Aren’t we getting good at collecting data? In fact, I’d say we’ve never been so good. We’ve got forms for everything, we’ve got people on the phones, we’ve got CRM systems, we’ve got spreadsheets… we’re probably as good as we ever have been at collecting data.
It’s such a shame we’re still useless at using the data.
I still see a litany of schoolboy errors with data, from telemarketing campaigns that target multiple markets with the same message to e-mail campaigns that have absolutely no relevance to most of the audience.
I say it’s time to shift the focus. But how do we do that? Here’s how…
1. Don’t Be So Desperate
There are companies out there who have targets for the amount of prospect data they collect. Someone high up has obviously said “get me LOADS of data” and someone lower down has willingly complied by putting calls to action literally everywhere on their website. They’re hammering the phones and they’re buying data.
The thing about data is that it’s old the minute you acquire it. In fact, if you’ve bought it, it was old before you bought it.
Worse, if you’ve bought it, someone else has bought it too.
Collecting a lot of data implies responsibility. You’re responsible for updating that data. You’re responsible for segmenting that data. You’re responsible for KEEPING that data.
Most of all, you’re responsible for getting something out of that data.
Wouldn’t you rather have a data set that you can rely on rather than a data set that you have to sift through and maintain. High-maintenance data is a time suck and a productivity drain.
Don’t be so desperate. Only go after data that is of value to you. That means only ask for details when you know someone is interesting and don’t go after the speculative.
2. Automate More, and Care for the Detail
So much can be automated. My old colleague Warren Butler wrote a good post some time ago about automating customer data updates, and it’s still hugely valid.
You can get someone internally to update customer data, hit the phones, check things, take them off mailing lists – or you can get the customer to do it for you.
You can get systems to automatically take people off mailing lists, or move them to more suitable ones depending on their activity. You don’t have to do everything yourself – systems are available that can make intelligent decisions for you.
That’s the point of big data – there’s so much of it that you can leverage the quality of that data to make intelligent decisions on your behalf.
The detail is what you should care about. If you’ve got the breadth of data that will help you make those decisions, then your automation efforts will work so much better. I’ll give you an example – if you’re pulling through Twitter data and you’ve found that a segment of your e-mail database is particularly active on social media, then you can move them to a special list delivering mailshots that are tailored towards people sharing.
It’s not a difficult thing – if you’ve collected the data and you know how to automate. Remove the manual, remove the errors – care for the detail.
3. Don’t Just Segment – Alert!
Segmentation is something we’ve got better at (thankfully) although I still see instances of irrelevant campaigns wasting data.
The next step is to build on our segmentation. For instance, a telemarketing campaign can be refined down to, say, IT managers within the construction industry. That’s nice and granular, but there are going to be nuggets within your data that you need to pull out for the right person at the right time.
We may have hidden some of those in “notes” fields – free text that is not searchable and is not always brilliantly useable. But if we’ve got, for instance, access to a stream of their social data, we can maybe pull on some of that information to enhance the conversation we have.
It’s all about getting smarter with the data we’ve got, making it more user-friendly for the people accessing the data, and giving them a competitive edge thanks to your data.
So don’t just collect data and hope that a mass of data will help you, it won’t. Collect less, and look after it better. Expand what you’ve got, if you’re confident in it, and give your customer-facing people better data – better access – and better alerts that will help them satisfy that customer more.
It’s not that hard…
