Data Hygiene – No Room for Error Here
Everyone, especially CRM vendors, often believe (hope?) data hygiene, or “data quality” is a non-issue. If ever there was an expectation just waiting to be unrealized it must be under the heading of “data quality.” In fact, data quality is a horrible name for something so often far removed from the concept of “quality.” While there are numerous reasons for poor data quality within an organization, two predominant reasons are “human error” and disparate systems that were never designed to co-exist. Add third-party data sources (e.g. a prospect list acquired from a list broker) and the lovely term “data silos” can be translated into “we have lots of data everywhere that we do not trust.” Human error is pretty much self-explanatory; a customer service representative enters customer data with a misspelled name, bad street address, or missing apartment number and the sales department will have another valuable customer that will not receive marketing communications.
Once again, a packaged solution makes the most sense. At Clairvoyix we integrated with the data hygiene product suite from Melissa Data, and true data quality out of the box became a reality. Thanks to the magic of “Software as a Service” every marketing database provided to our clients utilizes the exact same data quality process. Once again, we see consistency with “people” as the things that define them really don’t change too much. The variables in the definitions certainly do, but a customer’s mailing address, email address, mobile number, interests and demographics are very well-defined marketing attributes. The same goes for transactions—marketers want to know how much consumers spent, what they purchased, when they purchased, and was it the result of a marketing campaign. It really doesn’t need to be much more complicated than that.
About the Author
Mike Schmitt
Mike Schmitt is the CEO and founder of Clairvoyix, LLC, a Las Vegas based marketing automation company focused on the travel and leisure market. With over 25 years of software industry experience, including eighteen years in management positions, Mike has worked in nearly all functional areas of the software industry. Mike holds a Bachelor of Science, Computer Science degree from California State University, Long Beach and a Masters of Business Administration from Nova Southeastern University.