Data quality helps you, among other things, to communicate more relevantly and actually reach your customers. Many people know this. But how do you approach this? When it comes to data quality, it’s good to keep the following three questions in mind: who is my customer, where does my customer live, and how do I reach my customer? In a series of three blogs, each time a question is central that you should be able to answer based on the customer data in your database. In this second part, that question is ‘where does my customer live?’.
‘Who is my customer?’ was the main question of thefirst blog. You answer this question by knowing a customer’s name, gender, and age. This is the beginning of your 360-degree customer view and ensures that you can communicate more targeted and relevant. But also that you can recognize a customer. This prevents fraud, abuse, and identity confusion. Recognizing a customer well works best if you can combine personal information with address data. This works even better if the customer has created an online account and logs in through that account. There’s no better recognition than that. The only problem with this is that many customers don’t do this or haven’t done it (yet). After all, there are several John Smiths, and there are plenty of Mary Johnsons around in the country. But a customer’s address details tell us much more. More on this later.
In the first blog, we already referred to our data quality benchmark. There we see that in 9% of cases, the residential address in the database doesn’t exist, and that 13% of customers in a database have since moved. Added together, almost 1 in 4 customers is thus not reachable at the address available in the database. For a database with 500,000 customers, this means 110,000 customers cannot receive letters, invoices, policies or contracts, no direct marketing actions, no relationship magazines, and no nice invitation to a fun event. For confidential mail items, there is actually also a data breach. And starting a collection process also becomes difficult without an address. But these aren’t even the main disadvantages, unlike the risks of identity fraud. And that problem is quickly growing, especially because e-commerce has taken such a big flight. It’s happening more and more often and the costs are often incalculable. And this no longer applies only to webshops, but to every company.
The Combination of Personal and Address Information is Worth Gold
Besides reaching and recognizing customers, much more is possible with the combination of personal data and address. Because one of those interesting possibilities that remain unused is profiling customers. With the combination of address and person, you are much better able to realize that 360-degree customer view, because it gives you insight into which city a customer lives and even more specifically in which neighborhood, street, and at which address. Using national segmentation data such as GeoMarketProfile, you are then even better able to get information about all customers regarding, for example, the living environment, housing (for example, the property value), and the type of household. Furthermore, using GeoTypes, you can segment your customer portfolio into different lifestyle segments, so that you immediately get answers to questions such as which customer segments are under- or overrepresented. This way, you can campaign much more targeted with a message, tone-of-voice, images, and offer that fits the customer in the respective segment. But that’s not all. It also gives you tools to qualify potential new customers and you can map the market potential to determine, for example, where best to open a new branch.
‘The golden combination of personal information and address data’ is the title of this blog. You answer this question by knowing the address and postal code. This is the second, most important step towards working towards a 360-degree customer view. With the correct address, your Direct marketing is more effective and important customer communication by mail always arrives. Moreover, the address gives you access to a wealth of information, but more importantly: it gives you the ability to segment and profile. You communicate more relevantly, ensure better conversion, and, very importantly, you are able to recognize your customers.
In addition, organizations even have the obligation to keep their customer data up-to-date. The GDPR specifies quite specifically what organizations must do to achieve the quality of customer data: “Personal data must (…) be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay.”
Want to know more about data quality? Then also read the first blogof this series or check our website for more background information. We’re happy to help you further!