. This can be implemented by creating one big picture of each and every customer. That opens up the door for greater cross-selling and upselling opportunities throughout the organization, which can mean good news for the company’s growth and bottom line.

About the Author:

Mugdhita Chaphekar is a Web Content Writer with more than 2 years of experience in writing several kinds of content. She has the passion for web and loves offering assistance and inspiration wherever possible. She works for Sage software Solutions Pvt Ltd. She has an in-depth knowledge of technology combined with content writing experience and is willing to explore new technologies.

Tags: affecting, customer, data, incorrect, relationships