The Need For Data Quality And Data Enrichment As A Service In Real-Time
Melissa IN Team | Data Enrichment, Data Quality, India |
Business leaders in every industry understand the importance of customer data. Every time a customer interacts with the brand, their data is absorbed into the system. Leaders of successful businesses also know that it isn’t the quantity of data collected that matters as much as data quality.
This is where the challenge is. Low-quality data can impact everything from customer relationships to decision-making and marketing. The best way to improve data quality is by finding the right tools for data quality and data enrichment services.
The Data Quality Challenge
When you talk of data quality, there are two aspects to be considered. Firstly, companies must ensure that the data entering their system meets high-quality standards. Some of the most common data quality issues take the form of data entry errors. Entering a street name as ‘Main Street’ in one form and ‘Main St.’ in another may seem like a trivial mistake. But, this could lead to the creation of duplicate records.
Similarly, entering an email address in the wrong syntax could increase your bounce rate and affect campaign analytics.
The second aspect of data quality is the rate at which data decays. When customers move to a new home, they don’t always update their address on company databases. Similarly, they may not update their mobile number or when they switch jobs, you may still have their old official email address on file that is no longer valid.
Another situation in which customer data could decay is when city authorities make changes like renaming streets and cities. Customer data is prone to quality issues like this. According to some estimates, customer data can decay by as much as 30% every year.
Data Quality As A Service
Storing outdated customer information isn’t just an unnecessary expense, it also makes companies miss out on opportunities. For example, when a college student moves from dorm accommodation to a rented flat, they probably have a higher income and hence can spend more on themselves. For financial institutions, this may be an opportunity to promote a car loan.
To be able to make such insights, companies must be able to continually verify and validate all incoming data as well as data existing in the system. You can’t rely on customers clicking on a link in your newsletter to prove that the email on record is still being used. Neither can you call each phone number on file to check whether it is valid or not. There’s a high margin of error, it’s time-consuming and expensive and worse, it could downgrade the customer experience.
What you need is a software solution that offers data verification in real-time. It should be able to compare the data in your records with data from reliable third-party databases to assess its accuracy and validity. This check must be conducted in the background without expecting any additional customer inputs.
Validation Isn’t Enough
Apart from accuracy and validity, there’s also the issue of non-standardized formatting and incomplete data that needs to be addressed. When a customer enters their name as ‘John Smith’ on one form and ‘John A. Smith’ on another, the system creates two records. Similarly, phone numbers may be considered incomplete without an area code.
This is where data enrichment comes in. While the data is being validated, you should also be able to append information from internal and external sources to create a more complete 360-degree view of the customer.
For example, adding data from the app about the customer’s behavioral pattern helps identify areas of interest for target marketing. Similarly, correlating addresses with geocodes can improve demographic grouping for deliveries as well as when you need to decide on a new store location. In this way, enriching data uncovers a wealth of information that can be used to improve customer satisfaction rates.
Data Enrichment As A Service
Data Enrichment as a Service simplifies and quickens the process of appending data from multiple sources. It provides access to the specific attributes required by the company and is thus simpler to implement. Rather than simply store all the data available about a customer, it limits the personally identifiable information stored in databases to only that which is relevant and hence protects customer data to a certain extent.
Finding The Right Data Quality And Data Enrichment As A Service
When you’re choosing a service-based model for data quality and enrichment purposes, you must ensure a few things. Firstly, they must be able to access reliable domestic and international third-party databases for data verification. Secondly, they must be able to enhance different kinds of data – address changes, email and phone number formatting, demographics, IP location, etc. And lastly, they must be flexible and easy to integrate with your existing systems and database.