Have you ever gone to a party, chatted with a co-worker, and asked him how his daughter was doing – only to hear him reply, “Um, I don’t have a daughter…”?
Unfortunately, businesses do the same thing all the time, at a cost to their brand reputation. They bug people for subscriptions two weeks after they already subscribed. They make customers regurgitate information that should already be in their database. And they send pitches for winter coats to leads who just moved to Miami. In short, they’ve developed a case of customer amnesia. This is all avoidable, with a little automation – and in this article, we’ll show you how.
Leveraging CRM and validation to respond smarter
Customer relationship management (CRM) software has been around for decades, and in recent years these systems have grown both in sophistication and ease of use. Nucleus Research estimates the investment in a CRM has an ROI greater than 8-to-1. A large part of its growth is due to how consumers want to interact with businesses today – most businesses now have a wide range of customer touchpoints, from phone and email to mobile apps and social media.
Whether consumers communicate directly with companies, send tweets, post on Facebook or write reviews, many of these communications are now public and demand responses. Businesses are expected to reply with personalized messages that are on brand and with personality. This is the ‘relationship’ part of CRM: leads and customers expect personalized service that honors your relationship with them. CRM systems can help you manage this, if you have the right data.
Validating the contact details that a customer provides helps ensure you have accurate, genuine, and up-to-date information. Whether you deploy validation on your front-end forms, include it in your lead scoring process or integrate it directly into your CRM, validation provides confidence that you are communicating with genuine people. Checking the validity of your leads and customer contact data also protects you and them from missed communications, deliveries and fraud. Lead Validation also:
- Provides accuracy and confidence scores that can be used for scoring rules within the CRM
- Standardizes contact details, helping accurately match contacts with your existing lead or customer data in your CRM, avoiding duplicate entries and ensuring all communications are recorded to a single CRM entry
- Helps ensure your personalized responses are accurate and up-to-date
- Enables better match rates for data enrichment, allowing you to build out a more complete and thorough profile of each of your contacts
- Protects you from bogus leads and contacts seeking marketing promotions or competitive intelligence
- Guards against retail and shipment fraud by flagging suspicious or high-risk contacts
By building contact record validation capabilities directly into your CRM or business automation environment, you can have a much clearer picture of who you are dealing with, and how best to respond to them, while better leveraging the power of your CRM system and improving your ability to respond timely.
Lead Validation Services
Service Objects’ Lead Validation services are designed for businesses to check the validity and accuracy of their incoming and existing global contacts. Our lead validation tools combine our flagship address validation capabilities with our phone, email, name and device validation services, providing a comprehensive and accurate view of your contacts. In addition to correcting and appending contact records, it cross-references and analyzes over 130 data points, yielding a quantitative quality score from 0-100 to inform your response strategy.
Lead Validation easily integrates with most major CRM and business automation platforms, either through direct plugins or via API interfaces. In addition, you have the option of doing validation just before adding the record to your CRM system, to save on CRM costs. Our friendly and knowledgeable technical team are always glad to assist with your specific implementation questions.
Today’s businesses are in the business of “knowing their customers.” Lead Validation is one way to really know your customer, current and potential, and in turn, improve your communications with them. To learn more about Lead Validation, or for a free trial license key, please contact us.
