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IT is difficult to overestimate the value of a well-maintained customer database. A customer database can be the most readily accessible and rewarding source for survey samples, prospect demographics and segmentation, mailing lists, and many other types of marketing riches. But to provide these benefits, a database must be cured of three common ailments.
The first is ill-conceived database architecture. Databases must be designed with the system's overall purpose in mind: to provide information upon which informed marketing decisions can be based. A correctly structured database will perform the preliminary interpretation, the number-crunching, saving the decision-makers' time for exactly that-decision-making.
Secondly, the success or failure of a database to achieve your informational objectives to a large degree depends on follow-up maintenance. A database that has been long-neglected is either chock-full of valuable, though be it unobtainable, information, or worse, its information has out-lived its usefulness and is no longer accurate.
Finally, there is the common problem of fragmented databases, dispersed over a variety of departments, each containing one piece of the overall puzzle. Databases suffering from this malady are often of widely different vintages and formats, and are not nearly as useful as they would be if united into one cooperative site.
There are no firm figures on the percentage of healthy to sick databases, but odds are even companies with the luxury of full-time information technicians and systems coordinators have a database that suffers from one or more of these ailments.
Fortunately, there is a cure.
The data programmers working in a full-service marketing research firm are experts at cleaning data, and can turn an ungainly mass of electronic bytes into a well-organized encyclopedia of available-on-command information. Combine these skills with a full compliment of CATI personnel, whose phones can turn out-of-date data into up-to-the-minute facts, and you have a team than can cure any database with surgical accuracy.
From initial design, to updating, to the unification of disparate systems, more experience with handling market information of every description is not to be found.
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