You know that data quality helps your data analysts perform their jobs better and can smooth the transfer of data across your organization. But data quality is crucial for another reason: It translates directly to cold, hard cash. Here’s how increase your data quality return on investment…
When it comes to big data, you may think of expensive storage infrastructure and sophisticated platforms like Hadoop as the most significant places to invest your money. But while it’s true that you should invest in data storage and analytics technology, investing in data quality is equally crucial.
The reason why is that poor-quality data can undercut your business operations in a variety of ways. No matter how much you spend on analytics – or marketing, recruitment, planning and other endeavors based on those analytics – you’re shooting yourself in the foot if the data you’re working with is subject to inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and other quality issues.
Consider the following ways in which investing in data quality can save you – or earn you – big money.
marketing is key to attracting and keeping customers. If your marketing team’s efforts are based on low-quality data, they will chronically come up short.
Think about it. If the email addresses you collect for prospects are not accurate, your marketing campaigns will end up in black holes. If the data you collect about customer preferences turns out to be inconsistent, your marketing team will make plans based on information that doesn’t reflect reality.
The list of marketing problems that can result from low-quality data could go on. The point is that your return on the investment you make in marketing efforts is only as great as the quality of the data at the foundation of your marketing campaigns.
In addition to using marketing to attract new customers, you also want to keep the customers you have. Quality data is key here, too.
Why? Because your ability to meet and exceed the expectations of your customers is largely based on the accuracy of the data you collect about their preferences and behavior. If time zone information in your database of customer transactions is incorrect, you might end up inaccurately predicting when customer demand for your services is highest. As a result, you’ll fall short of being able to guarantee service availability when your customers want it most.
