66% of European Organisations Admit Dirty Data Impacts Company Profitability

SAS has announced the results of a European survey among 500 marketing directors from companies across France, Germany, UK, Italy and the Netherlands. As a result of inaccurate or incomplete data, two thirds (66 percent) of respondents felt that the profitability of the company as a whole was negatively affected. This in turn led to 67 percent revealing that customer satisfaction and loyalty within their organisation is suffering.

The independent study, commissioned by SAS, focused on the challenges marketers face when creating and investing in customer marketing campaigns. Respondents were from financial services organisations in the insurance and banking sectors as well as the telecoms industry.

More than half of the respondents said they had experienced lower than expected return on investment from campaigns due to incorrect data. With only 25 percent of respondents having a 'great deal' of confidence in their data quality, all others admitted that better data quality and accuracy would improve customer service, satisfaction and loyalty.

Allan Russell, Senior Vice President, Strategy, SAS International said, "Data quality is the single largest obstacle to achieving ROI from marketing campaigns. As this survey shows, it affects customer profitability in many ways - from impacting the profitability of marketing campaigns to increasing the affect of customer churn. The foundation of successful customer relations is the accuracy and timeliness of the underlying data."

Key findings of the survey include:

• 76% said that data accuracy is an area they need to focus more on
• 56% identified third party data as being the most frequent source of inaccurate data. This was of particular concern as third party data was also identified as being the most common source of information for organisations across Europe
• 52% said integration of systems was a major source of inaccurate data saying data from diverse systems did not integrate, causing significant problems
• 74% are doing or planning to do something this year to improve data quality
• 87% said that they were raising or planning to raise awareness of data quality issues within their company, highlighting a willingness among respondents to make organisations aware of the consequences of dirty data

IT industry analyst, Ian Charlesworth of Butler Group comments, ""SAS is one of the very few vendors to provide an end-to-end Integrated Business Intelligence (IBI) infrastructure that addresses the issue of data quality by integrating data Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) and data cleansing, together with the front-end information presentation components. I see this a major strength in SAS' offering."

In their report, Integrated Business Intelligence, Butler Group says "BI vendors should not see data quality as being someone else's problem. It is a business and technology imperative that underpins every single BI activity".

Alan Russell concludes, "SAS can access more data sources than any other software vendor and can pull data from any system and format into a common store or warehouse. Over 80 percent of our customers claim to choose our solutions because of the ease of integration and cleansing ability."

About the survey

KRC Research conducted this survey between 5 March and 2 April 2003. In total, 500 marketing directors from large financial services and telecommunications organisations participated in this online survey. The overall margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence interval.

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