10 Reasons Why Duplicate Data is Harming Your Business

10 Reasons Why Duplicate Data is Harming Your Business

Why You Should Make Duplicate Data Top of Your Agenda

The issue of duplicate data may not be high on your agenda especially if it’s viewed by senior management as a timely and idle investment. However, from our experience of working with data and helping our customers to reduce duplicates, we would strongly disagree.

Why Duplicate Data Is Bad...


Why Duplicate Data is Harming Your Business

1. Wasted Costs and Lost Income

When put into monetary terms, the cost of duplicate data is significant. Imagine the wasted costs of sending five of the same catalogs to one person. In addition to the money wasted on duplicate print and postage costs, there is also the potential negative effect on response rates and the overall ROI of your marketing activity.

To help reduce wasted costs, users need to be able to identify duplicates and prevent additional duplicate records from being entered into CRM. This will put you in the best position possible to maintain a healthy database and save your company money by minimizing wasted income on things like marketing costs and stopgap data cleansing solutions.


2. Lack of Single Customer View (SCV)

With two or more records for the same person, it is difficult to view an accurate picture of your customers and their behavior. With each customer interaction being recorded against different records, it makes it challenging to view what communication has taken place and if there are any outstanding actions.

From a sales and marketing perspective, it is tricky to evaluate what marketing effort has been successful and at what stage of the sales funnel the customer is if the same customer is in the database more than once.


3. Negative Impact on Brand Reputation

By neglecting the health of your customer contact data, you are neglecting the health of your business. Customers are sources of an existing business, new business, and referrals. By improving the quality of their data, you are maximizing the effectiveness of your communications with them and building the perception of your brand.

Imagine the impact on your company’s reputation if you are bombarding the same customer with multiple mailings or telephone calls. Take for example, if you were to mail three versions of your marketing materials to Andy Smith, Andrew Smith, and Drew Smith. Do you think Andrew Smith would view your company as a competent and professional one?


4. Poor Customer Satisfaction

Duplicated and inaccurate data affects every customer touchpoint, from customer service teams’ conversations with your customers to marketing and sales messaging with new prospects.

From a customer service perspective, it is much harder and more time-consuming trying to get to the bottom of a customer issue if there are multiple records and differing notes and actions against them. This, in turn, is frustrating for customers who may result in turning to alternative suppliers for a higher level of personalized customer service.

Gartner quantified the impact of bad data management, identifying that annoying customers in this way can result in a 25% reduction in potential revenue gains.

Bad Data means inefficiency and lack of productivity
5. Inefficiency and Lack of Productivity

In today’s interactive business world, we are collecting customer data from a multitude of data sources, but can you be certain that all engagements with your customers are centralized in one record? Imagine this scenario:

All this confusion makes it more difficult for staff to work efficiently with customers and prospect records, compounded by the fact that Joe Bloggs is not the only record with a duplicate in the CRM.

If CRM is supposed to provide a 360° view of your customers, enabling duplicates within your CRM is undermining its purpose. Where CRM normally allows your staff a more efficient way of reviewing data about customers and prospects, they are now in doubt about all the information in the database, undermining confidence in the system and slowing productivity.

"85% of organizations indicate that poor-quality contact data negatively impacts their operational processes and efficiency and, in turn, hinders the chances of being flexible and agile. Poor-quality data has a ripple effect as do operational issues." - Experian’s 2022 Global Data Management Research Report.

6. Decreased User Adoption

Data confidence plays a key role in how company employees use business systems like CRM. Poor quality data is one of the most common causes of low user adoption. Your CRM could offer user-friendly and intuitive functionality, but if the system is filled with duplicate data then users will see that very quickly. Bad data affects morale because it is frustrating and inefficient for many departments.

Low system confidence leads to mistakes and mistakes lead to lower system confidence. With an average of 60% of companies in an Experian study citing human error as a reason for poor quality data, the importance of preventing this downward spiral could not be clearer.

Employees need to be using systems correctly and taking care to prevent mistakes for your business systems to be reliable at producing insights and tracking the state of your business.

7. Inaccurate Reporting and Less Informed Decisions

If you are planning on using your data to make informed decisions and forecast what you should be doing more for future business growth, you need to make sure that your data is accurate, complete and duplicate free. Decisions based on poor quality data are no more reliable and accurate than those made on assumptions. Cluttering up your database with poor quality data will impact on your ability to make informed judgments and decisions about the state and future of your business.


8. Missed Sales Opportunities

Poor quality data filled with inaccurate and duplicate records can be costly in terms of missed sales opportunities. Think of the lost time that could have been spent interacting with the right prospect rather than trying to reach contacts that are no longer in that position.


9. Poor Business Processes

When employees start to lose confidence in the CRM because of the number of duplicates and inaccurate data, they can revert to using traditional methods to record customer data, such as Excel and Post-It notes. Using such business processes limits the view of your customers and inadvertently limits the growth of your business.

If this is true for your business and you are aware that employees are sharing customer information internally via emails, spreadsheets, or shared drives, think again! As your business and customer base grows, so does the number of customer records, making the data unmanageable and increasing the potential to lose it.


10. Poor Targeting and Wasted Marketing Effort

Are you sending out multiple messages to the same person every time an email campaign is delivered? If so you may run the risk of annoying them so much that they refuse to open any of your emails. If you keep emailing users that aren’t responsive, some email providers may push your emails to the spam box.

Furthermore, without an accurate view of each customer and where they are in the buying process, it makes it difficult to segment properly. Sending out untargeted messaging can demolish open and click-through rates wasting your valuable time and money. Having accurate, good quality customer information can help you to provide more personalized interactions, which makes, all the difference when it comes to winning customers and keeping them.

Conclusion

In summary, Experian's 2022 Global Data Management Research Report states that bad data has an impact in the following ways:

  • 42% say wasted resources and additional costs
  • 39% say negative effects on customer experience
  • 38% say damage to reliability in trust in analytics.

Duplicate data can significantly hurt the view of your customers and it is the responsibility of all business users to effectively manage data at every touchpoint with CRM.

Paribus 365™ provides intelligent CRM searching and duplicate data management, which can help reduce the instances of adding duplicate data, giving you confidence that you have a single view of all your customers.



Paribus 365™ is revolutionizing the way Microsoft Dynamics 365 users manage their data – as the proven DQ for Dynamics solution, your data quality guardian for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Saving users precious time and empowering organizations to finally realize the true potential of their customer data.

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