Data quality refers to the state of qualitative or quantitative pieces of information.
Why is high-quality data important to businesses? It controls the user’s ability to extract useful information from data and in turn also impacts analysis, decision-making, and reporting.
An organisation might have a set of data containing information about customers' purchases over time. If this data wasn’t high quality, it would be difficult for them to gain any value from the data. So in this article, we explore why data quality is so important and explain why organisations need to take it seriously.
Why Use High-Quality Data?
Data consistency is important, and issues often occur when data is shared multiple times. Organisations may then choose to only share certain data via an internal intranet to give a single source of truth. That high-quality data can then be used to assist multiple business tasks:
- Business decision-making: high-quality data can be used to inform business decisions, for example by identifying market trends, predicting customer behaviours or optimising business processes. This can be made easier with a data visualization tool.
- Research and analysis: conducting research becomes much easier and more streamlined when guided by accurate data, and reliable information means analysis can be conducted without having to account for inaccuracies.
- Improve customer service: high-quality data can be used to personalise experiences for customers. Recommending relevant content or products and tailoring marketing messages is likely to make the customer feel more valued.
- Predictive analytics: accurate data means organisations can adopt predictive models to forecast future events and trends such as customer behaviours or industry shifts.
- Risk management: risk management strategies should be based around high-quality data to be able to identify potential hazards or threats.
- Improve customer satisfaction: using data that’s high-quality makes it easier to understand customer needs, leading to improved products and services that serve the customer better.
Save Time, Money, And Frustration
In the long run, organisations that start with high-quality data will save time, money and frustration. They make better business decisions as they can rely on their data to be trustworthy and accurate. And through being able to make more informed decisions, organisations can focus their efforts in the most efficient ways, and know for sure how well their decisions perform.
In contrast, organisations that don’t take care of their data often find themselves spending disproportionately high amounts of time in areas that don’t benefit the business as much. Without reliable accurate data, it’s impossible for them to know if their operations are efficient or not.
It can also slow you down. Taking sales as an example, without accurate sales CRM data teams don't know who to engage with. Moreover, managers don't know what their pipelines look like - undermining overall performance monitoring.
Doing More With Your Data
While the concept may seem simple, understanding the importance of data quality can be challenging for many organisations. The key takeaway is that not all data is equal—and if you start with high-quality data, your organisation will save time and money.
Akita develops Microsoft Power BI to help organisations do more with their data. See typical solutions:
