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Businesses are always on the lookout for information they can use to connect with their customers and market their products more effectively. Sometimes the information you need has been right in front of you the whole time, sitting in your customer database—if you know what to do with it. Data enhancement is the process of filtering existing information and adding the right contextual information to make it directly useful for reaching, converting, and retaining more customers.

In this digital era we have access to more details about customers’ demographics, financial status, and behaviors than ever before, but making effective use of it all remains a challenge. It doesn’t help that customer data is frequently changing, often leaving businesses making decisions based on outdated information and getting suboptimal outcomes.

With data enhancement, you can build better systems for identifying and prioritizing leads, target them with customized messaging, and create better customer experiences across the board.

For telemarketing companies or any other business whose marketing activities are subject to Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations, having outdated or inaccurate data in your system can be downright dangerous. Every day, over 100,000 phone numbers get reassigned to new owners. If you call or text any of those numbers without the consent of the new owner, you’ve just committed a TCPA violation that could get you hit with a fine or even entangled in a lawsuit.

When performed with TCPA compliance in mind, data enhancement can help you find and remove reassigned numbers and ensure that your customer databases include the most accurate, usable information you can access.

In this blog, we’ll look at the ways data enhancement can improve data quality for higher customer engagement, increased ROI, and to guard against violations, customer complaints, and costly lawsuits.

Enhance Your Acquisition Marketing

Often, the most data you’ll get from a new lead is a few pieces of contact information—their name, phone number, and email address. What can you do with that, other than cold call or email and hope for the best?

Data enhancement solutions can turn this bare bones contact info into a detailed profile with verified, actionable elements that can help you engage with the customer more effectively. Better yet, data enhancement can ensure that if you do cold call, you won’t be violating TCPA regulations and risking a fine.

When your data is fleshed-out and accurate, you know who’s at the other end of the line and you can segment and tailor your communications accordingly, engaging customers in the ways that are most relevant and important to them.

But what if you want to identify the leads with the potential for the highest ROI, or just turn unidentified leads into known prospects? Data enhancement can do that too, often with just a single unit of identifying data to start from.

When you call a number and end up talking to the wrong person, hopefully the worst you’ve done is waste your time and theirs. Unfortunately, if you call somebody who has opted in to the Do-Not-Call (DNC) registry, you’ve violated the TCPA, which can mean fines, lawsuits, and damage to your brand.

Identity verification is a data enhancement process that reduces this danger by matching up key units of identifying data and giving the lead a score that indicates the level of confidence that its information is accurate. With integration through an API or IVR, this can be done in real time, giving you a one-click solution for prioritizing leads and helping you extract the most value out of your lead generation budget.

Data enhancement can also complete partial or fragmented lead profiles, filling in the blanks with verified information about their demographics, lifestyle, and purchasing behaviors.

With complete and enriched lead information at your disposal, you can expand your marketing reach to target consumers who are actively searching out the products or services you offer, extending your marketing omni-channel in promising new directions and getting more bang for your buck in all of your acquisition marketing efforts.

Tap the Potential in Your CRM 

Businesses are always looking for ways to connect with their customers in a more meaningful way and create more interesting and engaging experiences for them. This is another area where data enhancement can be helpful.

Your CRM database might be chock full of actionable information and insights that can increase your marketing intelligence, target your leads more precisely, and craft more personalized and relatable messaging. Sometimes you just need data enhancement to help you draw it out.

When you receive an inquiry from a customer, you’ve already got an advantage: you’re talking to somebody who is already interested enough in your company to initiate contact. Why not double down on that advantage by using data enhancement to understand how to speak directly to that customer’s primary concerns and motivations?

Integrated data enhancement can verify the identities of the people making these inbound inquiries and provide you with insights you can use to communicate with them more effectively. You can then seamlessly update your CRM in real time with enhanced data and scoring so that you can continue to create engaging, personalized experiences for those customers in future inquiries, helping you retain them longer.

Here’s a worst-case scenario: failure to recognize and identify a returning customer. This usually ends up in a sub-par experience for the customer, and a missed opportunity to strengthen and build on your existing relationship. With profiles verified and enriched through data enhancement, this is far less likely to occur, even when customers change addresses, employers, or other key identifiers.

Remember, data that’s useless fluff one day can become mission-critical the next. As industry and consumer attitudes shift, different aspects of the customer profile may become more or less pertinent to your marketing activities. Data enhancement can pull newly-relevant information from demographics and lifestyle data and append it to existing profiles, updating them to meet your current needs.

Guard Against Fraud and Other Risks 

Fraud is a constant danger for businesses, especially in e-commerce. The cost of fraud and data breaches is huge—the Insurance Information Institute reports that 16 million people were victimized in 2017, with $16 billion lost—and those numbers keep going up. Fraudsters and hackers are constantly revising their tactics and adapting to the security measures that are designed to stop them. To stop them, businesses need an equally adaptable and effective strategy.

Data enhancement can mitigate the risk of fraud by making it possible for you to verify identities in real time, so that you always know exactly who you’re communicating with. When a fraudster is impersonating a real customer, an enriched customer profile can give you all the information you need to see through their deception.

Enriched data that includes birthdates, IP addresses, and even social security numbers can be scored, along with signs of fraud, to tell you how likely it is that the customer is who they say they are. Common fraud tactics, such as using a deceased individual’s personal information, can be caught immediately.

With enhanced data, you’ll spend less time conducting manual reviews, making (and paying for) credit bureau inquiries, and dealing with the financial and reputational consequences of a data breach.

Improve TCPA Compliance

The TCPA became law in 1991, prohibiting companies from making autodialed calls to consumers without their consent. The law was updated in 2013 and 2015 in part to account for the prevalence of wireless phones.

Calling customers who are on the DNC registry, whether they’re on landlines or mobile phones, violates the TCPA and can subject you to civil damages of up to $1,500 per call. Companies like Wells Fargo and Dish Network have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle class action lawsuits brought about because of their repeated TCPA violations.

When data enhancement has validated the records in your CRM, you can place calls with full confidence that you won’t accidentally call somebody on the Do-Not-Call registry. You can also identify the serial litigators who wait for TCPA violations to pounce on and delete them from your contact lists.

Every day, more than 100,000 phone numbers get transferred to new owners. It’s not worth the risk to call unverified numbers and hope for the best when instead, you could use data enhancement to confirm the status of the number with the carrier and verify whether or not you have consent to call. This can be done on-demand, via an API or other integrated processes, or you can have your entire CRM database file under constant monitoring to eliminate practically any chance of an accidental violation.

Collect your Debts

By verifying that you have the right addresses, phone numbers, and other information for your customers, data enhancement can assist with your debt collections as well. Even if you only have a little bit of information, a good data enhancement solution can find the missing pieces and put them into place.

Bankruptcy notices, family members contact info, alternative numbers and addresses, and other data that can assist with debt collection efforts can all be acquired through data enhancement. Customers who purposely change their identifying information in an attempt to avoid debt collections won’t be able to hide any longer.

Conclusion/The Right Experts with the Right Solutions

When you’re trying to improve the ways you communicate with customers, flawed or incomplete data can detract from the experiences you’re trying to create. Businesses need accurate, complete data to inform their decisions, create engaging customer experiences, and protect themselves against fraud and compliance threats. Fortunately, there are experts ready to step in with the ideal solutions.

The right specialists, working flexibly with and around your existing internal processes, can tackle both the overall strategy and fine details involved in creating comprehensive customer profiles for more effective marketing, sales, and retention efforts. That leaves you free to focus on your business operations without worrying that devastating fines or lawsuits could wipe you out without warning.