The shiny objects, er, trends, that many marketers are obsessed with today are Big Data, cloud technologies, and social, Trillium Software SVP of Marketing Len DuBois pointed out during a recent conversation. And all for good reason. But sometimes big trends can overshadow more low-profile but equally important ones. Data quality, for example.
“One of the biggest, but often underplayed, trends is the shift in responsibility for data quality,” DuBois said. In most organizations IT often has oversight for data quality, as well as the tools to maintain it. Increasingly, however, data oversight is moving to the business side, which is often responsible for taking action on that data and is closer to what should be improved and how. And with today’s technologies it’s easier than ever for business users and analysts to do “self-service” data quality, he said.
Additionally, DuBois said, IT often takes more time to respond to requests than what marketers want or expect because they need to move at an ever-faster pace. The enormous downsizing of many IT organizations has impacted this shift, as well.
When it comes to social data, the focus is on sentiment, not cleansing. “Creating a unified view, though, is growing in popularity,” he said. DuBois cited as an example a financial services company that used Facebook and its own online community to track customer sentiment on customer satisfaction and product acceptance. Instead of trying to change customers’ opinions, the bank improved its products based on customers input. It also connects social data to CRM data where possible to create a more complete view of customers’ and what they’ve said about the brand.
Access to unified, quality data like that of the bank, DuBois said, can open opportunities as big as the data itself.
