Every business stores, uses, and relies on data. Yet, not every business is engaging in optimal data management practices and tactics. Is yours? Since data has transformed into the cornerstone of business strategy, it’s crucial to understand what exactly is meant by data management, why it matters for your business, and the steps your organization can take today to ensure optimal performance. In this guide, we’ll outline everything you need to know to get started.
What is data management?
In today’s digital-first world, data has become a mainstay for business operations. Not only is the information created and shared within an organization vital to success, but it’s also growing at a surprising rate, too. Some estimates state that data has grown nearly 44x in the last decade1, from 1.2 zettabytes of new data to 35 zettabytes created and shared across the globe. Data management evolved as a way for organizations to organize, interpret, and leverage this key information to engage in optimized business processes.
While data management practices will vary from business-to-business and will look different depending on which company you survey, the principles of this practice remain the same. In a nutshell, data management is the process by which a company collects, stores and accesses data within the business while maintaining a sense of efficiency and accuracy in the process.
What are the steps of data management? Here are the 4 steps for data management success
Data management is the key to driving success within any organization. Whether you run an online retail shop, oversee a leading financial institution, or work in the healthcare industry, you understand that data is a valuable asset for strategic business decisions. Beyond data management playing a key role in operational efficiency, it also factors into your ability to maximize profits and generate happy clients. Ready to get started? Here are a few steps you’ll want to take:
1. Establish your key business objectives
Before you begin to establish a data management strategy, you’ll want to first start by outlining the key objectives in your business. Consider making a list that includes the current data your business is collecting as well as the goals your business has for its data. Identify any intersections in your objectives while noting gaps or issues present in your correct database and data collection process. With this outline, you’ll be able to best decipher what data your business needs, how you need to organize it, and opportunities for improvement based on how your company currently organizes and secures data.
2. Prioritizing data training throughout your business
Too often, business leaders think that data only needs to be a topic of discussion for those in data-centric roles, such as IT professionals or those focused on data analysis. However, fostering a widespread data-informed workplace is a key step in maintaining data integrity in a business, which helps to guarantee the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of your data.
Ensure that all individuals within an organization are trained on data, its importance, and how it can be leveraged to make more informed business decisions. Consider investing in training programs and communicating the importance of leveraging data in your business’s daily operations to achieve this goal.
3. Build a holistic and accurate view of your consumers
As you know, better quality data can lead to enhanced decision-making throughout a business. To achieve good data, you’ll want to invest in a data quality platform that can offer valuable insights into the information your business stores and processes daily. Investigate various data quality solutions that serve to improve the overall value of your data, including:
Data quality management solutions can connect hundreds of data sources to provide your business with more accurate customer profiles—a key part of achieving an organized data management program.
4. Invest in management solutions to ensure future data accuracy
The second data enters your system, the reliability of this information steadily begins to decline. Every day, countless pieces of information in your database will begin to reflect outdated addresses, phone numbers, emails, and more. Manual data maintenance is time-intensive, costly, and leaves room for human error. That’s why one of the best principles for data management is investing in data verification solutions that ensure the accuracy of your data today and into the future.
Key solutions, such as address verification, phone verification, and email verification tools help ensure that the information stored in your CRM is reliable and up-to-date. This in turn helps increase the success of reaching your customers correctly the first time—a necessary objective for experiencing marketing campaign success, brand growth, and client satisfaction.
Why data management matters
The way businesses utilize data has drastically transformed over the past decade. Now, more than ever, there is an increased need to maintain organized data and leverage this information strategically to remain ahead of competition. Since data is inevitably an integral part of your company’s success, creating a management plan for data collection and maintenance is critical.
If you’re not entirely convinced data management is necessary for your business, we’ve compiled a list of reasons why data management should be a priority in your everyday operations:
1. Increased customer satisfaction
Research shows that an astonishing 20% of companies2 have lost a customer due to inaccurate or incomplete customer information. Why? Whether you’re attempting to reach a client on an outdated number or ship out a package to an address that was incorrectly entered into your CRM, unreliable data works against all efforts your business makes to ensure satisfied, repeat customers. A simple misdelivered piece of mail or bounced email may end up costing you a prospective client.
2. Better brand reputability
The exchange of customer data often requires significant trust in a brand. Whether an individual shares their phone number, home address, email address or all the aforementioned pieces of information with a company, they trust that this information will be safely stored and used for any future interactions with a business. With the proper data management procedures in place, your business can help to ensure that data is accurate, up-to-date, and safely secured in an organization’s database. On the other hand, inaccurate data can easily discredit a company and foster a sense of distrust amongst consumers who may be unwilling to do repeat business with a given company.
3. Maximized profits
The proper data management initiatives will not only boost your branding and keep your clients happy, but it will maximize your bottom line and profits, too. How? Enhanced data means your employees don’t have to diverge from their necessary activities to handle the consequences of poor-quality data. Since misdelivered mail due to inaccurate addresses can also lead to considerable losses for your business, a data management plan will significantly reduce the occurrence of this issue as well.
It costs more to resolve data-related issues than it does to instill the proper preventative measures. Any business putting off data management investment will oftentimes find that they’re doing themselves a disservice by compromising on data quality measures.
4. Access to reliable and trustworthy data
The USPS® processes an average of 118,152 address changes3 daily. In addition to switching homes, your clients are likely to change their phone numbers and emails with an even greater frequency. Since data is everchanging, it’s crucial to prioritize data management plans and solutions that ensure reliable and updated customer data at any given time.
Begin your data management journey today
At Experian, our goal is to help businesses just like yours build, store, and leverage high quality data that will assist in strategic and successful decision making. Our team of qualified experts are here to help your business. Ready to get started?
