Completing the picture - Appending customer contact details for improved business outcomes

Customers are at the core of any organization—they are the “why and how” of a successful business. Yet, if you were to send out “Thank you” letters to your customers to say how grateful you are for their loyalty and support, would you be able to reach all of them?

For any business today, it is critical to not only have an accurate and complete contact record for every customer, but also to have a reliable view of those customers’ purchasing behaviors and preferences. By appending missing contact details to customer records, you can ensure you have the correct phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses to get those “Thank you” letters to the right doorsteps (or inboxes). Even better, you can personalize those letters using insights gleaned from third-party data. Here’s how!

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1. Validate, cleanse, and deduplicate your data
Building a complete customer view starts with the data you already have. Leveraging a contact data verification tool can help to make sure the contact information in your system is valid—and deliverable. The next step is to cleanse that data to resolve any issues raised during validation, particularly around inconsistent data formats or erroneous entries. Last, use the cleansed data to identify duplicate records for harmonization or archiving.

2. Recognize the gaps
Cleansing and addressing errors within your contact data may yield a number of gaps in your existing records. For example, you might have a name and address for a customer, but no email address. By identifying the pieces of missing data in your records, and whether that is needed to meet your business objectives, you can work to gather these missing details and enable better outcomes.

3. Append data to fill the gaps
Gathering missing contacts details en masse is a task best suited for technology. A data append service, for example, uses a combination of third-party data and sophisticated matching capabilities to track down the bits of customer information you may be missing. By using a service to perform a bulk data append, you can instantly gain actionable data that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Want to send eBills to customers over email, but you’ve only been collecting postal addresses? Problem solved.

4. Enrich your data
Your customers are your most valuable resource—get to know them better. With data enrichment, you can enhance your contact records with consumer attributes ranging from demographics to buyer propensity information. With a clearer picture of who your customers are, you can provide more personalized services, maximize marketing dollars, and streamline the buying journey.