Most economic experts agree that we are facing a very different economic road ahead. After over a decade where core inflation rates rarely broke 2%, they have recently peaked at over 6%. Recent bank failures have led to tighter credit from lenders. And while unemployment rates have finally returned to earth from the heights of the COVID pandemic, there are concerns that forecasts of significant near-term job losses will impact consumer spending.
What does all of this mean for your business? For many, improving the yield and ROI of their sales and marketing efforts has taken on a renewed urgency. In this blog, we will explore how Service Objects has been changing to help you meet these challenges.
Using Customer Data Validation to drive revenue enhancement
Business has evolved over the past decade, as has Service Objects.
For a long time, companies accepted a certain amount of inaccurate and poor contact data among their customers or prospects. There were many reasons that contact data was inaccurate, such as people moving, changing jobs or job titles, changing their phone numbers or they were simply fraudulent or bogus contacts to start. The costs of identifying and correcting these issues were largely prohibitive, and most were dealt with retroactively. In 2001, Service Objects responded to this with a cloud-based solution for address validation, which evolved into a number of other Customer Data Validation tools.
Let’s call this the “defensive” school of customer data quality – using these tools protected (and still protects) firms from costs due to things like inefficient sales prospecting, missed deliveries, fraud, and compliance penalties. These things are more important than ever but in these economic times, it has become more important than ever to minimize the inefficiencies and maximize the revenue from your contact data assets.
Service Objects has evolved its approach to Customer Data Validation in recent years. Customer Data Validation is designed to ensure that all current and prospective customer data is genuine, accurate, verified, and complete. This is important for sales and revenue, as incomplete or inaccurate data can lead to missed opportunities and lost sales. Customer Data Validation is a four-level process, as shown in the figure below:
Now, let’s look at some of the ways this process can aid in getting more revenue out of your customer data, largely driven by these last three steps of Customer Data Validation:
- Customer data enhancement: Can you make more sales by opening more channels to reach your contacts? Tools like Service Objects’ Phone Append provide missing phone numbers, while Address Detective uses artificial intelligence to turn fatal addressing errors into viable leads.
- Business intelligence: If you are selling a high-end product, what makes more sense – casting a wide net, or targeting contacts in high-income areas? Likewise, segmenting your prospects according to other geographic or demographic criteria can find those who best fit your products and services. Our Address Insight and Address Geocode services can be used to yield data such as socioeconomic, cultural, population and geographic information to better target your audience.
- Lead quality: Better quality leads boost your ROI as well as sales productivity and morale. Our flagship Lead Validation services validate and cross-checks your contacts against over 130 data points – including address, email, IP address and more – to provide actionable Certainty and Quality scores that combine with your own business qualification criteria to power your leads for increased sales.
The bottom line is that the enhanced capabilities of Customer Data Validation go far beyond simple data quality, to get much more profitability from your customer data.
From Better Data to Optimized Marketing
At its root, marketing is about helping businesses make accurate and informed decisions about the customers they serve. This includes having accurate client and prospect data, weeding out bad or fraudulent contact data from your database, and above all, having insight into your contact data to make smarter marketing decisions.
Our friendly and knowledgeable product experts can help design a custom Customer Data Validation solution that lets you bridge the gap between better data quality and increased profitability. For a free, no-pressure consultation, including the opportunity to try out our services at no charge, contact our team to learn more.
