How evolving data quality technology is improving profit margins
Today, many businesses are finding it harder to turn a profit. They face persistent inflation that’s driving up operating costs. Then there’s intensifying competition putting pressure on pricing, stricter industry-wide regulations to comply with, alongside growing global tariffs, and a rapidly evolving technology-driven marketplace that demands ongoing investment to stay relevant and competitive.
Importance of customer contact data quality
One of the best ways to deliver profitability is to improve customer contact data quality. With clean, accurate and appropriately formatted customer data not only are logistics and delivery fast and efficient – with costly failed deliveries and redeliveries few and far between - but marketing efforts are improved with correct customer data informing effective personalisation and upselling.
Overall, this results in the delivery of a standout customer experience, and encourages repeat purchases.
With data lacking regular intervention degrading at 25% a year as people move home, die and get divorced, ensuring customer contact data quality has never been more important. Particularly as data quality issues are also compounded by 20% of addresses entered online containing errors, including spelling mistakes, incorrect house numbers and invalid postcodes.
The answer is to use data verification technology, in particular address verification technology both at the point of data capture, and when cleaning held data in batch. This usually involves simple and cost-effective changes to existing data quality procedures.
Onboarding with address lookup or autocomplete
Using an address lookup or autocomplete service works well at the customer onboarding stage. As people begin typing their address it automatically provides the correct one, ensuring an accurate and properly formatted address for their country location. It’s an approach that avoids all too common errors caused by fat finger syndrome.
Also, using this technology there’s a reduction in the number of keystrokes required when typing an address by up to 81%. This accelerates the path to checkout, reduces the risk of basket abandonment, and helps secure the sale - while supporting a seamless, high-quality online customer experience.
Similar technology enables real time verification of email and phone data at first contact, strengthening these critical datasets.
Prevent data duplication
Data duplication is a persistent issue which frequently occurs when errors in contact data collection take place at different touchpoints, when merging databases after a new business acquisition, and when two departments combine their customer datasets.
Data duplication rates of 10 – 30% are not uncommon on customer databases, which has negative implications for marketing, particularly with printed communications. For example, sending the same letter to a customer twice not only wastes money on printing and distribution, but can also damage the reputation of the sender.
To eradicate duplicate data an advanced fuzzy matching tool works well. These services can merge and purge the most complex records to create a ‘single user record’, which delivers an optimum single customer view (SCV) that insights can be made from to enhance personalisation and support upselling.
Data cleansing and suppression
Data cleansing or suppression technology is an important part of the data cleaning process, because these services highlight those customers who have moved or are no longer at the address on file. Access to the National Change of Address (NCOA) database is essential to this process, as it identifies individuals who have relocated and supplies their new address.
Along with removing incorrect addresses, cleansing services can include deceased flagging to stop mail and other communications being sent to individuals who have passed away, and thereby help to avoid distress to their friends and relatives.
Adopting such suppression strategies enables businesses to cut costs, maintain trust and combat fraud.
In summary
With growing inflation and other factors encroaching on profit margins, ensuring customer data quality is a big step towards improving profitability. Access to quality customer data improves logistics and deliveries, as well as the marketing and personalisation of communications to existing customers. It also delivers a standout customer experience, further boosting sales and profitability.
This guest blog was written by Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa. To learn more about Melissa please visit their LinkedIn page.
Author
Barley Laing
Barley Laing
As Managing Director, with 28 years of technology and data industry experience, his role is focused on meeting the data quality, address and ID/compliance needs for organisations in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, and worldwide.
The team that Barley heads up provides data consultancy, sales and technical support across their wide range of market leading web services, apps, SaaS and on-premise software solutions. These help organisations to deliver efficient multichannel customer engagement; onboarding; build customer loyalty; optimise organisational efficiency; and deliver data management and ID verification to meet Know your Customer (KYC), Know your Business (KYB) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements.
Under his leadership Melissa’s UK office has achieved sustained double digit growth over the last six years, including 20% growth in 2022, 25% in 2023, and 25% again in 2024. During this time Barley has significantly grown the UK client base, which includes: ASOS; BBC; Citi; Creditsafe; Family Fund; the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA); the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; GCHQ; GSK; Lambeth Council; Mars; P&G and Visa.
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