Customer analytics have the potential to promote business profitability by surfacing insights which enable correct business decisions to be made, increasing customer revenue or reducing inefficiencies in the marketing, sales and customer service teams. Meaningful and accurate customer insights must be based on trustworthy, reliable customer data, yet most companies today are dealing with data that is incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate, inaccessible or fragmented, resulting in business and marketing decisions being made that fail to yield the desired results.

In the best case scenario, a data science team or specific business users will spend precious time cleaning up the mess. In the worst case scenario, time is not spent cleaning the data and faulty data becomes the foundation for poor decisions. It’s not a pleasant choice!

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

As a top British daily news brand, our customer reaches 1 in 5 UK adults every day and 70% of the population each month. In 2019 it launched a tablet and smartphone app that allows users to enjoy content from the UK or Scottish editions of its daily periodicals, along with exclusive daily radio broadcasts, podcasts and videos from leading journalists. This draws 34,000 weekly users, with an impressive dwell time of 47 minutes per day.

Poor quality data is the result of numerous errors that can progressively ruin the success of your marketing campaigns. In fact, according to IDG, poor data quality is one of the modern marketer’s biggest concerns, with 66% of those polled declaring data quality and accuracy as a “top priority”. 

Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of a customer, resulting in poor campaign results and inaccurate insights. Worse still, it creates a bad experience for your customers whereby they either miss out on a specific offer, are targeted wrongly or receive the same message multiple times.