Ensure a Positive Customer Experience With Accurate Data

Creating a positive customer experience is a top priority for retailers. Not only does it create company advocates, but a positive shopping experience keeps existing customers coming back to buy additional products and services. There are many important aspects of the customer experience, including e-commerce site design and customer service philosophy, but one item that's often overlooked is contact data quality.

Contact data impacts many aspects of the retailer/customer relationship. If that data is inaccurate, future sales could be inhibited. Data quality affects three main areas:

1. The ability to deliver shipments: Without accurate contact data, retailers are unable to deliver orders to customers, creating not only unnecessary customer service calls and shipping costs, but also a poor customer experience.
2. Analytical data: Contact data serves multiple purposes when it comes to analysis. First, it can provide geographical information to help retailers allocate advertising dollars or make decisions on locations of new brick-and-mortar stores. Second, it serves as a unique identifier for removing duplicate data. This helps to develop a singular customer view that allows retailers to household data or prioritize high-value customers. Without accurate data, this analysis is incomplete or even incorrect.
3. Delivery and selection of marketing materials: Coupons, catalogs and other promotions are often sent to encourage purchases. Inaccurate contact information prevents these offers from ever reaching customers or prospects. Marketing dollars spent on such mailings are effectively wasted. In addition, if the analytical data mentioned above is incorrect, customers could receive duplicate marketing offers or be incorrectly targeted due to an incomplete account history.

While it's clear that contact data plays a key role in a variety of functions, is poor data quality really a problem for cross-channel retailers? According to an Experian QAS survey, 97 percent of retailers don't completely trust their contact data quality. So where are data errors coming from?

Data comes from many different places. With the diversification of the retail sector, cross-channel retailers have to be more careful than ever with so many points of customer contact data entry. The worst data often originates from e-commerce sites, where customers enter their own information. Customers are often in a hurry to complete their orders, and can mistype information or forget fields altogether, leaving retailers unable to deliver the order or market to them in the future.

Secondly, errors frequently occur in call centers. When an order is placed, call-center operators can be at a disadvantage because of language barriers or poor connections. Even when call-center representatives ask customers to spell out contact details, errors can still easily occur. This results in poor data quality, and also takes up valuable representative time.

Lastly, errors can occur at the point of sale (POS). More and more retailers are collecting contact information at the POS to enhance marketing efforts and customer loyalty programs. If not done correctly, bad data can filter into these programs and negatively impact marketing campaigns.

So, how do retailers solve these problems? By placing verification tools at each of these points of entry, retailers can not only ensure the accuracy of their data, but also speed up data entry times. Interactive tools prompt users for missing information and ensure that all collected contact data is valid and deliverable, increasing a retailer's opportunities for a sale.

Data quality expert David Loshin of Knowledge Integrity states, “Missing customer information, incorrect location data, errors in demographic values, or missing expectations for inventory and supplier data are common across many organizations. Flagging data errors and applying governed practices in data correction will lift your company above the pack when it comes to increasing revenue.”

With accurate data going into a database, retailers are able to improve their efficiency — and their bottom lines. Customer service representatives reduce checkout times, and communications reach customers without additional back-end work or expense. Over time, these efforts significantly improve the customer experience, increasing retention and upsell opportunities.

Joel Curry is COO of Experian QAS, a contact data management software and services provider. Joel can be reached at joel.curry@qas.com.