Blog: Customer Data Quality

A few nights ago I finally got a chance to watch the Facebook Obsession, which aired on CNBC a while ago, and had been taking up space on my DVR ever since.  Because of my job and because of the kind of software and services my company sells, I’d been aware of the importance of social networks for some time, but I wanted to see a mass media take on it.  It was well done, but it really didn’t tell me anything new: just about every sentient being with access to the Internet interacts socially.

A few years ago, I bought a new house. I wasn’t moving across country, not even across county, just moving into a new house in a different section of town.   Naturally enough, I wanted to take my phone number with me, which shouldn’t really have been that big of a deal.  Except that while my phone provider had a fairly accurate view of me in their CRM system, once they had to switch me over to the folks who would actually do the work and switch my home phone to the new address, they had no idea of who I was. The systems were unconnected, and the data representing me in their systems were different.

This week, our panel of industry experts dives into data and analytics – identifying ways you can improve communications and strengthen relationships with existing customers. 

I was at a party over the holidays, on Christmas Eve actually, and the kids had my neighbor’s laptop open all night, busily tracking Santa Claus’ progress delivering toys all over the world.  And my neighbors were pretty excited about it, pretty geeked up about how cool it was that NORAD would do something like that for kids. Meanwhile, I was thinking that what these kids were really doing was using all the available data they had to put some transparency on their supply chain and how, in fact, their supplier (Santa) was using geospatial data to achieve just in time delivery.

Here’s something that should come as no surprise to business people: the United States Postal Service estimates that more than 23% of customer records include an address error.  This, of course, annoys consumers - and, as we all know, it annoys and frustrates businesses even more.

If you haven’t looked into what you can do with GIS lately, you may be surprised.  My colleague Lamont Norman likes to say that we can “do GIS to people and they don’t even know it.”  In less Orwellian words, it means we can now provide GIS without the map, because what’s really important in some areas of business is the geocode of an address. Geocoding is the process of converting data into geographic coordinates.  At Pitney Bowes Software, we can also use this to pinpoint locations and calculate key relationships between data and location in one simple step.

Being truly customer-centric requires “always-on marketing” – every interaction, every facet of the business needs to be sensitive to and honed in customer preferences and needs. Instead of just marketing to customers, businesses that are most successful today are working with customers.

While the telecommunications industry has been the source of many innovations regarding information theory and managing the level of quality for data exchange, the same industry continues to be plagued by negative impacts related to data flaws. Incomplete records and variations in customer and location data are just the tip of the iceberg - all aspects of corporate value are affected by poor data quality, impairing revenue growth, increasing costs, while increasing risks associated with leakage, fraud, and regulatory noncompliance.
 

Hurricane Irene just passed through leaving a wake of death, debris, power outages, flooding and more.   Good data, modeling, decision-making and communications kept a terrible event from being more devastating. It reminds us, thought, that businesses make big decisions and issue important communications based on bad data and faulty models – putting themselves in harm’s way all the time.

When it came to Irene, the weather gurus sliced and diced their data; enabling government officials to prepare. They crafted and delivered communications.  They deployed resources to ensure their messages were heard where and when they needed to be. As a result, folks really knew whether they’d be on Irene’s path and how they should prepare.  But what would’ve happened if the data that was used to drive the models was wrong? 

Basing business decisions and communications on bad data carries substantial risks to business performance and shareholder value.  A major bad decision could be the hurricane that blindsides an institution.  An unending string of irrelevant, incorrect or redundant communications add up in wasted effort, eroded customer satisfaction and loyalty, opt-outs, and a host of other corrosive costs.