Inaccurate and incomplete data is impacting company profitability and having a deleterious effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, according to a survey by business intelligence vendor SAS International.
Two thirds (66%) of the 500 marketing directors surveyed from insurance, banking and telecomms companies across France, Germany, UK, Italy and the Netherlands, felt that the profitability of the company as a whole was negatively affected. This in turn led to 67% revealing that customer satisfaction and loyalty within their organisation was also suffering.
Only one in four respondents said they had a 'great deal' of confidence in data quality but more than half of the 500 surveyed admitted they experienced lower than expected return on investment from campaigns due to dirty data .
Third party data was cited as both the most common source of information and the most corrupt data by 56% of respondents. Lack of systems integration was seen as a major source of inaccurate data by 52%.
Allan Russell, senior vice president, Strategy, SAS, says data quality is the single largest obstacle to achieving ROI from marketing campaigns: "It affects customer profitability in many ways - from impacting the profitability of marketing campaigns to increasing the affect of customer churn. The foundation of successful customer relations is the accuracy and timeliness of the underlying data."
The results were released as SAS announced plans to introduce further financial sector compliance software, including new, upcoming solutions focused on fraud, broker surveillance and lending regulations.