Most modern businesses understand how customer data and information are crucial to their operations. A business owner can generate insights and make better decisions by utilizing them. While this sounds good, inspiring, and comforting, remember that not all data is valuable. For example, information on how a customer prefers one soda brand over another holds little value to a company that sells lightbulbs.
Ensuring the data you collect is beneficial to your business operations is critical. How can you guarantee that you receive all the relevant data you need for your company and maximize all the benefits you can get from it? To do that, you need to know more about data enrichment.
Definition Of Data Enrichment
Data enrichment can be defined as an additional process in data management. It aims to enhance the quality of the collected data by adding relevant or related datasets. After that, a pair of eyes or a quality assurance team needs to ensure that they will verify that everything checks out, is accurate, and is helpful to the company.
Usually, data enrichment involves filling in missing information, correcting errors, and adding more data points to existing records. If you only focus on customer accounts, it’s often called account enrichment. Many third-party providers specialize in this kind of data enrichment. So, if you know that this is the only aspect you’ll need to work on for your business, you might as well get their services instead of a full-blown data enrichment firm.
Reason Why Data Enrichment Important
Data enrichment helps ensure that all the data you acquire is accurate and up-to-date. After all, receiving the wrong information is easy, mainly if people collect and submit them manually. Also, data can change. For example, a customer’s address may change if they plan to move their residence later.
Data enrichment forces organizations to continually add relevant data to their existing records. Hence, they’ll often have no choice but to have multiple opportunities to verify the accuracy and relevance of all the pieces of information that they have.
The Way To Perform Data Enrichment
Before anything else, you should know why you need data in the first place. Do you need it for marketing purposes? Do you need it to make better business decisions? Or do you need it just in case you use them for some unknown reason?
Once you identify why you need data, you should know how additional information will be helpful to your initial batch of data. You should also consider who and what will perform the data enrichment process. Will you create a dedicated team or let a third-party service provider do it automatically for you? Do you want artificial intelligence (AI) to do it for you instead?
Remember that getting a professional provider can let you and your business utilize their expertise and experience. Usually, these providers have better methods of collecting data and know which ones are relevant to your existing records.
Benefits Of Data Enrichment
At this point, you already know that data enrichment can improve your decision-making and ensure you have a valuable and relevant data set for your business. Aside from these, it lets you see new opportunities and invent innovations to improve your business operations further.
Of course, those are big-picture benefits, so here are some simple advantages that data enrichment can give you.
- Improves sales efficiency: Knowing your customers and leads better can make it easier for you to sell them something.
- Elevates your customer service level: The more you know about your customer, the more you can give them what they want.
- Lets you know the VIPs: With more data, you can identify your biggest customers and spenders, allowing you to prioritize them more in your marketing strategies.
- Prevents your marketing campaigns from getting lost: Even with the best strategies in play, you wouldn’t know if your marketing campaign is efficiently working if you had little idea of your target audience.
- Identifies bad actors: The moment your business starts to scale up, the higher the chance you’ll encounter malicious individuals that might harm your company.
Remember, those are just some of the key benefits of data enrichment. Of course, these benefits will only be apparent if you perform this process correctly.
Conclusion
Data enrichment is one of the processes you shouldn’t forget about if you run a data-driven business. Now you know how important it is and can greatly benefit you. With it, you can always have a guarantee that your data will be consistently accurate and current, leading to better business decisions and further success down the line.
