- Seven Dimensions of Data Quality
- Data Quality Trends
- Duplicate Trends
- Company Level Capture
- Team or Departmental Level Capture
- Individual Level Capture
If you didn’t get a chance to read Part 1 or Part 2, here are the links
In today's post we look at three more important charts that all companies should look at, namely:
- Data Degradation
- Information Quality
- Profiling
Data Degradation Chart
I can't stress enough how important data degradation is. I've seen so many companies ignore this facet of business data or maybe they are just unaware of its existence, that they are willing and ready to scrap their entire database by labelling it as bad rather than realising with a bit of effort one could build on their database and not lose all that important data.
Data degrades simply because things are constantly changing. For B2B data, companies close due to good and bad reasons, contacts move at an alarming rate (about 15%-22% per annum); for B2C data there is less movement but it's still about 11%, which includes moving homes or people who have passed away.
If you don't look after your data, this means in a few years your database becomes unusable. Marketers and sales professional get poorer results, CRM users lose confidence and senior management panic when things are going terribly wrong.
In this chart we illustrate the point by reviewing the number of companies either closing for good/bad reasons, merging or being taken over.
You can see that the number of companies closing is higher than the number of new customers, with the net result of decreasing number of accounts.
Information Quality
In this definition we are looking at how useful a piece of data is. We’ll take a look at emails for simplicity.
Just because there is some text in an email field, it does not mean we have a valid email. The data can be:
- Some non-email data
- A badly formatted email (probably entered in poorly)
- A free email (those hotmail, gmail accounts may not be right for your business)
- A general email, e.g. [email protected] - again not very useful
- An invalid email (these can be tested for hard bounces)
By knowing which emails are usable you can create better marketing results, but more importantly you're metrics are accurate!
Checking emails are valid through an email validation tool is a great way to see which contacts are no longer at their companies (for B2B data.)
This chart only illustrates emails, but can equally be applied to companies, telephone numbers, contacts, etc.
Profiling Charts
These charts are a huge help to marketers. Knowing the demographics and propensities of your customers and prospects enables you to market more accurately by tailoring messages, methods of communications and segmentation.
By regular profiling, you can see how your customer base is changing as economies change, or as you introduce new products/services or as the population patterns change.
By being proactive, you can use the customer/prospect profile to create new lines of businesses, new products and new services.
Here are sample of few profiling charts. (Remember, profiling results are only as good as the underlying data quality!)
Summary
Having simple charts measure varying aspects of data quality is very powerful for all businesses. You can:
- Proactively manage data degradation
- Train users to enter data correctly
- Substantially increase marketing returns
- Establish positive confidence in CRM users and users of other applications
- Focus on sales effectiveness
- Leverage every contact for business opportunities
- Give confidence to senior management
- And many more...
As the great management guru Peter Drucker once said:
"If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It"