4 Links Between High-Quality Data and a Great Customer Experience
In the financial services industry, there’s a regulation known as Know Your Customer (KYC). On the most basic level, it’s a mandate that requires banks and other financial institutions to collect customer data to verify their identities. The primary purpose of this law is to prevent fraud and financial crimes, but companies outside the financial services industry can greatly benefit from “knowing their customers,” too. If you’re looking for motivation for why you should close the gap between data quality and your customers’ experiences, Forbes recently published a list of 100 customer experience (CX) stats that are quite compelling, including:
- 88% of buyers say experience matters as much as a company’s products or services
- 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized (a.k.a. data-driven) experiences
- 61% of customers will pay at least 5% more if they know they’ll have a good CX
- 60% of customers have switched brands over a negative customer experience
When you make it a priority to truly know your customers, you understand what they like, what they don’t like, what they want, and what they need. Naturally, you need a lot of data, to keep up with all those preferences, but thanks to the wonderful world of marketing technology automation—everything is possible. The good news is that when you make the effort, it puts you way ahead of most of the competition because it means you are actively listening and responding appropriately. In fact, research by Salesforce maintains that 56 percent of customers say most companies treat them like numbers. In today’s blog, we’ll cover four ways your data is having a daily—and often dramatic—impact on your customer experience, and by default, your bottom line, goal achievement, reputation, growth, future sales, etc.
- High-Quality Data Builds Customer Confidence
Maintaining clean, complete and current customer data instills trust by showing customers that you value their information and are committed to ensuring its accuracy. The more often you “get it right” with customers on basics like name, title, order history, etc., the more confidence they have in your company and its products and services to deliver on whatever they promise. Remember when we told you most customers feel like companies treat them like a number? Well, that same survey also found that 84 percent of customers say being treated like a person, and not a number, is very important to winning their business. This brings us to our next point—the power of personalization.
2. High-Quality Data Improves the Personalized Experiences You Create
When the data you have on-hand is not only accurate, but enhanced with interesting datasets from top tier third-party sources, you are better equipped to deliver truly personalized messaging. When you consider that 44 percent of customers are more likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized customer experience, it’s easy to see how data quality becomes critical to a positive CX. Scaling personalized content and engaging in account-based marketing (ABM) is only made possible through the wonders of marketing automation. Efficient and economical, when you automate the process of creating and sending personalized campaigns, you can impress every customer you have by delivering an experience that feels truly personal to them.
3. High-Quality Data Enhances Targeting
Enhanced data enables you to see new patterns in customer commonalities and engage in more effective types of segmentation. For example, if you enrich your demographic, geographic and firmographic data with, psychographic or behavioral data, then you can create highly personalized messages to customer segments that share the same buying attitudes. This gives your customers the personalized experiences that they crave. It also empowers you to build more meaningful relationships with customers because you can host special events for members of their group (segment) and enable them to network with one another or enjoy special “members-only” discounts. Finally, in addition to tapping into new markets and customer types, narrowing your segmentation strategy is proven to lead to higher conversion rates and boost customer loyalty.
4. High-Quality Data Saves Your CX and Some Serious Money
The Harvard Business Review maintains that 47% of newly created records contain errors significant enough to impact operations. What’s more, Gartner says poor data quality costs U.S. businesses around $12.9 million per year. If the only thing standing between you and a $12.9M budget boost is bad data, then its high time you whipped out your automatic weapon (a.k.a. data automation) and challenged that old budget killer to a death match.
With regard to CX, bad data leads you to call customers by the wrong title, misspell their names, send products or reps to the wrong address, and undo all the goodwill you have worked so hard to establish. These experiences are not only negative, but are the very culprits that cause customers to feel like a number (always bad). These feelings quickly lead to higher rates of customer dissatisfaction and churn, which is very expensive considering that the average cost to acquire one new customer is between $86 and $1,985—depending on the industry you are in.
Inaccurate data also leads to an increase in email bounce rates, a higher risk of being blacklisted as a spammer, sales teams wasting time calling the wrong numbers, direct mail campaigns being sent to file 13 after being sent to the wrong recipient, and the list goes on. Verifying customer data reduces the costs associated with managing incorrect and outdated information. Research shows the cost of verifying a record as it is entered is $1 per record. The cost to fix errors afterward is $10 per record, and the cost of doing nothing is $100 per record, per year. Yikes!
High-Quality Data Improves Customer Journeys and Relationships
Incorporating automated data cleansing and enhancement into your CX strategy leads to tangible benefits in terms of significant increases in customer satisfaction, customer spend, customer loyalty and customer lifetime values. In short, it’s a win-win for both your customers and your business. Sureshot has a long history of helping businesses get and maintain high-quality data that is ideal for building mutually rewarding customer experiences. If you are ready to harness the power of accurate data to unlock the full potential of your CX, start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.