The cost of poor data quality is more costly than just the extra printing and postage associated with marketing waste, such as duplicate mailings to the same person. Although hard to quantify, the real cost of these mistakes is negative customer experiences.
Technically, poor Customer Data Integration (CDI) processes will yield too many records on a customer database. The risk is that each new transaction might fool the system into thinking it’s a brand new customer when in fact it's a repeat customer. As a result, we lose the rich history which is the reason we separated the marketing database from the short-term operational database in the first place.
To illustrate this scenario, what if a loyal advocate who's purchased 10 times from your company receives a "welcome" message complete with a valuable coupon. Any existing customer would be at best annoyed, and at worst, angry that they never warranted such a gift even after their lifetime of purchases to date. The nerve!
So, keep customer experiences in your mind as you build the business case to improve data quality, which will make the investment that much more compelling.
