A “golden record” is considered the “single source of truth,” the most accurate resource that a company has on customer, vendor, or product. It is assumed to be 100% accurate. When records are duplicated within your system, whether that is due to a quick employee turnover rate, or just from years of less than careful record-keeping, they quickly become less accurate and less valuable. Here are 4 reasons why you need to resolve your duplicate records.
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They are more likely to be inaccurate and thus, unreliable. For example, a customer record may contain the person’s name, phone number, email address, or home address. With many specific numbers and letters, there is a huge possibility that the information on one record doesn’t match the information on the other.
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Incorrect email or home addresses, phone numbers, and names can lead to bad marketing. Using email as an example, if your content is sent to the incorrect email (or if the email “bounces”), you’ve wasted your time, money, and resources. The content that your company spent valuable time on falls flat, and you receive little to no ROI.
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Duplicate records take up valuable space. Whether your company uses paper or digital records, storage costs money, so duplicate records are taking up two times as much space as they need to.
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It makes your company and your brand look bad. If you are emailing or mailing the same content twice to the same person who went under two different names in your records, the chances of that person viewing your business favorably get lower and lower.
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Customer service becomes poorer and poorer. When you have to spend more time dealing with incorrect names, numbers, or notes about a customer than you spend on actually helping them, it’s time to reassess the state of your records. The last thing you want is for that customer to look elsewhere for better, more efficient service.
The best method of combating duplicate records is to extract your company’s data with Advanced Data Capture at the earliest opportunity. Using InStream’s range of data capture options, we can tailor the perfect solution to your company’s needs. Scanning and capturing data upon arrival helps prevent duplicates before they have an opportunity to form, because the data is extracted correctly the first time, every time. Data capture software eliminates the margin of human error, ensuring that you never have to check one record against another to obtain the correct information. Because your data is automatically accurate, you can build those “golden records” immediately, creating a single data set that can be used as a resource for all marketing or other operations without being duplicated. Neglecting to take care of your records is bad for every aspect of your business from marketing to customer service. Don’t let your business suffer when you can reap all the benefits of advanced data capture with InStream.
