Solving the Costs Of Double Data Entry

In this new landscape of growing tech to automate tasks and increase efficiency, you will come across plenty of software to use.

And, like most of us, you think your business is sorted after purchasing various software to do different tasks.

This is great until it isn’t. Using different types of software can cause data inaccuracy, or your staff spends more time entering data twice. Because these systems don’t work together, one customer’s record is duplicated by the other, often manually and with errors.

Data is critical to the optimal functioning of your business. For any decision or its impact, it’s the data that shows the story behind it or the reason for it. However, if that data is incorrect or is siloed across systems, the whole point of data-driven, targeted decision-making is in vain.

And that’s not all…

Double data entry has the power to disrupt your business as it has enormous costs attached to it. Let’s break down some of those, and understand why you need to solve this problem as soon as possible.

How Much Double Data Entry Is Costing You?

Productivity Costs

Pipedrive’s report on the State of Sales mentions that a staggering 47% of respondents cited that selling is not their main activity. Indicating how much time salespeople waste on tasks like entering data into multiple systems.

Imagine your sales team being part of those statistics. Their time is being caught up in wasteful activities instead of selling; less selling means less revenue and profits for your business.

Severely impacting productivity.

It’s not just them.

So are the customer reps in your company. With scattered data – a by-product of double data entry, they must go through multiple records of the same customer to answer simple queries. Or your marketing team emails the same information to the customer three to four times.

A massive waste of time and effort. And ultimately, unhappy and annoyed customers. That’s why poor data quality due to double data entries is a severe productivity killer that needs to be tamed before it costs you, your company, and your customers heavily.

Costly Errors

We are humans. There are always chances of errors sticking around. Like they say, to err is to be human. 

And these errors can creep in when you or your subordinates enter data manually into different systems of record.

To put it in context: For a distribution company where 4.7% of the records have incorrect addresses and who ships about a million packages a year, it implies 47,000 packages shipped to the wrong addresses.

That’s just one case in point. Wrong phone numbers, incorrect names, and any other erroneous information critical to customer conversion, satisfaction, and retention can put a dent in your team’s efforts.

Customer Experience Costs

A satisfied customer is a crucial driver of growth in every business. Satisfaction stems from delightful experiences. Experiences which they have had, such as when they ordered for the first time, when they had a problem to resolve, or when it was a question that they couldn’t find answers to.

And one bad experience sets them back.

In fact, in a report by Verint, the Customer Engagement Company, 64% of the respondents said that they jumped to a competitor following a poor customer experience.

And a significant cause of poor customer experience is poor quality of data which is a consequence of double data entries.

Asking your customers to hold the line for 5-10 minutes while you search for a record, or being unable to resolve their problems is a poor customer experience at best, possibly losing that customer. 

The most damaging characteristic of brand loyalty is the amount of effort needed to get a resolution (34%), followed by long hold times (25%) and bad bot experiences (22%), as reported by Verint’s The 2022 State of Digital Customer Experience.

And we all know keeping positive brand recognition requires effort and is difficult to recover after a bad experience.

However, there is good news: The solution to the double data entry problem lies in Data Integration.

So, How Can Data Integration Reduce the Costs of Double Data Entry?

Data integration, through companies like Commercient SYNC, will connect your disjointed systems, your Accounting ERP, and your CRM systems. Instead of working in silos, your sales, marketing, and customer service teams can have access to the same data in the ERP and the CRM. 

This will solve the problem of each department or individual entering their own information, decreasing the chances of errors. Everyone has a 360-degree view of sales, customers, and marketing.

Information entered in one software will reflect in another in real-time, reducing discrepancies. Data consistency will lead to significant savings in time and effort, increasing productivity. 

As when one employee enters information, it will reflect for others, and your customer-facing employees will have accurate information at their disposal – decreasing their response time from minutes to seconds.

Imagine if integrating your data saves your salesperson 40% of his or her time. That means 40% more time to close deals! An 8-hour workday means your sales executive has an additional 192 minutes. 

Over the course of a week, that’s 960 minutes, and if we take the whole year into account, that adds up to about 49,920 minutes more to convert. Now multiply these with each of your sales representatives. That’s a lot of time saved!

That’s the power of having consistent data, streamlining your processes, and making your business work as a single unit by using powerful ERP and CRM data integration tools like Commercient SYNC.

And when you look at the big picture here, it also means reducing the potential of human errors, which leads to a positive customer experience.

Positive experiences will lead to improved brand perception and satisfied, loyal customers.

It’s About Taking the Steps

The problem and costs of double data entry and incorrect data arising from it are persistent across industries and sectors. Whatever your niche may be, you are not shielded from it. In order to protect your business from the issues of erroneous double data entries and improve efficiencies, taking steps to mitigate is your only solution. 

Investing in data integration software like Commercient SYNC will help you resolve double data entry problems. As always, It’s about increasing profits while reducing costs.