Customer data is the lifeblood of Customer Relations Management (CRM). Defective or wrong data can have a negative impact on the financial aspects of a business. This Data entered on a day to day basis in to CRM’s are critical while managing an organization. Managing customer data can be a real challenge for organizations with a large pool of customers. These challenges are growing as people are constantly generating profile and activity data across the plethora of social networks and mobile devices. Processing such information is crucial to get information about customers, which in turn, is strategic for decision-making about marketing campaigns, pricing policies, and new products. However, businesses face many challenges when it comes to managing customer data.
-
- Difficulty in Integrating Data
The “State of Customer Analytics 2012” report showed that about 54 percent of companies surveyed have difficulty in managing and integrating data from the many varied sources. Data related to customers is stored in multiple systems, under different departments, may be duplicated, available in multiple formats, and in different levels of granularity. Aggregating such information is very difficult.
-
- Long Time for Data Extraction
In a data-driven organization, processed data has substantial value in helping to make more informed business decisions. Insights from big data cannot be captured within a single day. The inability to automate structured and unstructured data quickly and effectively is one among the biggest challenges in big data projects and will take a lot of time to complete. Surveys show that 60% of the businesses typically take at least 18 months to complete big data projects.
-
- Data Inaccessible for Analysis
The majority of information that companies have now is unstructured. By 2012, Gartner predicted that enterprise data will grow by 800 percent in five years, out of which 80 percent will be unstructured. However, proper management of unstructured data will determine how effectively and efficiently a company can serve its customers in the future.
-
- Inability to Act on Captured Customer Data
Inability to process and extract useful information is one among the major challenges of organizations in losing revenue opportunities. A study by Oracle says that organizations are losing 14 percent of incremental revenue for leveraging collected information. On average, private sector organizations with revenues of $1 billion or more say that they are losing approximately 13 percent of their annual revenue because they are unable to extract useful information.
Businesses are moving toward greater integration of their systems and automated decision making, which will only increase the risks posed by poor data. Having a data quality control program can help. Also, partnering with a company that can provide professional data management services can ensure efficient strategies for data capture and cleansing, and maintenance of diverse types of customer information for strategic decision making.
