Undeliverable addresses - lower sales, high costs
Undeliverable addresses make mailing campaigns run out of steam and cause unnecessary postage and research costs. Invoices cannot be delivered, which results in non-payment, not to mention lost sales opportunities, since your promotional messages do not reach potential buyers.
Duplicates - dissatisfied customers, uncertain planning, unused up/cross-selling
Multiple data records (duplicates) are possibly even more problematic:
- Important customer data is incorrect during a customer service call. The customer is disappointed and may turn to the competition. Lost sales are the inevitable result here.
- Sales and marketing planning suffers, because duplicates prevent correct automatic classification of customers and require expensive manual correction.
- Forecasts are distorted, which can lead to delayed or incorrect business decisions which hit your company hard.
- Address selection for marketing campaigns becomes enormously complicated, which is why you may only be able to place your offers after the competition.
No confidence - starting signal for increasingly poorer data quality
Practice has shown that if users cannot access the requisite information in the CRM system quickly and with a high quality, the amount of care taken during data input and maintenance is normally also reduced. The result is a downward spiral of constantly decreasing data quality, which can only be stopped by a complete - and expensive - relaunch of the CRM system in the extreme case. Don't let things get that far and start making the requisite process improvements before it's too late.