In the ten years since Poland joined the EU and its citizens gained the freedom to legally live and work in Britain, more than half a million of them have chosen to do just that. In the same period, nearly as many have arrived from India and Pakistan. Most of these immigrants are typically under 35, they are working, getting married, having children and making a significant cultural and economic contribution to Britain.
These individuals and families are an important segment in the customer base of major brands.
Indeed according to the ONS, 13% (7.5 million) of residents were born outside the UK. This is a significant increase in the last ten years, up by nearly 2.5 million people.
This significant change in ethnicity will have introduced new data management challenges to many organisations. Data quality and customer recognition rules are typically defined and implemented when a CRM system is built and deployed. The rules are defined based on detailed analysis of the customer data they are expected to process. However this requires considerable investment in people and skills and is such a challenge that in most organisations, once a CRM system is put in place, the rules used in its implementation are never reviewed and updated.
Not just any Tom, Dick or Harry
Recognising your customers across multiple channels and devices, and being able to personalise offers to them is increasingly important. The rapid change in population will cause problems that the systems were not originally designed to cope with.
While matching Tom, Dick and Harry (Thomas, Richard and Henry) is now considered fairly trivial, matching Tomek, Rys and Henio (Tomasz, Ryszard and Henryk) will only work if the system has been configured with appropriate nickname tables.
Typographic errors in capturing customer data can lead to incorrect gender coding and name parsing, leading to an inability to correctly personalise customer communications. It can also cause failures to match and de-duplicate customer data appropriately, leading to further errors in campaign targeting.
Marketing managers and their IT partners need to be reassessing the performance of their CRM systems. How well are they performing with data from different ethnic groups? Do the data quality rules need updating? Should new match rules be implemented? Can you stay on top of this or could a partner help you get further faster?
Politics aside, rule one for most brands today is to ensuring they can recognise their customers, whatever their ethnicity, across all channels, media and devices.
Refs: http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc123/index.html
David Barker – Product Director for AbiliTec and customer recognition
