Today is National Telephone Day, serving as a day to celebrate the first telephone. While thinking of that first telephone, I look down at the mobile phone in my hand, an item I would be close to powerless without. I think of the growth and innovation around telephone technology and how today’s reliance on these objects compares to the time of their inception in 1876. I believe the evolution of the telephone has a similar story to something we are growing more dependent on every day: data quality.
It seems like with each day, week, month, our mobile phones grow more and more unorganized. Emails are overflowing, contact information changes and locating the correct contact becomes more challenging. We have grown to depend on our phones for more than a simple call; from our calendar to our contacts, memorizing information is a thing of the past as our networks grow. All the information in our world lives in this little 4x2 device.
Many companies relate to their databases much the same as we would our mobile phones. Organizations today depend on data for everything—when they struggle with data hygiene, it affects their ability to effectively communicate with their customers.
We could take the mobile phone analogy one step further with this comparison:
Today, we seem to upgrade our phones constantly—for some of us, it may be every year when the new iPhone or Galaxy is released. Think about all the new contacts, addresses, and numbers you have on your phone. Now think about what happens when you move to a new phone and all of that information has to be transferred?
Much like how I get frustrated trying to figure out which of the ten Jens I have in my contacts is the one I want to message, businesses suffer from the same problem when it comes to communicating with the correct customer, especially when their database is a swamp of incorrect or duplicate records. (If you thought the duplicates contacts in your mobile phone were confusing, consider a database of millions of contacts that businesses must sort through.)
Today, our phone contacts can have creative names. We might have our mother listed as anything from “Mama Bear” to calling her by their full name, “Margaret”. We have to decipher who is mom and who is that old roommate from college, the process of cleaning and matching contacts seems to be a never-ending, manual, time consuming process.
Through data quality solutions, there are now more tools than ever to help businesses manage the constant flow of consumer information. Through our data matching solution, businesses can identify if William and Will is the same person, and remove the duplicate information, helping to de-clutter the database.
We know how nice it is to have a de-cluttered phone, having an organized database gives the same satisfaction. Being able to communicate with the correct person without having to filter through a mess of contacts could save an astounding amount of time.
Just as the telephone has rapidly evolved since 1876, data quality is rapidly evolving. Experian Data Quality has a tool to help make smarter decisions and build a single customer view that allows you to make every interaction count. Data Matching from Experian Data Quality provides the ability to discover intelligent links between your customer records, identify and remove duplicates, and suppress records you cannot use.
As technology for telephones have changed, we are always first in line to get the latest model. Have you gotten the latest in data quality technology as well?
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