What is your organization’s single most important asset? It could be your company’s devoted employees, proprietary technology or award winning service. But what about the one asset that drives your business forward everyday, helping retain customers, improving both products and services and paving the road for the future, all the while making no further investments in resources? It’s something every company has but rarely leverages to its full potential – data.

The powerful impact of data remains untapped in most organizations. Vital information lives throughout a company’s corporate infrastructure from simple customer databases to complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and data warehouses. Yet despite its role as an invaluable resource, most organizations today put more value on infrastructure and high priced applications used to access and deliver information. The result, companies pay little attention to the actual accuracy and quality of the data that lives within their four walls. The information that had the potential to become the major competitive advantage for the organization is subsequently rendered useless as a vehicle to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenues.

Data quality is not just an “IT Issue.” Poor data quality causes havoc in your boardroom and across your organization. It jeopardizes customer retention, decreases the value of your current IT investments and hinders your ability for global relationship comprehension.

Part one: Customer retention/acquisition

However, at each customer touch point within an organization there is the potential for data corruption and thus the potential for a disastrous customer exchange. For instance, online customers may intentionally enter incorrect data to protect their privacy; call center operators may enter abbreviated data to save time; and customer support staff my accidentally input typing errors into front office systems. If these errors in data are used in a subsequent interaction with a customer, it could jeopardize the entire customer relationship. Data quality becomes imperative to a satisfying customer experience in the future, providing corrections to human error and ensuring overall improved customer service while reducing the costs of the transaction in the process.