"Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything." - Wyatt Earp.
Imagine you scheduling a meeting at a coffee shop near you, you get there and get to know that the shop is closed. After asking around you get to know that the shop has been closed for over two months and has relocated to some other place. Don't we all just hate it when we are given inaccurate or inconsistent data while making some decisions. This situation causes a lot of inconvenience to your existing and potential customers.
Data is the heart of any business, and bad data can have a lasting impact on everybody about your business, and bad data can have a lasting impact on everything about your business from the customer experience that you provide to your revenue.
Data accuracy plays an important role in every business. Data is used to measure performance and profitability and analyzed to improve internal operations and drive innovation. However, as a business move to the cloud, the quality of data can suffer due to formatting problems, data loss, inaccurate timestamps, and other incompatibility issues. Though the brands try their best to avoid such issues or they hire various agencies to do the same.
One of the biggest headaches poor data quality creates is having to fix the errors. If an error is created early within the data collection process, it can easily snowball, taking more time to fix these errors. Additional hours are now being put into accommodating and validating errors rather than utilizing data to create innovative business strategies. Unfortunately, businesses focus on other, more mainstream digital marketing activities to stay on top of the competition; so much so that maintaining the accuracy of their business listings, directories and citations sometimes takes a backseat. And because of this, their online reputation (reviews and star ratings) also take a hit, because a) Customers are not able to find the business they want to review on the internet, and b) Inaccurate listings online lead to bad customer experiences.
Bad data refers to information that is incorrect and can mislead the customer. Unfortunately, no industry, organization, or department is immune to it.
Here are the factors that cause bad data:
- Missing Data: Incomplete address, or having empty fields that should contain data.
- Wrong data: Information that has not been maintained or is obsolete. (eg: old business address or phone number)
- Poor data: Typos and variations in the spelling, naming or formatting.
What can be the outcome of inaccurate data?
#1 Losing customers
People need to understand that wrong or inaccurate data can straightaway steepen the customer curve. The customer landscape in India has changed drastically. Customers rarely leave a business website with an unbiased impression, especially when they have had bitter experiences.
For businesses, having inaccurate information online is a potential disadvantage, and should be avoided at any cost. Not only it makes your business look bad, but it also causes a lot of inconvenience to the customers.
#2 Online reputation
As far as most customers are concerned, your local business is an unknown entity, so you need to make the most of your first impression. We all know the power of word-of-mouth marketing. It's up to you if you want it to work in your favour or against it. Bad reputation online can lead to bad reviews, therefore you have to nip it in the bud before it gets worse and turns into a PR disaster.
#3 Missed opportunities & decrease in revenue
If you can't reach your customers and vice versa, you won't be able to achieve your revenue goals. Poor data quality includes incorrect data (phone, email id or address) and lack of other crucial business details online. This is a genuine problem in the majority of businesses across India because in order to cut costs, many businesses are still trying to clear bad data manually, instead of using location intelligence tools.
It's important to resolve the issue of poor data quality, because it hinder the business a lot, it can leave a bad impression on customers and clients. Inaccuracy lowers credibility and increase the perception of risk and the failure of compliance.
To conclude, inaccurate business data can be extremely damaging to any organization and its reputation. It can further result in customer churn or revenue loss. As a business, you need to provide your customers with the best service. Customers are investing their valuable time and money on your business, so their convenience has to be the top priority.
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