Customer experience, or CX, has become one of the hottest topics in business today. However, like many words, when thrown around too much, they can lose their meaning.
Here we will discuss what CX means for your business and how it can be affected by bad data.
Fresh, timely and customer-relevant data frame the conversation for your CX.
Why CX Matters
Although the term “customer experience” has been used (too) frequently of late, that doesn’t detract from the fact that CX makes a huge impact on your business. How your customers interpret their experience with your brand matters. It can make or break a business by driving purchasing decisions towards or away from your firm.
Customers in the digital marketplace are extremely demanding, and they can afford to be. Online shopping has become so prevalent that the modern consumer commands unprecedented power. As such, failure to deliver a satisfactory CX will result in damaging your brand.
How Bad Data Affects CX
To further illustrate the direct impact that data quality has on customer experiences, and, in turn, businesses, consider this: Gartner has estimated that inferior data can cost firms a whopping $9.7 million per year.
The damage encompasses more than money alone: can your brand really afford tarnished reputations and missed opportunities that result from bad CX caused by poor data quality?
The Importance of Fresh Data
One of the most important aspects of data is that it must be as fresh as possible. Just like organic fruits and vegetables, the longer they’re out, the more they degrade and providing them in such a state over time can be unhealthy to consume. Eventually, once either data or food is sufficiently outdated, it actually becomes harmful when used. If you eat a rotten banana, you can get sick.
When you use outdated data, your business loses customer trust—who wants to eat rotten tomatoes? When you lose customers you will, of course, lose money. Essentially, the fresher your data is, the more positive the customers interaction.
Data Powers Personalization, Positive CX
Among the myriad of uses for data, the facilitation of personalization is among the most important. Creating personalized correspondence for customers requires fresh, even real-time, data about the individual recipient. In today’s market, you simply can’t afford to generalize.
A significant degree of personalization has become the standard rather than a luxury, meaning that providing it for your customers is expected, not hoped for.
If your data is not sufficiently up to date, you can end up adding details that could result in an extremely negative CX. For example, marketing something that is typically sold to an older demographic to a younger one could turn them off. More specifically, addressing someone by a gender other than what they associate themselves with could result in a particularly bad CX and confuse or offend them.
Introducing INTOUCH®
One of the most important and effective tools that you can use in combination with data is customer communications management (CCM) software. As a 100% cloud-based enterprise-grade solution, INTOUCH delivers a sophisticated CCM that simplifies your CX for an unparalleled ROI.
INTOUCH can integrate with—and join together—just about any data source: your CRM; claims and contract management systems; and even mainframes that provide a rich sources of data to personalize customer communications. These data sources can replace variables used as placeholders, and can even drive logic used to choose the right communication and content to send to each recipient.
Optimize CX with Topdown
Top Down Systems Corporation (or Topdown, for short) creates the tools to not only provide a smooth CX but also ready for the next level of innovation. INTOUCH is a key asset to have when corresponding with customers, and our four decades of experience in the CCM industry will help ensure you get the best return on your investment in CCM.
Have a chat with the folks at Topdown and start providing superior customer experiences!
Image: Pixabay
