Putting customer data at the heart of your digital business

Ensuring that this is collected and used effectively benefits the bottom line and builds closer, more profitable relationships with customers. Respondents in a recent Royal Mail Data Services study back this up – they estimated that poor-quality customer data cost the equivalent of 6% of annual revenue.

Looking in-depth at the challenges in managing customer data, the research highlighted three key trends:

The 25 May GDPR implementation date is approaching rapidly. Unsurprisingly, this means that GDPR compliance was the largest concern for respondents, cited by 29% as their biggest worry. This had more than doubled since the 2016 study, when 12% listed it as a concern, which demonstrates the rapid rise of GDPR compliance within businesses.

Looking in more detail, the study asked how confident respondents were that their internally held and third-party customer data was GDPR compliant. The positive news is that 78% of all marketers were either “very” or “reasonably” confident that their internally held customer data complied with the new regulation – although worryingly, 11% were not confident, including 2% who didn’t know if they were compliant or not!

Responsibility for managing customer data is split. The research found that in 37% of companies it was down to marketing, while for another 37%, central data management had this role, and IT/IS was in charge in 30% of cases.

Around half (51%) of marketing teams set their companies’ data strategies, while other groups, such as central data management (26%) and the board (25%), were also involved. Unsurprisingly, legal and compliance teams were heavily involved in privacy and permissions decisions, taking lead responsibility within 38% of organisations. Forty-four per cent of marketing departments led in this area, compared to 20% of IT/IS teams.

Data management is complicated by the technology that companies possess. Nearly four in ten (37%) brands said that dealing with legacy systems was their biggest challenge. These can be inflexible and difficult to use, and act as blocks on using data to effectively meet wider marketing challenges.

All of this means that cooperation between different departments is increasingly vital if companies are to meet the challenges of managing their growing volumes of data and effectively reaching customers.

Poor-quality customer data was the biggest challenge for 18% of respondents.