Having accurate information is key when interacting with customers, whether real-time on the phone or online or through direct marketing aimed at generating responses. Teradata’s (News - Alert) new Data Quality Scorecard service will help ensure this by quickly and cost-effectively identifying immediate data concerns and providing a corrective action plan to address data quality issues.

 

The Data Quality Scorecard accomplishes these outcomes by enabling firms to find and resolve underlying issues behind poor data such as wrong names, genders, contact addresses and numbers, identifiers, and transaction record errors.

 

The Scorecard also gives enterprises a tool to spot and correct what Sam Gragg, Teradata Vice President Marketing, Customer Management Solutions calls "misuse of data". This occurs when data is transferred from one application, such as call recording, to another, such as billing, where there is no validation or accuracy checks performed. There are often quality issues that arise when data is taken out of context.

These problems add time to calls, prompt concerned customers to call, and turn interactions from sales opportunities to problem solving and impact loyalty and retention. These issues and others run up corporate expenses. The Data Warehousing Institute reports that poor data quality costs companies billions of dollars each year. In response even a minor data quality upgrade can dramatically improve decisions that affect an organization's bottom line every day, all day.

“As we paint a true cross-channel picture of the customer, and the customer expects us to remember them, data errors are no longer acceptable,” explains Gragg. “Customer data must be accurate to create and maintain customer relationships as it shows that organizations are paying attention to them.”

The Teradata Data Quality Scorecard pinpoints high-priority data quality concerns, creates rules to isolate and fix the violations, and then uses the scorecard to continuously monitor and trend the data quality areas on an ongoing basis. A well-designed data quality scorecard, which appears as a dashboard on the desk of ‘data stewards’, helps companies better understand data quality issues, evaluate improvement opportunities and measure progress over time.

The greater data accuracy that the Data Quality Scorecard is intended to achieve may significantly bolster customer satisfaction and relationships, cut contact center costs, and boost revenues.

“While we’ll never have ‘perfect’ data, with a tool to identify and prioritize quality issues, and with clear business focus on the customer, improvements can be effected that will impact loyalty and retention," adds Gragg.

Using a proof-of-concept approach, Teradata can tailor a data quality scorecard and other data stewardship reports in as little as three weeks. The scorecard can be implemented using Teradata's Viewpoint portal or the customer's existing business intelligence reporting tool.

Once companies have completed the scorecard process and successfully implemented the action plan, which includes cleaning and managing data quality, and demonstrated the payoff in improved decision making, then they can begin to build on this success.

“Although a data quality action plan is imperative for all companies, we believe this is an especially valuable approach for companies just beginning a data warehouse implementation,” says Dave Klumb, Vice President, Teradata Global Professional Services. “Poor data quality leads to poor decisions; superior data quality leads to superior decisions. Addressing data quality early on helps to insure that the superior decisions necessary to drive business success are enabled.”