Managing your customer data

The first step to improving your data is to ensure the data coming into your organisation has been properly and compliantly collected, and that it’s brought together in one place in a timely manner.

Once you’ve gained access to all your data, you need to audit and enhance your records so that they can support marketing and analytic operations. Good data management solutions such as those offered by Experian can make sure any duplicate records are eliminated, gone-away contact details have been updated and that suppressions and opt-outs are tagged.

Once you’ve ensured your customer data has been collected compliantly, then centralised, standardised and refreshed, one crucial step remains. You need to check for possible gaps in your customer database. If they’re found, enrichment options are available to fill in the missing details and ensure your communication channels remain effective.

Customer data may derive from very disparate sources. It's crucial to standardise, unify and connect these unconnected records together to provide a single, consistent – and accurate – view of customers through a Single Customer View product, such as that offered by Experian.

Different needs and challenges require different solutions. While off-the-shelf templated workflows may work for some, a bespoke custom database may be the only practical option for others. If you’re not sure what best fits for your operation, look for expert help to evaluate the most cost-effective platform that puts data at the centre of your organisation to give you a competitive advantage. For those organisations looking to do most of the heavy lifting themselves, Experian’s experts can also provide an on-premise keying solution. 

By getting the data right, you can deliver a better customer experience with enhanced communication and insights. By bringing your data together, you can increase operational efficiency by reducing unnecessary duplication of effort, saving time and money for your business. 

When you onboard new customers and gain their consent, you need to ensure you have a robust, immediate understanding of their new customer profile. Obtaining these crucial data points, on demand and in the moment, will enhance customer and prospect journeys such as call centre interactions or automated lead scoring processes. In turn, these insights can power longer-term data-led strategies. 

Having a valid, cleansed view of customer data is not just desirable from a marketing and analytics perspective. Removing or suppressing pertinent records is also a requirement for satisfying customer expectations and GDPR compliance standards.

The need to connect datasets with other organisations to extract valuable insights and communication strategies is not a new one. Nowadays, it involves linking and sharing data from a multitude of channels – both offline and online – in a compliant way.

Retailers should look for cooperatives that share transactional data into a common pool. Look for a solution that does more than simply granular transactional data from the retailers. For example, Experian’s data cooperative – one of the UK’s largest – combines retailer data with its own broader insight to provide a unique view. From this, more accurate predictive models are built to drive acquisition across channels, including non-digital routes like direct mail.

With the advent of clean room technology, new methods of data collaboration allow your brand to host your offline, CRM data securely in data bunkers of a decentralised environment. Once the right permissions are in place, data can be matched in the clean room with other parties’ datasets, without the need of physical transfers. Overlap analysis power further insights opportunities. 

While clean room solutions can unlock new use cases for your brand, you would need to confident that they’re the right answer for your business challenges. There are many scenarios where traditional data collaboration is more advantageous, especially where multiple datasets require advanced standardisation which may not be currently available via automated clean room data matching. Experian can help assess if clean room solutions are right for your business problem.

Going forward, digital marketing will see far greater collaboration between brands and publishers to create compelling solutions that engage customers without compromising data privacy and giving users control over their data. A solution like Experian Match can leverage your first party data (online and offline) and connect it in a data-secure environment with other media publishers. This in turn can unlock valuable campaign activation opportunities.