Gathering data is like pulling together ingredients for a very nice dinner. You shop, you carry home your groceries, and you take things out of the pantry to create a memorable dish.
Similarly, data must be researched, collected, and brought together to create a memorable and accurate matrix of the ebb and flow of your company.
Using data to understand your customers really isn’t as complex as you think, but it does require a thoughtful analysis of where and how you collect meaningful data. By defining which aspects of customer behavior are most significant to your business, you can measure and analyze better ways to engage your customer and ultimately increase your business and sales.
The second part of gathering accurate data is learning how to map it to your financial data.
Customer data and financial data are two different things, and they are kept in different places. You will likely have to do a lot of cleaning to get good analytics, but you can’t create useful reports unless you have clean, accurate data.
Once you have a handle on the data available, you can then create a key matrix. To do so, you need to know what you are analyzing and why. Are you comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges?
Remember, customer data is anything you want it to be — contact information, purchasing and payment history, demographic information, psychographic information and even social media updates.
Resist the temptation to keep track of everything in a spreadsheet. In fact, you shouldn’t even use a spreadsheet! You need a proper database or customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Next to your company’s financial data, your customer data is the lifeblood of your company. If you lose it, the damage can be irreparable.
The five best practices for customer data management include:
- Choose critical data carefully.
- Don’t collect it all at once.
- Clean your data.
- Validate your data.
- Keep your customer data secure.