Keeping your customer data up to date is crucial to business performance for many companies today. However, ensuring continuously clean, fresh and accurate data, can seem like a tricky road to navigate at first.
1.Minimize manual data entry
The first step to ensure updated customer data is to minimize the amount of manual data entry and remove the human error factor. A good way to do this is to implement some sort of authenticator, like an entry of organization number, social security number or BankID, early on in the process. This enables automated data collection based on the authenticator input. If an authenticator is active in the onboarding process, the risk of having to do manual work later on in the process minimizes drastically.
Let's say for example that the customer, by mistake, enters the wrong address in the onboarding process, if an authenticator isn’t in place, this might cause future errors for things like shipping and billing.
2. Start monitoring the data as soon as it’s collected
A common mistake when it comes to data handling is to wait a while from the actual data entry to the first time it’s monitored. The reason that you should start monitoring the data right away is pretty straightforward. A company or persons data can change at any time, they could move, get new employees, become a financial risk customer etc…To keep your data up to date and valid, it’s crucial to avoid risks that might cause you trouble in the future.
Activating monitoring from the get-go will ensure data quality from start to finish.
3. Conducting regular updates
Why risk waiting for updates to be sent your way after the changes have occurred, when you could be proactive instead and receive the changes as they happen? By doing regular updates you lower the risk of having faulty data in your systems.
Regular updates allow you to see the change at the time when it occurs, or even ahead of time. Let's say that you get a notification of a customer becoming high-risk, getting new owners or replacing key representatives. Real-time updates means that you could take actions ahead of time, before this actually becomes a problem for you.
Webhook solutions are a great way of conducting your customer data monitoring, as you can receive push notifications of updates instead of polling for them regularly.
4. Trigger actions when changes occur
Once the data supplier has been chosen and the system is set up to match your needs, the next step is to set up triggers as soon as any changes take place in your monitored datasets. Using webhooks as an example, triggers be leveraged to automate data updates based on changes occurring in your customer data.
After chosing your datasets to monitor make sure you build your process in a way so that the information gets updated automatically to your database, systems or platforms.
5. Don’t forget to offboard
The last step in keeping good quality data is to remember to offboard and remove the data that you no longer have use for, such as former customers, prospects that have been in your system for too long and so on.
This step is important both for you and your customers. Legal aspects of processing or managing data, especially personal data, require you to offboard data that you no longer have a purpose of usage for. In addition, it creates a lot of friction and frustration, to keep receiving mails and other forms of contact as a prospect or former customer of your company.
