Customer acquisition takes a significant amount of resources, time and effort. That’s precisely why companies want their customers to stay loyal to the brand forever.
However, new eCommerce ventures are launched every day and thus the competition never decreases. There’s a limit to how products can be differentiated and the type of discounts you can offer.
And this is where it becomes important to offer a consistent customer experience across shopping channels. Whether the customer is placing an order online, on a shopping app or at a physical store, they expect their experience to be the same.
Data: the foundation of consistent customer experiences
Would you trust a brand if a customercare representative addressed you by the wrong name? How would you feel about a brand that recommended products that aren’t relevant to you?
The only way to avoid such occurrences is by relying on good quality data. If you have clean data, you can maintain direct lines of communication for a good customer experience. Last-mile delivery agents have the correct address and phone number to contact the customer and avoid mis-deliveries. According to a recent study on retail delivery statistics, 13% of consumers said that they would not shop from a brand again if their order was not delivered on time.
The quality of data available also influences the insight offered by the data. For example, you will get a clearer idea of the customer’s tastes and demographics that help personalize communications with them. For example, if you can verify the customer’s address you can send them targeted newsletters listing products available at the closest retail outlet.
Improving customer experience by improving data quality
Given how the quality of data available influences customer experiences, you need to work on cleaning and enriching datasets to offer consistently good customer experiences. Here are a few things you can do.
1. Autocomplete addresses
Street addresses are one of the key data fields collected from a customer. This helps understand customer demographics and is essential for last-mile delivery. Given the average length of street addresses, there’s a high risk of making typographic errors when entering the address details. A difference of a single digit in postal pin codes can send an order to a completely different city. Using an address autocomplete tool greatly reduces the risk of such errors.
An address autocomplete tool automatically suggests complete addresses based on the initial details entered by a customer. With type-ahead address completion, you can ensure that the addresses entered into the database are complete and verified.
In addition to improving data quality, using an address autocomplete tool also simplifies the checkout process. It reduces the time taken for data entry by 50% and thus reduces the risk of shopping cart abandonment and improves the overall customer experience.
2. Verify Data Entries
If a customer makes a typographic error and notes their email as [email protected] instead of [email protected] your emails will not be delivered. Similarly, there may be errors made when entering an address and phone number details. Incorrect contact details can be disastrous for the customer experience. It makes communication difficult and could lead to duplication of customer records.
To keep this from happening, you need to verify all customer identities, phone numbers and addresses stored in your database. Verification helps ensure that the contact details provided are correct and valid so that your attempts to contact the customer are always successful.
3. Address data decay
Customers are under no obligation to update your database when they move to a new city or when they switch mobile service providers. When a customer changes their phone number or moves to a new city, the data in your database becomes obsolete and useless. The rate of data decay each month can be as high as 3%. If this isn’t addressed the decay can pile up and worsen.
Relying on outdated data will have a negative impact on your communication with customers. Orders may be delivered to the wrong address and last-mile delivery agents may be unable to contact the customer for clarifications. This reduces revenue and increases your operational costs thereby lowering your profit margin.
To keep this from happening, you need to continually analyze your databases and address data decay as early as possible. Phone and email verification tools can help ensure that the details in your database and accurate and in use. Similarly, address verification tools can check addresses in the database against reliable third party databases to update details such as changes in street name, etc.
4. Deduplicate records
Data is collected from multiple touchpoints and thus there’s a high risk of duplicate records being created for the same individual. This issue worsens when you take human error into account. By misspelling a customer’s name, a customer care representative may unknowingly create a duplicate record in the database.
This affects the reliability of your database and creates confusion in the customer experience. For example, let’s say a duplicate customer record was created when a customer made an error while signing in to the shopping app with their phone number. Instead of entering 9876543210, the number entered was 9876543201 with the latter being invalid. This affects your ability to communicate with the customer and thus interferes with the customer experience. It also leads to poor analytics.
To ensure that customers have a consistent shopping experience, you need to assess data records regularly to identify records that have the potential to be duplicates, assess them and merge them if they prove to be duplicates.
In conclusion
High-quality data builds a positive customer experience and aids with personalization. Today personalizing communication isn’t a luxury but the standard for a good customer experience. For this, you will need to regularly analyze the quality of data in your database and correct and enrich it wherever possible. The good news is that there are a number of tools that can help you achieve high data quality.
With clean, accurate and verified customer data you can deliver an exceptional customer experience across channels to all your customers.
