Experian Data Quality: Solving data challenges in uncertain times

Unprecedented events

The COVID-19 pandemic is firstly a health crisis, and secondly an economic crisis. We outlined some of our predictions for economic impact and the impact on credit in Financial Services in our recent Experian Credit Services: Insight and control in uncertain times blog.

Since that blog, the Australian Government has announced further restrictions, but also further stimulus including the JobKeeper programme. It’s also clear that every industry will have some level of impact from the crisis.

Data and technology will be key to the speed at which organisations can react during the crisis and during the recovery, and the quality of data an organisation holds will play a key role.

Communication

Organisations in Australia and New Zealand should consider the volume/frequency of communication with their customers over the coming weeks and months, as well as the clarity of message and delivery accuracy. A large proportion of households will be reducing their spend, facing financial hardship and re-evaluating the products and services they use. All consumers will be expecting consistent, well-timed and compassionate communication from the organisations that they trust. All consumers will expect organisations to hold accurate contact information in order to achieve this. Organisations who communicate effectively and compassionately will have the opportunity to build strong and trusted relationships with consumers for many years.

Contact data and accuracy

Ensuring you hold accurate information for your customers will be key to your communication. From our experience, contact data quality (address, email and telephone data) ranges significantly in completeness, accuracy and currency across different sectors.

For example, in financial services, 84% of address data, 73% of emails and 86% of mobiles are found to be valid. In utilities, 84% of address data, 65% of emails and 90% of mobiles are found to be valid. In automotive, 68% of address data, 62% of emails and 88% of mobiles are found to be valid. Most sectors will face challenges communicating with their customers on at least one channel.

Ways in which Experian’s services can help:

Data profiling

Understand contact data completeness through data profiling.

Clean, validate and enrich contact data attributes

Clean, validate and enrich contact data attributes using sources of truth

• Address data from Australia Post and PSMA.
• Inbox level email validation.
• Number level mobile number validation

Accurate data capture

Capture accurate contact information as it enters systems.

Data access and trust

During this challenging period, decisions will need to be made quickly by organisations. This could be rapid identification of consumers facing hardship, planning and executing communications within hours or ad-hoc reporting using data from multiple systems. Organisations may also be called on to provide ad-hoc and agile reporting to federal, state or local government as part of the response to the current crisis.

Organisations are likely to struggle with the agility required from traditional systems, data access and data teams when accessing and trusting the data required. Working from home arrangements may also place additional challenges for data professionals and teams to collaborate effectively to access and use data. Modern data management software, such as Experian’s Aperture Data Studio, can help organisations:

Simplify access

Simplify the access to data, by allowing data teams to curate and expose data to business users.

Increase access

Put control into the hands of business users, by providing a business user focused user experience, allowing more people in an organisation to work with data.

Trust data

Easily assess data quality and add rules to assign trust to data.

Data-driven decision making

Aside from data access and trust, organisations will also need to ensure that they have the agility required to work with data to reach decisions quickly. It is likely that decisions will need to be made using data from multiple systems, of unknown accuracy and potentially from the wrong data domain (for example, product data rather than customer data). It is also likely that, during this crisis, decisions will carry far more weight than usual. Organisations should be evaluating their data capabilities when it comes to challenges such as:

Bringing data together

How to bring together data easily and quickly from multiple systems if your customer has multiple touchpoints with you. For example, credit cards and home loans in financial services, or car and home policies in insurance.

Classifying a single customer and evaluating value

Classifying a single customer identity accurately from multiple sources, in order to ensure you identify financial hardship, or to evaluate the value of a customer to identify your key customers for communication.

Extracting from multiple systems

Extracting customer contact information from multiple systems quickly and accurately for consistent communication purposes.

Trusting sources and quality

How to decide which data source to trust and evaluating the quality of data across different dimensions.

Expertise

Whilst most organisations will enter a phase of either survival or at least efficiency and spend control, the reality is that many challenges, particularly with data, will require outside expertise or resource. Organisations should consider which of their partners have the expertise, resource and agility to support them with data challenges that may arise with little notice. Experian’s local consulting team is available to assist and importantly has the agility to support our customers through the data unknowns that will arise during this period.

Experian is here to help

This is a period of uncertainty for all individuals and businesses. Experian is here to support our customers wherever possible and we are uniquely placed to support data driven outcomes. For further information on any of the above, please contact your Account Manager or Consulting Manager. Alternatively, you can get in touch with us using the form below.