All data (like all customers) is not created equal. While good quality data is crucial to the successful management of your business, bad data can have negative effects ranging from inefficiency to uselessness to detriment. What comprises good quality data? At the most elementary level, it needs to meet the following three criteria:

• It should be complete.


• It should be accurate.


• It should be collected in a consistent manner.

When any of these quality factors are compromised, your business is at risk of having data that is inefficient to use, misleading, and/or unusable - and the impact of these risks can range in severity depending on what the data is used for.

Let's look at a hypothetical example of KidCo, a company which manufactures children's car seats. The company's customers register with KidCo using their addresses for the purpose of marketing, warranty administration, and in case of a safety recall.

If the addresses they collect are incomplete, inaccurate, on inconsistent, they run the risk of:

• Inefficiencies such as: high returned mail rates on DM campaigns; manual research and additional data entry to complete addresses; manual corrections to inconsistencies in formatting in order to enable automation such as mail merges.
• Misleading information such as: faulty geographically-based analysis of customer base; inability to de-dupe customer lists leading to duplicate information.
• Unusable information such as: inability to confirm warranty coverage, resulting in lost customer goodwill; customers who are uncontactable.

Based on the above list, the impact on KidCo's customer relationships and reputation could be negative in the case of a marketing campaign or warranty administration. In the case of a safety recall? The inability to contact customers due to poor data quality could be downright disastrous.

Data is only as useful as its quality allows . Ensuring the data your business collects is complete, accurate, and consistent ensures that your business has the foundation it needs to make sound decisions.