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Customer Data -
Are You Neglecting A Key Corporate Asset?
by
Craig Bailey
Is your firm
neglecting a key corporate asset - customer data? Many firms do, and it
costs them dearly. The business impact of this neglect includes, but is
not limited to:
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Operational inefficiencies for all personnel that deal
with customers (Sales/Marketing, Service, Billing,
Credit/Collections, etc.) resulting from difficulties trying to
determine "which" customer record to use when there are multiple
occurrences of a customer's record to choose from.
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Negative customer perception as front-line personnel
fumble around trying to identify the appropriate record, out of
many, that may contain the relevant information about the customer's
profile and interactions with the company.
-
Costs related to sending duplicate materials to the
same party or entity.
-
Costs related to returned mail (materials, shipping
and repeated handling) due to incorrect address information.
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Inability to get an accurate count of the customer
base.
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Inability to perform analysis with regards to customer
acquisition, retention and risk without investing significant time
to massage the data. Examples of "difficult" but important business
questions include:
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Was this
really a new customer or a duplicate of an existing customer?
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Did this
customer stop ordering, or are their orders being booked against
a different / duplicate customer record?
-
Who are the
top revenue generating customers and what percent of revenue do
they represent?
To put things into perspective: What if numerous people had the ability
to add or modify YOUR employee record, in an uncontrolled manner?
Wouldn't that wreak havoc for you and others (payroll, benefits,
security)? To a very large degree, that is how many firms treat their
customer data.
This neglect of customer data often results from a lack of:
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Consistently applied data entry standards
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Controls in terms of who has access to do what
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Conversions of customer data from acquired companies
(compounding the above)
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Overall ownership of customer data and customer data
quality
Now that we have your attention, we'll share strategies that you can
follow to improve customer data quality. We will do this by covering the
following topics:
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Promoting awareness of the problem
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Stopping the bleeding
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Getting well
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Prevention
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Inspection
In the coming editions of our newsletter we will cover each of the above
items.
A question that you might ask: "Is there a light at the end of the
tunnel?" To be clear, customer data may never be 100% clean. Realizing
this, consider pragmatic goals and realize that it is a continuous
journey.
To summarize, increasing the integrity of customer information will
improve the customer experience, internal efficiencies and the ability
to leverage this information to achieve business objectives. An easy ROI
indeed!
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Contents
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About Customer Centricity, Inc.
We strengthen overall company performance through
better service delivery and management.
We boost efficiencies in front-line customer service and technical support
teams, order processing, fulfillment, field service, logistics and other
key operations functions.
In short, we align the resources of your organization to exceed your
customers' expectations in the most effective and efficient manner
possible.
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