Having proper data hygiene means your customer data is clean, standardized, free of errors and all fields for a single customer are linked. Data hygiene ensures that customers will have the best possible experience and will lead to improved customer retention. However, your data might be holding you back. When your data is inaccurate or "broken", there is a substantial risk of alienating customers with irrelevant communications or wasted time and resources associated with sending the wrong offers, sending to wrong addresses, calling the wrong phone numbers, sending emails that bounce or having a complete misunderstanding of the customer.
Casino and resort properties may have multiple data sources, such as player database, hotel database, POS database, event / showroom database, spa database, etc. There is a high possibility for these data sources to store duplicate data. Since there are diverse sources to record customer contact details, it means there is duplicated data, and the information may be entered in different format and different styles.
There are many causes of data breakage within the database. From the input of inaccurate data (human error), syntax errors, no standards of input, and losses during data transfers between systems to silos and warehouses existing across multiple databases. But one of the most common causes of data breakage is decay. Customer data isn't immortal. Names, physical addresses, phone numbers, emails, marital status, all demographic information can change at any moment, leaving your database with outdated information.
Cost associated with data decay can be staggering. Costs can include wasted offers, piles of returned mail, reduced loyalty, reduced occupancy, reduced covers, immeasurable time correcting offers or time spent correcting customer data, linking bad data.
The rate of churn in customer data is an ongoing obstacle in ensuring marketing and customer retention success. On average, within 12 months, at least 30% of your database is outdated. That doesn't mean that 30% of your database has a different address. It means that 30% of the demographic and contact information has changed. This could be phone number, physical address, email address, marital status, name, etc. This creates an enormous need to update and refresh your customer data on a continual basis.
Having only partial customer information limits your ability to fully engage your customers and diminishes the customer experience you are able to provide. Having correct information can also allow you to activate new channels to engage your customers such as social media channels. Using appending processes and having correct email addresses and / or physical addresses, you can determine if your social media followers are current customers or potential customers. Append processes only work if the customer information is correct.
Data cleansing is the critical first step to building an accurate database. Consolidating duplicate records across databases will improve marketing effectiveness and make reports more accurate. Complete the identity of your customers by getting complete contact information such as phone number, email address(es), physical address, name change, etc. With data hygiene you can get personalization information on your customers such as gender, age, income, marital status, children, wealth, score and interests. Interests include any personal interest your customer may have such as camping, car type (Ford, BMW, etc.), types of magazines or literature, type of music, etc. It is remarkable the information you can obtain on your customers. With personal interests' information, you can determine types of events and promotions that will interest your customers.
In conclusion: Data Hygiene will give you confidence your data is accurate, and you are getting information and offers to the correct customer with the correct information, and you have a better understanding of your customer.
One of the top priorities to a successful marketing plan: Getting the right message
to the right customer on the right communication channel, at the right time. This can only be achieved with clean data.
For further information: https://www.cmsgroupinc.com/data-hygiene