Modern day businesses are beginning to understand the fact that the success or failure of their business depends majorly on the quality of the data they have and make use of. As such they have started paying so much attention to improving their data quality. Although this post is aimed at walking you the various types of data quality issues you could run into in your day to day business, let’s quickly take a look at the some of the effects poor data quality could have on your business and afterwards we’ll take a look at the common data quality issues.
EFFECTS OF LOW DATA QUALITY ON BUSINESSES
Loss or reduction in Return on Investment (ROI)
A business could have a great product that would benefit its customers immensely. And still end up not making profit or even the desired amount or units. How is that possible? If half or many of the emails and customers data gathered are bad. Then you can be sure that half of the intended users are not aware of the product. This would lead to a very Low return on Investment (ROI) and would hamper the growth of the business greatly.
Poor data can ruin or damage your company’s image
If you keep sending a lot of emails that do not reach the intended users your company will be blacklisted. And categorized as a sender with low reputation. The implication of this is that many of your mails will be regarded as spam. Therefore the chances your recipient would open will be very slim. In the long run, if this occurrence is checked, the company’s email may be blocked entirely. And won’t deliver at all. For a company who has fallen victim of this situation, it is not very easy for them to gain back customer’s trust and redeem their image.
Poor data could lead to loss of customers
If you are business owner and you have a large customer base, you shouldn’t be told how important it is for you to keep your customers data up to date. If not, each time any of your customer changes email address or even residential address you lose them as a customer. It may seem like it’s just one person, but over time you’ll notice that you’ve lost quite a lot of them as customers. And as the saying goes, customers are the soul of any business.
Now that you have a clue of how heavily poor data could cost your business as a business owner. Tt is important that you do a deep scan through your data base to determine if it’s of high quality or not. If not then you should plan to improve your data quality. Below are some of the major data quality issues that business owners usually run into.
COMMON DATA QUALITY ISSUES
Poor data arrangement
One major data quality issue is poor data arrangement that makes it very difficult to scan through your data base. This would in turn make the data difficult or almost impossible to use.
Too Much Data
Although this doesn’t seem like a bad thing but a closer look reveals that often times than not. and many of these data are useless and irrelevant. You expend so much resources browsing through the bad and irrelevant data. When you should be working on better and qualified data.
Duplicate and inconsistent data
A major indicator that your data base has quality issues is that there are inconsistencies in the data format and forms. Also, if you have a single data appearing more than once, it is detrimental to your business.,/p>
Inadequate Data Security
One major data quality issue that businesses easily fall into when dealing with customer data is inadequate data safety. As with every other aspect of life, data security is very important and customers don’t take this lightly. You as a business owner cannot afford to mishandle customer data. Because it can easily fall into the preying hands of criminals and frauds. Asides this, customers would never do business with a company or startup that can guarantee the safety of their data.
Poorly Defined Data
When your data is not properly defined, you will encounter errors and issues. This would make data very difficult to sort and analyze. For example if information is placed in the wrong category such as an individual’s name is entered as a business name or company name would cause issues and confusion.
Incorrect and outdated Data
One major data quality issue that you can run into that can bring down your business is incorrect data. Statistics reveals that data goes out of date very easily at a rate of about 2.2% per month. With this info, you can be sure that close to 25% of your data is out of date and needs updating.
Incomplete data
If proper care is not taken, it is easy to fall into the data issue of incomplete data. And an incomplete data is as good as useless. For example a data set that contains details of ten customers but their email address are missing is totally useless for an email marketing campaign.
Data loss due to system upgrades
Often times there would be a need for you to upgrade and improve your system in order to make your business run seamlessly. But during this time there is a chance that you’ll lose your information or it could get corrupted. Although this is inevitable or preventable, you can take measures against data loss. And by ensuring that you create a backup of your database before you begin any system upgrade. This way even if anything goes wrong and the data on your system goes missing you can be rest assured of recovering them from the backup.
With all these said, you have gained enough insights to the various types of data quality issues you can run encounter in your day to day business activity. And also some of the detrimental effects of low data quality to your business. If you are having a hard time fixing your data quality issues then you can reach out to us at Ask Data Entry where we will provide you top quality data service solutions.
