Improve Customer Retention! How Clean, Enriched Data Systems Let You Deliver Exceptional Experiences 

Customer Experience is Paramount to Retention 

Encompassing all the interactions, purchase processes, and product or service deliveries a buyer has with a business, customer experience is vital to retention. Just look at the industry data: 

• 88% of buyers say customer experience is just as important as products or services during a purchase decision 
• 61% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience 
• 60% of customers have left a brand due to a negative service or contact center experience 
• 81% of buyers say a positive experience boosts their chances of purchasing from that same brand 

Of course, these statistics shouldn't be a shock. If you're happy with a company and what it has to offer, you'll likely keep purchasing from them. 

Bad Data Impedes You From Maximizing Customer Experience  

It's time to address the harsh realities of many manufacturing and distribution businesses. While everyone wants to be renowned for their customer service excellence and outstanding engagement metrics, many aren't getting the right insights to deliver the best possible experience. The reason? Bad data: 

Out-of-sync and siloed → Information is only accessible to specific teams and isn't automatically updated in cross-functional systems. 

• Example: Purchase history from the order processing systems aren't shown in customer CRM records for sales reps to know what to upsell or cross-sell.  

Dated or irrelevant → Information is old or obsolete to the sales, operations, marketing, and service teams. 

• Example: Multiple resolved customer case tickets from a month ago were never closed out, so service reps are spending time chasing information and not supporting more current cases.   

Inaccurate → Information stored in records is entirely incorrect.  

• Example: Delivery address for a customer is wrong so the operations team can't send inventory to the correct location. 

Duplicated → Information is replicated in multiple data records. 

• Example: Three identical customer records are stored in a CRM, each updated with different information, causing none to be complete and up-to-date.    

The impact of insufficient data systems trickles down to the customer and hinders their experience. 

• How do you know what hot-selling, high-demand products to reorder if you're siloing customer order data from your inventory purchase teams? 
• How do you ensure accurate customer orders if your account managers manually collect and send order information to operations?  
• How can you best deploy relevant, personalized marketing campaigns if your customer segment lists are out-of-date?  
• How do you upsell or cross-sell customers if your CRM records aren't showing purchase history? 
• How can you best service your customers if you have incomplete or duplicated case information? 

The list goes on and on. 

Visibility and Data Enrichment Drives Retention  

The solution to enhancing customer experiences all boils down to how you manage and activate your data — ensuring access to accurate, up-to-date information for your sales, operations, and service teams to fulfill their day-to-day and critical insights that improve decisions relating to enhancing customer experience. 

This starts with robust governance policies that keep data accurate and up-to-date and business visibility through system integrations. Using application programming interface (API) connections or third-party tools, you need flows between your systems, including your CRM, ERP, inventory management, quote generation, marketing automation, and order processing tools that synchronize data records. 

For example, new purchases from your order processing system should sync to your inventory management software to stay on top of fast-selling items so customers are never upset due to out-of-stock products. Alternatively, cases in your ticketing system should be updated in CRM account records to ensure customers don't constantly experience the same service issues.    

Supplement your visibility with advanced solutions that can take synchronized, enriched data and improve the customer experience. For instance, tools that can: 

• Identify and merge duplicate customer or case records automatically
• Spot upselling opportunities for reps at the point-of-sale (POS)
• Auto-recommend new products to customers based on their profile and purchase history
• Add customers to segmented contact lists based on their profile to run hyper-targeted marketing campaigns or loyalty programs 
• Quickly generate quotes or new customer contracts for new accounts      

Better Insights for Better Performance Metrics  

Working with cleaner, synchronized data lets you obtain insights that drive customer engagement, optimize product and service offerings, and ultimately keep customers satisfied with your brand. With improved customer experience comes higher retention rates, which provide the most cost-effective way to sustain and grow revenue.    

Our Proven History of Helping Clients Boost Customer Retention Through Data 

Lansing Building Products adopt Catalyst, the ProfitOptics data system integrator, to decrease order processing errors by 90% to ensure customers get what they ordered on time. (Read the full story) 

ProfitOptics helps Northfield Medical deploy an integrated self-service portal for customers to submit and track service tickets — letting them proactively anticipate and respond to requests faster to boost customer retention rates that ultimately led to their $475 million acquisition. (Read the full story) 

ProfitOptics SmartMatch solutions enable a medical distributor to shorten their data deduplication process from 30 days to just 3 — letting them work with clean data to enrich their customer experience and service offerings. (Read the full story)