Organizations leverage data to enhance their customer experiences. Good quality data is used to guide marketing and sales decisions, help organizations set goals, and control organizational spend. If you don’t use quality data to back your decisions, your customers will know.
SugarCRM recently wrote an eBook that details what Customer Experience (CX) should mean to your organization and how data quality plays a pivotal role in enhancing customer experiences.
Download the eBook: Data Quality—Unlocking Customer Experience’s Secret Weapon
This blog will discuss the main findings from the eBook and address four common challenges caused by poor data management.
The Importance Of Data Quality
Above all businesses should start and end with data. In today’s business environment, every organization (irrespective of its line of operations or business size) is busy identifying and implementing new ways to gain more customer data.
Here are just a few reasons why data collection and maintenance is so important:
- Nearly 30% of sales professionals believe that their customer data is out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate (SugarCRM).
- The average sales rep spends only 54% of their time actually selling while the rest was spent on repetitive, administrative tasks like updating inaccurate data (SugarCRM).
- 53% of fast-growing sales organizations rate themselves as effective users of analytics (McKinsey & Company).
It’s crucial that organizations have accurate insights about their customer’s purchasing patterns, buying behaviour, and preferences. The good news is, you can find data almost anywhere, from social media to google analytics.
The problem isn’t in finding the data… the problem is in keeping the data clean, accurate, and relevant.
Four Common Business Challenges That Stem From Poor Data
Out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate data can lead to a variety of business challenges, including but not limited to:
- Advertising budgets that don’t provide return. If you don’t have accurate and updated information on your customers you will spend your advertising budget with the wrong audience. This leads to delivering the wrong message, in the wrong place.
- Lost sales opportunities. If your sales team doesn’t have the correct data about prospects, they will spend their time trying to close deals they are not likely to win. This takes away time from going after deals that they are likely to win.
- Customer service teams that cannot provide the support customers need. Customers expect you to instantly know information about their relationship with your brand. Some examples include their order history, billing address and preferences. If you don’t have this data about your customers, your agents won’t be able to quickly address customer questions or concerns. You will also face frustrated customers that do not purchase from you again in the future.
- Finance teams that aren’t able to allocate budgets or make financial predictions. If your finance team doesn’t have access to relevant data like sales revenue, marketing ROI, or opex spending, they won’t be able to make strategic decisions about departmental budget allocation. This will also limit what financial predictions they can make that can help with things like securing external funding.
One thing is clear: having quality data enables organizations to provide unmatched customer experiences at every touchpoint in their journey.
Conclusion
In today’s market, you cannot afford to ignore the significance of data quality as far as customer experience (CX) is concerned. For more information on how to use data quality to improve your CX strategy, download SugarCRM’s eBook: Data Quality—Unlocking Customer Experience’s Secret Weapon.
