How Investing in Data Quality Saves You Money
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.
Making the most of marketing
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.
Keeping customers happy
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.
As another example, consider the importance of making sure you maintain accurate data about your customers in order to deliver excellent customer service. When a customer calls you with a complaint or question, you don’t want to misidentify him or her because of inaccurate information linking a phone number to a name. Nor do you want to route customer calls to the wrong call center because the data you have about a customer’s geographic location is wrong.
Staying compliant
Compliance is money – there’s no denying that – and quality data can do much to help ensure that you meet regulatory compliance requirements.
Data Quality Return on Investment: Compliance
Without quality data, you may end up failing to secure sensitive customer information as required by compliance policies because you have no way of separating data that needs to be protected from the rest of the information you store. Or, you may run afoul of regulatory authorities because you can’t rely on low-quality data to detect and prevent fraudulent activity, another area where data quality is key.
Keeping employees happy
Good employees are hard to find, and they can be even harder to keep. That’s especially true if poor data gets in the way of their ability to do their jobs.
Whether they’re in marketing, HR, legal, development or any other area of your organization, most employees depend on data to accomplish what you expect of them. If you are unable to deliver the quality data they require, they’ll become frustrated and less productive. They may ultimately choose to look for work elsewhere.
Low employee productivity and high turnover rates translate to higher staffing costs.
Keeping operations efficient
Just as your employees can’t do their job without quality data, so will your business fail to operate efficiently without good data.
Data Quality Return on Investment: Efficiency
In a world where data is at the root of almost everything a company does, inaccurate or inconsistent data slows down processes, creates unnecessary delays, introduces problems that teams have to scramble to fix, and so on.
Quality data helps you avoid these mistakes and keep your business lean and mean – which translates to greater cost-efficiency.
Achieving data quality with Syncsort
With Syncsort, you can ensure data quality and streamline your data integration workflows at the same time. That’s because Syncsort has added Trillium’s data quality software to its suite of Big Data integration solutions.
To learn more about how Syncsort helps you maximize your data quality return on investment by ensuring the quality of even the hardest-to-manage data – legacy data – check out the latest eBook, “Bringing Big Data to Life.”