Data quality revolves mainly around three questions: who is my customer, where does my customer live, and how do I reach my customer? In a series of three short blog posts we’re sharing with you, we’ll focus each time on one question that you should be able to answer based on the customer data in your database. In this first part, that question is: “Who is my customer?”
As a company, you want to communicate with customers in a relevant way and ensure an optimal customer experience. That means, among other things, making sure customers receive letters with the correct salutation and name, that they get email offers that fit their needs, and that they don’t see social media ads for products or services they already buy from you. The foundation of relevant communication is maximizing the quality of your customer data. Based on that, you can create a solid 360-degree customer view. One tool to assess the quality of your customer data is the ACCU principle.
- Accurate – is your customer data not outdated?
- Complete – is all relevant customer data present?
- Correct – are the records in your database accurate?
- Unique – does each customer appear only once?
Start with the Name
The importance of optimal customer data for customer communication is clear. But recognizing a customer can also be challenging. Customer data is often spread across multiple departments, and each department has its own challenges. For example, finance wants to ensure it has the right information about a customer to prevent fraud, while customer service would like to have the complete customer history available in no time so they can provide the best possible support.
It goes without saying that the combination of last name and first name (or initials) is the most important information for recognizing a customer. Still, our data quality benchmark shows that in 2.1% of cases something is wrong with the last name or it’s simply missing. That may seem small. But if you have a database of 500,000 customers, that means 10,500 customers won’t see their last name or will spot an error in it in every form of customer communication.
360-Degree Customer View
To make sure you know you’re communicating with the right person, you need more than initials and a last name. For example, gender, a date of birth, and an address. Our benchmark analysis shows that the date of birth is present for only 65 percent of customers in an average customer database. Another option is to include the address (which we’ll dive into in a next article), but that too is often unknown or not up to date.
When you have a customer’s name, gender, and date of birth, that’s the start of your 360-degree customer view. With this, you can, for example, ensure that customers who previously appeared twice in the database are now merged. This gives you a more complete picture, and an RFM analysis will better indicate which customers are the most valuable.
Want to know more about data quality? We would be happy to tell you more.