5 Tips For Providing Accurate Product Data To Your Customers
Data drives much of modern business communications, production, research and marketing. Not only do you need to collect and analyze customer and market information, but you also need to provide certain types of data to customers. Here are five tips for providing accurate product data to your customers.
1. Make Sure You Can Maintain Source Data Sets
Maintaining source data sets involves collecting and logging data from various devices and equipment. In many cases, you need to curate a solid and comprehensive data set from a product to understand how it’s functioning, how it’s being used and other types of data. Having a good source data set will inform improvements or fixes you need to make in future iterations of products. This is common in the medical field, where much equipment is focused on monitoring patient vitals. For example, a UDI or Unique Device Identification is a vital component of many types of medical equipment. UDIs can upload their data sets to a database, which ensures you can keep the data set maintained and well-organized by patient, by device or by other organizational methods.
2. Implement Data Transparency Policies
Before you can provide customers with accurate product data, you need to establish a trusting relationship with customers. This involves policies such as data transparency. Make sure customers are aware of how their own data is handled and protected. If you see a potential need to share customer information for any reason, make sure customers know that is a possibility. Likewise, you should make sure policies surrounding the transmission or sharing of product data with your customers are equally transparent. This type of information is often included in the terms and conditions of user contracts, but you can pave the way for customer confidence in your product data offerings by making your policies clear, easy to understand and easy to access.
3. Provide Customers With Ways To Control The Flow Of Data
While it’s important to make sure customers can access accurate product data, you also don’t want to inundate them with data they don’t want or need. One of the best things you can do to provide customers with only the data they need or want is to provide them with ways to control or filter data flow. A good example of an industry with highly customizable data flow is the medical field. In this field, patients often have accounts with their health networks where they can access test, scan and examination results from each of their healthcare providers, as well as data from medical devices such as pacemakers, and curate that data accordingly. Patients can then choose which providers to forward data to.
4. Focus More On Consistency Than Flexibility
While flexibility is a vital and desirable trait in many aspects of business, it’s not the most useful tool in making product data available. Customers tend to prefer consistency, with minimal differences between the way data on different products is offered. You want to make sure you have a consistent template for data sharing. Develop specific standards regarding coding, content, style, formatting, metrics and sharing with customers. You can always allow for customization on an as needed basis, but overall, your product data sharing communications should be as standardized as possible for ease of understanding.
5. Strategize How To Best Deliver Data
One of the pillars of providing accurate product data is to develop a solid strategy for how to do so. How you decide to collect, organize, analyze and provide data will depend mainly on your industry and your customers. However, many organizations start their strategies from a basic eight-step model and make changes or add complexity based on their specific wants and needs. The eight-step model includes media tracking, brainstorming, creating data schemas, cleaning data, visualizing and refining data, data analysis, story pitching and writing and sharing the data story.
There are many ways you can provide your customers with accurate product data. The strategies you use may depend on your industry, your tools and your customers.
