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Learning more about your customers and achieving a single customer view is a seemingly elusive goal for many companies. With the right tools, however, you can append your existing information with additional data to get a more holistic view of your customers. Prospect IQ (PIQ) is one of Experian’s data enrichment solutions that enables you to do so. PIQ is used most often by companies to enhance their marketing through greater customer insight and personalization. Whether that means better approaches to getting repeat customers, new avenues for attracting new leads, or better targeting existing leads, enriched data provides additional information that helps you approach your goal more strategically. Beyond marketing, other customers use PIQ to better understand their customers’ wants and needs, to expand product lines, and to model the likelihood of a sale. 

We live in an era of healthy living (whether we like it or not). Much to my dismay, I find my doctor constantly telling me to eat more fruits and vegetables, whereas I would rather be eating a cheeseburger and fries. And that’s not all – drink more water, cut out carbohydrates, take the stairs, get more sleep – it’s endless! The reality is, my doctor is right—and if I want to live a long and prosperous life, I need to take a comprehensive approach to my healthy lifestyle. Eating a green bean occasionally isn’t going to do the trick. I must see how I can incorporate as many aspects of healthy living as I can into my everyday life. 

Data is truly at the heart of every organization. We use it to back up business proposals and initiatives, prepare forecasts and projections, pinpoint areas for improvement, and substantiate cases we try to build. We can’t rely solely on instinct and gut feeling because they are intangible, and with the amount of information collected in today’s data-driven society, most businesses have come to expect the credibility that data brings and are investing in that power.

Being a Marketer myself, I know that we are nothing without our data. We are constantly looking to understand, improve, and leverage data in new and exciting ways to drive revenue for our business. We connect with our friends in Analytics or Business Intelligence to help us make visuals to share information and insight about our data, all of which takes time and resources from multiple teams. I wanted to take the opportunity to share my 5 tips for better leveraging your data.

Last week, I had the opportunity of attending the NASWA UI Directors’ Conference and IT/Legal Issues Forum in Orlando, Florida. The conference was a forum to collaborate and discuss innovative ways to improve customer service and business decision making, while fighting fraud within state workforce agencies. At this conference, I had the ability to connect with leadership to discuss the impact that quality data can have on their systems and processes.

Yesterday, I, along with twenty-seven employees from Experian, had the opportunity to spread financial literacy to youngsters in the Greater Boston area. We partnered with the Junior Achievement of Northern New England (JA), whose overall mission is to educate and inspire students from kindergarten to eighth grade about financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, the data an organization collects is expected to deliver insight and value back to the business. Therefore, there is an increased focus on the accuracy and reliability of data collected, while there is also the apparent need for business users to have direct access to their data. We are seeing organizations express their commitment to making data-driven decisions, and this is only possible when business users are directly able to understand and leverage data to make these decisions. Despite this growing need, a common problem presents itself when IT is the keeper of an organization’s data, and business users have to wait for insight from the IT that they can understand.

When you build something, the final product is only as strong as the foundation it was built upon. Building a company is no different. It’s not uncommon for startups, in the pursuit of rapid growth and higher valuations, to accidentally allow the basics to become an afterthought.

“Boo!” Is that a ghost or ghoul? No—it’s something much spookier: bad customer contact data. Did you know that less than half of retailers trust their data to make important business decisions? In fact, 57 percent of retailers say that they rely on educated guesses or gut feelings to make decisions based on their data. While blood and guts may have a place in horror movies, gut feelings are simply not enough to go on for important business decisions. Accurate, reliable data to drive decision-making is a far stronger retail strategy.

This week I attended the 50th Annual ISM show, which is the largest Health and Human Services (HHS) technology event of the year. Here, I had the opportunity to chat with some interesting people within the HHS space to understand their organization’s current data management practices. I was also able to listen to some informative sessions that explored ways to improve the HHS space using new, innovative technologies. I have personally spent the past couple years working in and learning about the HHS market, so I wanted to sit down and reflect on the most pressing topics in our world.