January 1, 2024

4 best practices for making international  customer data solidly reliable

If your company operates worldwide, it must be able to rely on its customer data to offer a premium experience in all countries. Here are 4 key issues that must be addressed by data quality on the international scale.

Quality of service is strategic for building customer loyalty. And this rule applies in all countries, as customers value efficient, practical and well-informed customer service above all else. To achieve this, customer data quality must be prepared to meet 4 key challenges to optimize the customer experience in all countries.

 

For more information, read also:Determining Data Quality criteria: where should you start?

1. Reach and know your customers anywhere in the world

For each customer, the correct title, last name, first name and contact information are part of the basic information needed to personalize communication. Likewise, verifying a minimum of contact information such as postal address, email and telephone number, ensures reachability regardless of the country where the customer is located. In other words, ensuring the data quality of customer data in all your markets is essential to knowing, recognizing and reaching your international customers.

having control of data quality on an international level presents real challenges. For example, some companies report how difficult it is for their customer representatives to correctly enter names in other languages. Between multilingualism, different alphabets and local specificities, collecting correct international contact information without misunderstanding or human error requires a data quality solution adapted to the international market that includes:

  • Databases certified in their respective countries and where your company operates to verify the contact information of your customers, such as postal repositories, telephone operators, and domain names. The data quality of your international database must be based on these repositories to be able to verify a syntactic standard, a prefix, a format to make postal addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses reliable. This ensures that your customers can be reached anywhere in the world.
  • A transliteration capability that allows a literal phonetic transcription of last names, first names, street names or city names... in a different alphabet.

 

2. Make your global deliveries more reliable

With 2 out of 3 French e-commerce sites selling internationally, according to Fevad (French federation for e-commerce and remote sales), and 31% of them present in more than 10 countries, smooth international delivery is strategic. The financial cost of undelivered mail includes the cost of shipping, but also the cost of correcting the addressing problem, then reshipping, or even the non-payment of the product by the final customer if the delivery is definitively cancelled. As an indication, the USPS estimates that undelivered mail costs them $1.5 billion per year. This cost increases with undelivered mail over international distances.

Some companies choose Google’s solution for postal address entry assistance thinking they will benefit from quality addresses that meet the country’s standards, but quickly encounter limitations: Google relies on cartographic repositories and not postal repositories (no management of supplemental address information, no merging of municipalities, or regular updating, among other aspects). To guarantee international deliveries, the data quality of your customer data must therefore be based on the postal repositories in force in your markets in order to verify and even correct the addresses in the database. But that is not all. You must also use:

  • Real-time autocompletion of international postal address entries, which correctly handles the alphabets, local standards, and postal standards in the countries that require them, and adapts to the specific input requirements of each country and to international phonetic rules. The accuracy of the input is checked in real time, with suggested corrections in case of error, regardless of the country concerned.
  • Standardization of international postal addresses for use throughout the supply chain and compliance with third-party logistics and transportation systems. In addition, in the event of a problem with an international delivery, your carrier will be the first point of contact to turn to. You need to be able to reference address data structured according to the same standards.
  • A data quality solution capable of controlling the data entries in real time and of rectifying the existing databases according to the same references in order to avoid any contradiction between the real-time and curative processing engines.

 

3. Get a unified view of global customers

Customers who travel and use a company’s touch points in different countries are a significant phenomenon in certain sectors, notably luxury goods. It is necessary to be able to track them and, for a luxury brand for example, to know in which of the company’s previous points of sale a customer who comes to the store has passed. The purchases, history, and wishlists established at their main address must be known and recognized when they travel elsewhere in the world. Data quality ready for international use offers the following advantages:

  • Unification of customer data from one country to another, essential with customers who have a history with your touch points in different countries. When faced with a traveling customer, brand employees must see and understand that the customer is indeed the same person already in the database, avoid creating duplicates, and respond to them at all touch points with a comprehensive and unified view of their journey with the brand.
  • The guarantee of premium service, because a unified view of the customer avoids blunders or confusion, such as offering the customer a product already purchased in another point of sale. It also offers the possibility of enriching the service, for example by identifying the local availability of a product from the customer’s global wishlist.

 

4. Master the company information of BtoB customers abroad

When your customers are companies, account data and customer files become complex, because the nomenclature of legal information is not uniform from one country to the next. In addition, the different authorities do not all give the same public access, according to their legislation. Also, managing company customer data internationally to properly identify each company requires collecting its various legal registration information elements, adapting data entry forms, and managing duplicates around information collection that is complex.

Data quality ready for international use frees customer service from this highly demanding collection process, particularly thanks to autocompletion adapted to the international constraints of BtoB information. Its configuration allows the system to make a call for the applicable legal information in each country and to pre-fill the information in the account creation forms. In addition, useful information can be added, such as whether a company is active, in default of payment, or under surveillance to anticipate possible payment defaults. As well, the real-time control of the company and employee contact information makes all contact information reliable. Your employees are ready to contact international BtoB customers rapidly and without risk of error.

 

About DQE

Because data quality is essential to customer knowledge and the construction of a lasting relationship, since 2008, DQE has provided its clients with innovative and comprehensive solutions that facilitate the collection of reliable data.

15

Years of experience

+400

Clients in all sectors

3 billion

Queries per year

240

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