Building the Case: Articulating the Value of Improving Your Customer Data

The clarity and quality of your customer data can serve as either a cornerstone of growth or a stumbling block to your aspirations. Intuitively, everyone “knows” that better-quality customer data is better for business. Better customer data allows companies to drive growth through improved upsell and cross-sell and better customer experiences, save money by avoiding rework and sales inefficiency, and reduce the risk of customer fraud. But many leaders find themselves asking: What’s the real value of my customer data?

Let’s do the math based on realistic assumptions. Consider this scenario: You are a B2B seller with 2,500 customers (companies), but due to data duplication and inaccuracies, you’re actually juggling 9,750 customer records across three sources. Ideally, managing customer information would be a straightforward task without the noise from duplicates and with every data field being accurate and up-to-date. 

In reality, 10% of the data fields are incorrect or missing, and you’re faced with addressing issues in 39,000 attributes. 

With a duplication rate of 30%, each customer record would need to be compared against 9,749 (([n*[n-1]]/2)) possible matches across three sources, resulting in 47M+ comparisons for all your customer records. Obviously, this is unrealistic. So we assume that curators can compare each customer record with only 200 other records (only 4%). If each comparison takes 4 seconds, the result is at least 90 days of work. But the data isn’t static, so you’ll need to return to the same records again soon. Assuming the need for millions of comparisons and corrections, we're looking at an effort that translates into years of work and a potential cost of $180,000 when approached through human curation.

And if you’re considering a traditional master data management (MDM) system as a solution, think again. High license costs and the need for a dedicated team to manage complex rules can drive expenses in excess of $520,000.

Enter the Age of AI with Tamr

But what if I told you there's a better way? A way that tackles the data challenge head-on and resolves it. This is where Tamr's AI-first approach changes the game. With AI-powered, human-refined golden records, your customer data becomes a valuable asset to achieve your strategic initiatives, paving the way for revenue growth, better customer service, and increased operational efficiency — all within weeks, not years.

The journey toward mastering your customer data goes beyond merely improving processes. It’s about enhancing how you engage with and understand your customers. This isn’t about managing data for the sake of it. It's about forging deeper, meaningful connections that drive growth and loyalty.

Improving your customer data isn't just an operational upgrade—it represents a value of $2.5 million. This includes growth opportunities, optimized expenditures, and minimized risk exposures. Enhanced data quality unveils hidden cross/upsell opportunities, bolsters customer lifetime value, and mitigates risks.

Every business leader intuitively knows that clean data is better for decision-making. Quantifying its value, however, helps to appreciate the profound impact of high-quality data on operations and business outcomes. Of course, I’ve made some pretty specific assumptions in this post. If you go to Tamr Value Calculator, you can put your own assumptions in and find out the value of YOUR data.