To remain competitive in their industry, organisations need to leverage data-driven insights so end users can confidently make informed decisions. While first-party data is essential to this, data enrichment generates even greater value by combining new attributes like information from trusted third-party data sources. This gives business leaders access to an extensive network of information that provides a complete view of customers, markets, product domains and competitors to guide more strategic decision-making.
As our technology partners at Precisely explain, by weaving the right, independently-sourced information into your existing databases, you gain additional context and deepen your understanding of customer behaviours. To help you further understand the critical role of data enrichment, we’ve outlined its four main benefits below.
Benefit #1 – Data enrichment enhances insight generation
Data enrichment makes raw data more useful by adding additional data attributes to your in-house, first-party datasets to elevate the value of your analytics. Although relying on your current information could be sufficient, there is a case of ‘you don’t know what you do not know’. Data enrichment can significantly increase your ability to build a complete customer outlook. Integrating additional viewpoints on your customers strengthens your original data attributes and together, provides far more diverse and in-depth insight into your customers.
When used in the right context with the right tools and data sources, you can manage huge quantities of data to make targeted actions and improve overall business outcomes. By expanding and refining your data sources, your organisation will be able to engage with qualified information which not only further strengthens your organisation’s data posture, but also provides the differentiation required to move ahead of competitors.
Benefit #2 – Data enrichment strengthens customer targeting
Being able to understand your customers and prospects is more critical than ever, especially in the current climate of shifting customer demands. That’s why it pays to build upon the first-party data within your existing martech tools and CRM databases, by supplementing it with more granular information such as real-time demographic insights, location and mobility intelligence, and clickstream analysis. This allows you to build a complete, 360-degree view of your audience, bolstered by a nuanced understanding of customer behaviours. With this information at their fingertips, your team will be empowered to create more agile and purposeful marketing and customer acquisition strategies.
Data enrichment also allows you to segment your customers and prospects to identify those that hold higher-value, or to produce personalised journeys or campaigns to meet specific customer needs. With an enhanced capability for personalisation, your organisation will be better equipped to foster positive customer experiences, which have flow-on effects like increasing customer retention and generating greater revenue.
Benefit #3 – Data enrichment improves risk assessments
Data enrichment can also provide you with a more detailed understanding of risk. This is particularly useful in the insurance industry, where the overall risk assessment of a customer’s property was traditionally underwritten by basic information such as local crime rates and postal codes. Through data enrichment, insurers can gain deeper insights into the full scope and impact of risk via geospatial analytics attributes. This pertains to anything from building footprints and materials and workmanship, to common weather patterns and conditions, traffic incidents, and more. With this information, you can build out a robust risk profile with detailed, accurate and real-time contextual data, leading to well-informed assessments and valuations for customers.
Benefit #4 – Data enrichment fills gaps & increases accuracy
As time goes by and customers move house or change their preferences, a proportion of your customer information will naturally become outdated or inaccurate across your internal systems, leaving your data environment subject to incomplete or incorrect entries. For example, you might have an address for a customer, but a missing phone number or an incorrectly entered postcode. Data enrichment can identify these gaps, correct inaccuracies and complete the missing information with the insights supplied by trusted external sources. What’s more, automation tools can save organisations significant time in manually retrieving this business-critical information. As the need for relevant and accurate data increases, providing end users with access to a greater wealth of knowledge at an accelerated pace is immensely valuable in maintaining a competitive edge.
While this may be an avenue that organisations overlook, making strategic decisions about enriching your data is an inexpensive approach that will pay dividends. By leveraging data enrichment you can refine, improve and enhance your business intelligence to gain a better understanding of your customer base, identify new opportunities and foster a long-term competitive advantage. To learn more about how to maximise the value of your datasets, contact the Optivia team today.
To learn more about how Optivia’s skilled and experienced business analysts can power incredible efficiencies in your organisation, contact us.
At Optivia, we help you optimise your customer management resources to get the most value for and from your customers. If you want the power to preempt customer interactions, identify potential churn behaviour, automate contact responses and reduce your customer call burden, contact us today.