Blog: Why it’s important to update your customer data post vacation

Your customer data changes - more than you think

As we all know, vacation tends to act as a time to reflect on life and business. And more often than not, that reflection leads to changes, both big and small. So if you're a company or organization who depends on having accurate, up-to-date data on your customers, it's crucial to remember to refresh your data after the holidays. 

To paint a bigger picture of the importance of updating your data, it is estimated that roughly 20-25% of customer data in Swedish companies change every year. Incorrect data can lead to additional costs, missed opportunities and negative impacts on your brand, making data quality crucial to your business.

Common data changes

As these changes can seem minor or significant, the effect of not having the correct data might vary. However, sooner or later the importance of having the right data will kick in and it's at that time you wish you'd already updated it.

Here's a list of changes expected to affect your company’s customer data:

• Relocations (both companies and people) to new addresses in different cities or countries. 
• Individuals changing jobs completely or their current job title, responsibilities or roles within a company.
• Company engagements, such as board members, beneficial owners etc. 
• Financial information, has the company's financial status changed during the vacation? (especially common during the pandemic)

How does customer data changes affect your business?

For a company like a bank, regulating company loans, it's key to be aware of any financial or legal changes their customers might have gone through during the vacation periods. So if the financial situation at a company has changed, good or bad, making the loan taker a high or low risk customer, it might change the situation of the loan. A change in company representatives and/or their PEP or sanctions lists status for example, could also trigger red flags.

If your business is shipping a product to customers (in both B2C and B2B), doing any form of marketing or posting physical agreements or contracts, it's crucial for the receiver information, such as address and contact information is up to date. When "bad data" causes businesses to send products, contracts or marketing in the wrong direction, it will not only come with an increased cost but a negative impact on your brand as well. 

In other words, bad data is an issue that is time-consuming, costly and bad for your reputation!

Three ways to keep your customer data up to date

Although it might seem like an overwhelming process to update all of your customer data, it doesn't have to be. Here are some ways to think about your customer data management to reduce costly and time-consuming manual work, as well as human errors.

Regular data cleansing

As mentioned above, roughly 20-25% of customer data in Swedish companies change every year, making it important to keep your data up to date. And given the fact that these changes can happen at any given time throughout the year, it might not be enough to just update the data once or twice a year. But as a guideline, remember to regularly conduct data cleanses, especially before triggering any form of data monitoring.

Customer onboarding

When your company registers a new customer, a smooth and efficient process is needed from start to finish. To avoid churn and abandonment in your customer onboarding process, the customer, ideally, shouldn’t have to worry about entering tons of fields of data just to become a customer, or worrying about giving the correct answer when signing up. Instead, make sure you collect data from external sources, which can be auto populated in a digital customer onboarding flow, that is accurate from the start!

Monitoring

To keep the data updating-process from becoming a full time job, the easiest solution is consistent data monitoring over time. Webhook solutions allow you to subscribe to changes in your customer data, receive notifications when changes occur and automatically collect them, keeping your systems up to date.

Webhook solutions are widely appreciated by business who monitor their customer data over time. Especially since they enable monitoring of customer data without requirements of any form of list, file or register of your customers to be handed over to a third party.