Every business that aims to build greater market share, accomplish apex level, and achieve success has to consider many factors. Aspects like competent resources, latest business models, effective marketing strategies, fail-proof sales plans, commendable customer experiences, and so on contribute to its success.
One of the important considerations among these factors is maintaining the accuracy and quality of data as it lays the foundation for a multitude of vital business functions and decisions. If the data is corrupted in the initial stages, then the resultant analysis and insights are automatic of no use for the organizations— data verification, therefore, becomes an important business function, be it the startups, small and medium-sized firms, or global corporations.
Importance of Data Verification
As the name suggests, data verification is the process of eliminating errors, inaccuracies, redundancies, and anomalies from datasets. The data is checked for relevance, completeness, consistency, and precision against a trusted source. With validated customer information an organization can better analyze customer behavior, personalize offerings, and perform effective competitor analysis as well as market segmentation.
Three Common Pitfalls
Verified and validated data not only helps businesses to avoid data decay and reduce the future costs of data clean-up but also boosts their marketing ROI. Here’s a list of three common pitfalls companies must avoid reaping the benefits:
1. Incorrect Postal Addresses
Customers have high expectations for their online order deliveries. Meeting their expectations is imperative for brands to hone up their game, especially when using customer experience as a point of key differentiation. But an invalid postal address negatively impacts a customer’s experience when the order placed never arrives or gets delivered to the wrong destination. Getting this information correct before it enters your legacy systems and distribution centers for shipping is the best practice for ascertaining a positive customer experience.
But what if your customers reside in a different country? This also becomes extremely difficult when their written language is different from that of yours and the format is unknown. Companies dealing in regulated industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and banking, for instance, can face fines if they fail to send privacy notices and other such important statements to their recipients. This is where professional address verification services help you feel confident that a postal address is correct and you reach out to the right local prospect.
2. Invalid Email Addresses
A brand’s marketing efforts might go in vain if they shoot a mail to invalid email addresses, resulting in a higher bounce rate for email marketing. These high bounce rates for emails can create a risk for businesses by threatening the email sender’s reputation. Poor email hygiene paired with a bad sender reputation can lead to blacklisting issues that are time-consuming and costly to overcome.
Email marketing ensures one of the best ROIs in the business. However, its inability to reach the desired customers proves to be a non-profit avenue in terms of blocked communication and lost sales. The email shared by the brands never arrives at the destination, but rather goes to the recipient’s spam folder when a brand is blacklisted.
With the availability of email verification services, brands need not worry about getting blocked by ISPs. You get the assurance that your email lands in the prospects’ inbox. Hence, you can meet the customer’s expectation that your communication with them will be consistent.
3. Inaccurate Phone Numbers
Different businesses use a customer’s phone number in many ways—you can either create a touchpoint for sales prospecting or make a call to resolve a customer service issue. Apart from this, you would also want to send a confirmation text for a scheduled appointment. So, when a business tries to reach their customer via phone in any such case, an invalid number proves to be costly. On the other hand, a valid phone number is extremely valuable.
For instance, your customer service department has to send an urgent message but fails to do so because of an invalid phone number. In this scenario, the designated representative has to spend extra time looking for the correct number when the response from the other side is, “I’m sorry, but you have called the wrong number.”
Or the other way round, the executive would have to use another form of communication to get this contact data. But when you have phone verification services at your disposal, that executive can instantly deliver the important message. Their solid data quality practices enable your business to reliably contact customers, irrespective of the mode of communication.
Bottom Line
Gartner reports that poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. The figures speak for themselves about how inaccurate and poor-quality data undermines businesses as they fly blindly. Apart from the immediate impact on customer acquisition/retention rate and revenue, incorrect data leads to poor decision-making in both the long and short run.
The same Gartner report predicted that 70% of organizations will rigorously track their data quality and accuracy levels via metrics, improving it by 60% to significantly reduce operational risks and costs by 2022. Data verification services, thus, enable businesses to resolve problems by conducting a root cause analysis before they grow big. Now that you know the value of validated and verified data, it is time to make the move.
