Accurate data is the lifeblood of any business that wishes to remain competitive in today’s market environment. Pools of high-quality data provide the foundation for data analysis. Data analysis helps businesses choose paths that enhance customer engagement, efficient workflow, improved profit, and a healthy reputation with its customer base. If your data is faulty or incomplete in any way, you are not able to make decisions from a place of certainty to propel your enterprise forward and beyond your competition. Here are a few of the many ways data quality could impact business operations.
Data that is faulty can be due to a number of factors including the following:
- Duplicate data is present
- Data is not the same across departments
- Data is incomplete
- Data is not up-to-date
- Data is not in a usable format
1- Influences on Customer Engagement
Data can be utilized to enhance customer engagement, whether in a store or online. For example, data can be gleaned to track customers as they peruse your website. This data can be analyzed to see where customers tend to click away, get confused, or fail to make a purchase commitment. Conversely, data gathered in this manner can show where and with what demographics your marketing approach is working smoothly.
2- Disruptions Versus Workflow
If you do not have a means of data governance in place to ensure you have quality data, you could ship packages to the wrong addresses. Your supplies may end up overstocked, or you may not have vital supplies on hand in a timely manner to keep workers productive. You also could make errors in serving your customers in a faithful and timely manner due to corrupt or duplicate data.
3- Financial Gains Versus Losses
Savvy organizations utilize quality data and its insights to propel their organizations to new heights. Companies that have high-quality data sources to analyze can make predictions about market conditions and adjust operations accordingly. Data quality can help enterprises better position themselves against competitors in tight markets. Reliable and accurate data can also help companies nimbly plan when to make strategic moves, such as launching a new product.
4- Impacts to Company Reputation
Companies that rely upon data quality with a data governance plan in place do not experience impacts on their reputation caused by faulty data. Enterprises lacking good data governance strategies can find their reputation damaged with their customer base when their enterprise fails to meet expectations in a timely manner with full satisfaction. Anyone who follows the news in recent years knows that the airlines have had spectacular hits to their reputations, some of these incidents due to faulty data governance systems. Lockheed Martin contributed to the loss of the Mars orbiter it built due to failing to use the metric system instead of the imperial measurement system. Because of the discrepancy in the units of measure, key navigational data was corrupted in the communications between Lockheed Martin and NASA, contributing to the expensive spacecraft’s loss.
When enterprises utilize a system of strong data governance, they are well on their way to higher profitability, improved customer loyalty, and better employee productivity.