Two common uses for customer information are billing and customer relationship management (CRM). Just as this classification separates the two, so do many businesses. They`re quite happy to tick over billing customers at the right address using the correct account number stating the correct value, but if they call Mr Smith Mrs Smith it`s not going to lead to troop movement.
However, when Mr Smith receives a letter addressed to Mrs Smith propositioning his bank account for an extra few hundred bucks each month, he may be inclined to believe the company cannot effectively service his needs and does not entirely deserve his custom.
One consequence of populating the system with poor data is that companies can spend millions of rands on CRM systems and enjoy little return on investment. Experts suggest that 4% of customer records become obsolete in a single month.
That said, The Data Warehousing Institute surveyed 647 data warehousing and business intelligence professionals, and found that half have no plans to implement an initiative to improve data quality. The institute also found that inaccurate and poor-quality data also costs US-based businesses $611 billion annually in bad mailings and staff overhead. While the figures may change, those businesses with bad customer data in SA will also be losing money because of it.
What you typically find in local organisations is that the CIO, who measures data quality based on billing customers, says there is no data problem, while the marketing director, who is trying to reach existing customers for additional business and new customers, finds the data ineffective and ineffectual.
The great natural chasm in the CRM cornerstone arises from data entry and change. Data capturers work for the CIO. He has no problem with the data since customers pay their bills. Other people in the organisation interact with the data on a daily basis with the capability to change it, such as sales staff, and they report to neither marketing nor IT.
CIO admission
One consequence of populating the system with poor data is that companies can spend millions of rands on CRM systems and enjoy little return on investment.
Julian Field, MD, Centerfield Software.
Fixing the problem requires the CIO to admit that it exists. Then you must either trawl the database to fix what`s broke, which in the case of a large local organisation can contain as many as five million customers and makes the task an impossibly woolly and mammoth one, or find an alternative solution.
Address lists and dictionaries are critical to sifting data in SA, with its cultural and social diversity. For example, on checking multiple data repositories, a company would find that it has multiple instances of a person`s name. You may have Michael Hutton, M Hutton, Mr M Hutton, MJ Hutton, or Michael James Hutton; depending on the division you`re dealing with. CRM operations must get this right. Mrs Hutton may not be partial to being called Mr Hutton when you`re trying to sell her a family development policy or offer her cheaper car insurance because as we all know, women drivers represent a lower risk to the insurance business.
Dictionaries allow businesses to determine gender based on name. Many South African names are unique. Importing a dictionary from the US or Europe to run the data through will probably not be a great idea for the CRM department. The billing department doesn`t much mind, as long as they have your address and your account number.
The good news is that consortiums are integrating their resources to offer customers the best solutions. Companies are pitting their expertise into a consortium pool, giving the customer the best dictionaries, integration skills, product knowledge and scalability options available.
This process becomes particularly crucial to organisations performing market analytics on their data stores and they need to admit the problem and engage the solution or expect a hailstorm of peanuts.
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