Good Data is the Key to Customer Satisfaction
Submitted By Melissa Data
The name of the game is customer satisfaction. And nowadays there are so many new tools such as predictive dialing, dynamic scripting, and customer experience analytics to "please the customer." Yet what do all these customer service practices have in common? They all rely on good data.
The benefits of good data for customers are measurable and significant. To begin with, data quality translates to product shipments, billing statements, marketing pieces, and corporate communications addressed to the right person at the right address.
Getting data right is not only a customer service necessity, but also a matter of dollars and cents.
Consider the “1-10-100 Rule,” which posits that it takes $1 to verify the accuracy of an address at the point-of-entry, $10 to clean it in batch form, and $100 per record if nothing is done (which includes the ultimate costs associated with undeliverable shipments, low customer retention, and inefficient CRM initiatives).
Data Quality at Point of Entry
The first step in the data quality process is capturing clean data at the point of entry. And this is where your call center agents become, in effect, the "first responders" of data quality.
To help call center agents capture accurate address data at the point of entry, Melissa Data offers Express Entry®. To verify an address, agents simply begin typing into a search bar, and as they're entering the address, Express Entry will automatically complete it with a fully-verified and deliverable address for over 240 countries worldwide.
Express Entry reduces keystrokes by 50%, which speeds up call times, benefiting customers and improving employee productivity. Express Entry is available as a cloud service and in a desktop edition.
Data Erodes Over Time
And, while cleansing data at the point of entry is the best—and the most affordable—method of ensuring data quality, even accurate contact data decays over time, resulting from a number of factors including customers moving, getting married, getting divorced, buying a new house, changing jobs, retiring, or even dying.
For this reason, performing periodic cleansings of the data already in your database, in batch, must be standard protocol. A good data cleansing solution will verify, correct, and standardize name, address, phone, and email information. In addition, to maximize the value of your contact data and ability to reach customers, it may be advisable to employ a data quality solution that can add missing email, phone, and address data.
Enrich Data
Once you've quickly and accurately captured address data at the point of entry, you can enrich your records with real-time data enhancements such as demographics and geographic coordinates. Adding this kind of specialized data to your customer records helps you profile your customer base to better understand what products and services can best serve them. This complete customer picture also helps your sales and marketing leaders craft more relevant and helpful marketing and corporate communication pieces that serve to keep customers and prospects more loyal to your brand.
Demographic enhancements include such valuable customer differentiators like date of birth, presence of children, marital status, household income, and occupation. A good demographic solution will have hundreds of demographic selects available, so you can choose only those relevant to your market.
Along with demographics, another vital data enhancement is geocoding, which is adding geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) to your records so you can accurately map your customer locations right down to the rooftop level. This practice serves to highlight clusters of customers/prospects so business leaders can better plan and budget their customer initiatives.
The bottom line here is simple. Customer satisfaction is not just affected by the quality of your data, but actually depends on good data. And when your data quality plan includes a solid three-fold approach of 1) correcting data at the point of entry, 2) regularly cleansing your existing data in batch to ensure stale data is updated, and finally 3) enriching your files with demographic and geographic data to arrive at a complete view of your customers.
And this three-fold approach is a surefire way to improve agent productivity, boost call center performance, and above all, please customers and keep them satisfied.
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