The Value of Clean Customer Data
Few things are as valuable to a company as their customers’ data.
Using collected customer data, companies can try out all kinds of strategies to increase revenue. Companies can also use that customer data to tailor specific approaches for each client to ensure that the working relationship continues for many years to come.
The companies that also take care of customer data and use that particular resource wisely will put themselves in terrific positions for continued growth.
After years and even decades of dealing with customers from all walks of life, you will likely amass an impressive collection of their data housed within a humongous database. It’s great that you have all that data available, but can you be sure that everything there is still accurate?
You can only get the most out of customer data if it’s up to date. This is why it’s important for companies to partake in some data cleaning every now and then.
What Is Data Cleansing?
Before discussing why having clean customer data is so important, it helps to know what data cleansing actually is.
To put it simply, data cleaning is a process that focuses on purging incorrect pieces of information from a database. The bit of data can be incorrect because it’s incomplete, because it was not properly encoded the first time around, or simply because it’s inaccurate.
Crucially, data cleaning is not just about erasing erroneous entries in the database. During the data cleaning process, entries can be corrected for spelling, formatting, and a variety of other issues. Data cleansing may also involve optimizing a certain database so that it becomes easier to access.
Given all the tasks involved in data cleansing, you can even think of it as a useful professional development resource that can help your employees become more fluent in technical tasks.
Data cleansing can be done in a variety of ways.
It can be done through the use of multiple spreadsheets or through certain functions. If your business is making use of CRM software, there are programs that can also be used for cleaning up customer data more efficiently.
Gartner MDM analysis may help you figure out which type of data cleansing method you need to employ. However, there are also other factors to consider such as the size of your customer database.
Why Is Having Clean Customer Data Important?
You probably won’t be able to fully appreciate the importance of having clean customer data until you’ve dealt with the ill effects of having incorrect customer data.
If your employees have to constantly double check entries and accounts because they can’t rely 100 percent on the customer data in front of them, that’s going to have a huge impact on your business.
Think of how much time is wasted regularly on your employees having to re-check the database whenever they are retrieving information from it. That’s time that they can put to use in more productive ways.
Having clean customer data will also help improve your retention rates. By allowing incorrect data to remain in your database, you could be needlessly risking the loss of customers. If you aren’t regularly checking to see if phone numbers and email addresses are still accurate, you may lose contact with a previous customer and all the future business they could have provided.
Clean customer data will also help bring in new clients to your business. If you’re using CRM software to handle your data, you should be able to form profiles of your customers and see why they have chosen to engage with your business. Using that information, you can then come up with additional marketing strategies that are designed to land similar prospects.
The information contained within your database is only useful if it’s accurate. You can’t allow such an important resource to lose its value over time because you didn’t maintain it properly. Regular data cleansing should keep your customer database in prime condition and your bottom line will be thankful for it.
Author Bio: Douglas Pitassi is small business blogger and freelance writer.