Subscription services are everywhere these days, easing our hectic schedules and providing a wide variety of conveniences. Media, personal care products, easy-prep meals, and more can all be delivered to your door via a weekly or monthly subscription. But subscription services rely on quality customer data for updated addresses, accurately documented allergies, and consistent insight into customer preferences. Poor data quality cripples a subscription service, increasing cancellation rates, and complicating reconnecting with previous subscribers.
Media services
Ignoring data quality is how you end up like Netflix, which facilitated a further drop in both stock price and subscriber numbers by declaring its intention to introduce ads, crack down on password sharing, and cancel your cousin’s favorite show. Data is crucial to understanding your subscribers’ media consumption preferences, what works for them, and what most definitely doesn’t.
Streaming services, like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+, rely on data for pivotal decisions. Subscriber data enables personalized viewing recommendations and targeted promotions specific to certain subscribers. Will your next “bingeworthy” content suggestion be a winner or a flop? It depends on the data. Data from what and how people watch drives everything from content creation to how many ads an audience will endure in return for the next installment of Stranger Things.
Food and personal care services
If you’ve watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast in the past few years, you’ve heard of HelloFresh. There are dozens of different food subscription services, each with its own data-driven, attention-grabbing name. Have you heard of Gobble? Freshly? Splendid Spoon? Food is not a one-size-fits-all product, especially when you account for allergies and ingredient intolerance — not to mention customer preferences. A triggered food allergy can turn a fun dinner for two into an overnight visit to the hospital, but high-quality data helps subscription services manage risk, so no one receives food they can’t enjoy.
Data quality is also essential for customer preference management and expanding add-on revenue. When one customer is on a diet and another enjoys rich, spicy meals, subscriber preference data reduces delivery mistakes. Data indicates one major appeal of food delivery subscriptions is the customer’s opportunity to expand their palate, perfect opportunities to offer additional products such as a suggested wine.
There are also services that provide personal care products. Services range from personalized hair care to shave clubs and feminine hygiene products. Again, customer preferences are critical data points for preventing allergic reactions and tailoring product features and recommendations to specific customers.
Unlike streaming subscriptions, food and hygiene services deliver physical products, which creates more risk for something to go wrong. Inaccurate streaming service data can annoy, and sometimes amuse, customers, but with food or hygiene subscriptions, poor data quality can have serious, even fatal, consequences.
Data quality management
So, let’s say your company is starting a subscription box service to deliver specialty chocolates once a month. How do you plan to measure and maintain the level of data quality necessary to manage risk and satisfy your customers’ wants and needs? Data quality management needs regular attention, especially as chocolate lovers everywhere rush to subscribe to your service — and add to your data assets.
Quality data is important to every business, but subscription-based services can be particularly sensitive to data quality challenges — and nothing good comes from bad customer data.
[cta]For help with data quality management challenges, reach out to pam.lang@xcelerated.com, call (877) 236-9155, or visit xcelerated.com to learn more about custom data quality management solutions for your subscription service business.[/cta]