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Identify the eight common challenges when compiling event data and learn how to overcome them.
Watch Mitch Deeming, our Head of Operations & Customer Success, talk through the common challenges and how to avoid them
In events, we gather a lot of data from our customers. But how do you ensure the data you collect is appropriate and easy to consume for your business? Read on for the eight common challenges and learn how to avoid or overcome them.
The common pitfalls
1. Public vs. Private data
Your CRM will likely contain a wide range of data, some in the public domain, such as names and job titles. Some of which are private.
While the people in your CRM may be comfortable sharing some of their private data with other companies, for example, their purchasing interests with a networking app. However, fields such as home addresses or phone numbers should not be viewable by external parties.
2. Duplicate records
Regular checks should be carried out within your CRM to ensure that people who register at multiple events aren’t counted as different people, or having some people in split records.
3. Inconsistently entered data
When collecting data from various sources, inconsistently collected data can compromise the quality of the wider data set. For example, if you’re asking people to rank their Customer Satisfaction on a scale from 1-5 but their Likelihood of Attending next time from 0 - 10, or from “very unlikely” to “very likely,” representing both on a chart will require some extra leg work and qualifying.
KPIs taken from survey data should be exported out using the numeric values that correspond to the option name, for example, “very unlikely” being 1 and “very likely” being 5, to help give context to scores for anyone viewing this data who isn’t familiar with the question scales used.
4. Redundancy of collecting data 25 May
Whenever you consider what data you want to collect about your customers and prospects, you should be aware of what you already hold about them, and how this is stored, so that any future data can be viewed and directly compared alongside existing data.
5. Inconsistent formatting between sources
As you use different event technologies within your tech stack, you’ll find that tools may track similar metrics but refer to them differently, or qualify criteria may vary. This can make analyzing the data for your post-event report harder and integrating external data sources back into your CRM more time-consuming.
Standards such as the Virtual Standard Event Format - VSef, enable event teams to consume consistent data regardless of which platforms they are working with by setting a common set of fields to allow for seamless data integration.
6. Out of date data
When people move job roles within a company or leave for a new job, you may find that the information you have on your customers and prospects becomes outdated over time. It’s important that these people continue to interact with your events and that you make sure that your CRM keeps as up-to-date as possible.
In addition, time should be allocated regularly to ensuring that the records you have are still accurate or relevant – in some cases, you may find existing customers of yours have left their previous role to move to a new position where they have an increased budget, or more decision making authority to exhibit at your events.
7. Outliners based on data held
For certain questions that you may have present within your CRM, be aware of people who may sit at both the low and high end of data held, and question why this may be the case.
For example, if you have a field based on "Average Budget Spent Per Event" and some of your entries are 100s of millions above the rest, is this because they make up an exceptionally high-value segment, or did your question phrasing lead some contacts to be confused and indicate the spend of their whole organization over the whole year?
Look for discrepancies based on the person’s role and company – someone who is fairly junior at a small company probably won’t hold millions in budget!
8. Lack of resources/expertise in data analysis
Without the right training and tools, and the time necessary to analyze the data you hold, you may miss out on key opportunities that your data may present.
Now that you know the eight common pitfalls and how to overcome them, compiling clean and robust event data will provide value for you and your business over time.