Better Business Decisions by Enhanced Customer Data Analysis
One thing that businesses relatively do is make decisions. At times, decision-making becomes a crisis but when done under thorough planning streams, it can lead off bad pathways and create fruitful ones.
Often, we get too excited and quickly decide to kick off a lead generation campaign but miss on the most important part of the process – customer profiling. It’s important to put more emphasis on data quality by having regular data cleanup to check your database for errors and ensure that you have complete, accurate, and reliable information to drive your marketing lead generation campaign. Data cleansing/data scrubbing, data verification, deduplication and database management are service processes that you may use.
Here are insightful processes on enhancing customer data for deeper profiling and analysis.
Data Cleansing / Data Scrubbing
Techtarget describes this as the process of removing incorrect, incomplete duplicated or improperly formatted data from a database and is often used by data-intensive organizations like banking, insurance, retailing, telecommunications or transportation. Scrubbing tools are used to systematically examine data for flaws by using algorithms and look-up tables to correct a number of specific types of mistakes such as missing zip codes or finding duplicate records.
Data Verification
Slideshare notes that data is an integral aspect in enabling decision making. Accurate data is vital for organizations across industries and relevant to business developers, sales professional, marketers, researchers and enterprisers. Accurate data improves:
- Operational Efficiency
- Reduces Cost
- Optimizes Business Process
- Provides Auditability And Data Transparency
- Improves Customer Experience
Data Deduplication
Technet says data deduplication involves finding and removing duplication within data without compromising its fidelity or integrity. The goal is to store more data in less space by segmenting files into small variable-sized chunks (32–128 KB), identifying duplicate chunks, and maintaining a single copy of each chunk. Redundant copies of the chunk are replaced by a reference to the single copy. The chunks are compressed and then organized into special container files in the System Volume Information folder.
Database Management
Study.com shares that a database management system (DBMS) is a software tool that makes it possible to organize data in a database. It gives you more control over your data and makes it possible for users to create, edit and update data in database files. The following are its functions:
- Concurrency: concurrent access (meaning ‘at the same time’) to the same database by multiple users
- Security: security rules to determine access rights of users
- Backup and recovery: processes to backup the data regularly and recover data if a problem occurs
- Integrity: database structure and rules improve the integrity of the data
- Data descriptions: a data dictionary provides a description of the data
Related: Where to get your database list?
Having a thorough understanding of how data interrelate increases an organization’s ability to link information, performance and strategy more effectively, as per Dashboard Insight. By identifying how business processes and operations link to data, organizations can turn that data into information that can be used for decision making purposes and bring out successful results.
The process may be a long and winding path but like the old cliche says “all roads lead to Rome.”