In the dynamic world of pricing strategies, the quality of data stands as a cornerstone. The stakes are even higher for high-revenue businesses equipped with dedicated pricing teams. The journey towards optimal pricing decisions starts with understanding and enhancing the data at your disposal.
To attain high data quality, each company must determine, in a structured way, exactly what ‘high-quality data’ means to them according to your process, products and goals. You also need to find a way to ensure that the quality of the data remains high.
High-quality data helps you conduct advanced pricing strategies like leveraging price elasticity and sensitivity with high accuracy while eliminating inconsistencies. You can eventually boost your profit margins through optimal pricing.
In this article, let’s delve into the essence of data quality and its paramount importance in the context of AI-based pricing tools.
What is Quality of Data in Pricing?
When it comes to setting the right prices for your products, you would want to rely on quality data that is devoid of any errors or fluff. The quality of data determines the effectiveness of your pricing decisions.
In pricing, you would need to define data quality for 3 major aspects for optimal pricing.
- Data Quality for Price Elasticity:
High-quality data in this category is critical for accurately assessing how price changes affect the demand for products or services. This means gathering comprehensive data on historical prices, sales volumes, and external factors like market trends and competition. To understand better, you can read How Price Elasticity and Price Sensitivity are Different.
- Data Quality for Product Segmentation:
High-quality data in this domain ensures that products are segmented correctly, which is essential for targeted marketing, inventory management, and strategic planning.
It involves collecting detailed information about product features, customer feedback, sales history, and market positioning. Accurate product segmentation aids in understanding customer needs and preferences, enabling more personalized and effective marketing strategies.
- Data Quality for Customer Segmentation:
For powerful customer segmentation, data must accurately reflect customer characteristics such as geographical location, industry sector, growth patterns, revenue generation, potential for future business, and categorization (like customer ranking, and strategic importance). High-quality customer data enables businesses to tailor their pricing approach to different customer groups, optimising marketing efforts and improving customer relationship management.
Effective price management always includes accurate and up-to-date data on a plethora of factors like product costs, competitor’s pricing, market scenario and customer behaviour. In this project, we will analyse the data quality of your products, identify good examples and give best practices on how to improve the data quality.
Why is Data Quality Important for Price Optimisation?
Your pricing data is the foundation of all your pricing decisions. If you rely on the error-prone and inconsistent dataset, you are most likely to be making suboptimal decisions in each execution step.
The importance of data quality lies in its ability to steer pricing decisions towards profitability and market relevance. It’s the backbone on which your pricing strategies will base their calculations and algorithm.
Hence, your historical datasets and other information need to be devoid of error so you can gradually increase your profit margins in the long term.
Data quality importance cannot be overstated, especially when making decisions that could affect your business's bottom line. Let’s take a closer look at data quality’s importance in pricing and profitability.
1. Foundation for Accurate Decision-Making: High-quality data is vital for making informed pricing decisions. Accurate, complete, and reliable data ensures that pricing strategies are based on sound insights rather than guesswork.
2. Enhances Predictive Analytics: In an AI-driven pricing environment, data quality directly influences the effectiveness of predictive models. Better data quality leads to more accurate forecasts and trend analyses, which are essential for dynamic pricing strategies.
3. Reduces Risk of Errors: High data quality significantly reduces the risk of errors in pricing. This is crucial for businesses where small missteps in pricing can lead to substantial financial losses.
4. Facilitates Regulatory Compliance: For many industries, adhering to pricing regulations is mandatory. High-quality data ensures compliance with these regulations, avoiding legal and financial repercussions.
The Negative Business Impact of Poor Data Quality in Pricing
The common issues with data quality include multiple human errors and inconsistencies leading to suboptimal price-setting. The cost of bad data quality often manifests as incorrect pricing decisions. This results in lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction and even leaving money on the table.
Poor quality data is quick to spread through the company. It’s adopted into other databases, serves as reference data, and also is used to create reports.
As the size of databases is growing, the volume of inaccurate data is also rising. The result is that inaccurate data is responsible for poor business decisions leading companies to incur millions of euros’ worth of loss or damage.
Understanding and addressing the impact of poor data quality is a vital step in safeguarding your business's financial health.
1. Inaccurate Pricing Decisions: Poor data quality can lead to pricing decisions that are out of sync with the market, either too high to be competitive or too low to be profitable.
2. Significant Loss of Revenue and Market Share: Incorrect pricing stemming from poor data quality can result in significant revenue loss and a decrease in market share, as customers may turn to competitors for better-priced options.
3. Damaged Brand Reputation: Consistently poor pricing decisions can damage a company’s reputation, leading customers to perceive the brand as either overpriced or of low quality.
4. Strained Customer Relationships: Pricing errors can lead to customer dissatisfaction and erode trust, particularly if customers are frequently faced with pricing discrepancies or perceived unfair pricing practices.
5. Leaving money on the table even during opportunities: If your data isn’t updated with the current competition price, any new trend affecting customer behaviour, can lead to lost profits. If you aren’t optimising prices according to your profit margin goals and customer’s willingness to pay, the sweet spot, also according to the other external pricing factors; your pricing process can hinder scalability.
Causes of Poor Data Quality in Price Management
Data is not stagnant and is continually in motion. It must be frequently adjusted, exchanged, and stored – depending on different actions and market scenarios. Every action in the market and competition contains the chances of a possible impact on the quality of the data.
Also Read: Data Scraping: How to Get Competitor Pricing by Price Scraping
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons for its constant metamorphosis:
- Active data use includes specific activities focused on handling data, such as converting data formats, manually entering data, entering data in real time, processing data, cleaning up data inaccuracies, and integrating data from different sources.
- Passive data use covers activities like adjustments in how data is utilised without altering the data itself, upgrading systems, adopting new data usage methods, loss of expertise, and automated processes.
From this, it's clear that maintaining high data quality isn't automatic. Various factors can diminish data quality. As a result, it's important for organisations to proactively check and ensure the quality of their pricing data. Conducting data quality assessments is a useful way to measure the actual quality and integrity of data within organisations.
How can you Assess Data Quality to Enhance your Pricing?
A data quality assessment is a process that helps identify incorrect data, understand how it affects business operations, and take steps to fix the issues.
Using computers to perform data quality analysis is highly effective. It allows for quick examination of large amounts of data against specific quality standards. Additionally, it facilitates automated cross-referencing with other trustworthy data sources, enhancing the understanding of our data's quality.
Automating the process and referencing independent data sources are key to improving data quality.
Also Read: What Kind of Data or Systems should Connect to Price Optimisation Software?
Here’s how to Assess Data Quality in typically five stages:
1. Planning Phase: This involves defining the assessment's scope and goals, assembling the team, planning the timeline, outlining deliverables, and preparing for data access and download.
2. Preparatory Phase: Focuses on arranging the actual data download, identifying the specific data to be used, and classifying meta-data.
3. Implementation Phase: At this stage, business rules, data quality criteria, and filters are set and then applied to the data.
4. Refinement Phase: Involves discussions with process owners about preliminary findings, and fine-tuning and expanding the data quality criteria based on these discussions.
5. Reporting Phase: The final step is to produce and present a comprehensive report, discussing the findings and planning future actions.
4 Benefits or Business Outcomes of High-Quality Data in Pricing
High-quality data opens doors to effective price management. It allows businesses to accurately track product costs, understand market conditions, monitor competitor pricing, and gauge customer behaviour. Data quality monitoring plays a critical role in maintaining this high standard, ensuring that every decision is backed by the most relevant and accurate information available.
1. Make your pricing strategies more profitable: Quality data allows for developing more sophisticated and effective pricing strategies. This includes segmenting customers more accurately, understanding price elasticity, and setting prices that maximize profit margins.
2. Stay ahead of your competition in the market: With thorough market and competitor data, businesses can position their products more competitively. This involves understanding competitors' pricing strategies and market trends to make more informed pricing decisions.
3. Unlock deep customer insights and incorporate them in pricing: High-quality data provides deeper insights into customer behaviour and preferences. This information is invaluable for tailoring pricing strategies to meet customer needs and expectations, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Allocate resources more efficiently: Quality data helps in allocating resources more efficiently. Understanding which products or services are more profitable enables businesses to focus their efforts and investments where they are most effective.
5. Long-term Customer Value: By understanding customer behaviour and preferences through quality data, businesses can build long-term relationships with their customers. Tailored pricing strategies and personalized offers increase customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Get Ahead with Optimal Profits: SYMSON’s Data Quality Improvement Project
In this project, we evaluate the quality of your product data, pinpointing strong examples and providing guidance on enhancing data quality.
1. Data Quality Analysis of Products:
In this project, the first step involves a thorough analysis of the data quality associated with your products. This step is crucial in identifying areas where the data meets expected standards (good examples) and areas where it falls short.
2. Best Practice Recommendations:
Based on the findings from the data analysis, we provide tailored recommendations on how to enhance data quality. These recommendations are grounded in industry best practices, ensuring that the advice is both practical and effective.
3. Insight into Current Data Quality State:
The project includes a detailed assessment of your current data quality status. This assessment gives a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in your data management processes.
4. Predicting Usefulness for Elasticity Analysis:
A significant part of the project is to evaluate whether the current state of your data is suitable for conducting elasticity analyses. Elasticity analysis involves understanding how changes in prices or other factors affect the demand for your products. High-quality data is essential for accurate predictions in this area.
5. Future Projections and Implications:
Beyond the current state, the project aims to predict the future utility of your data for various analyses and decision-making processes. This foresight will help in planning for improvements and investments in data management systems to ensure long-term efficiency and effectiveness.
In summary, this project is designed to provide a comprehensive evaluation of your product data quality, offer strategic recommendations for improvement, and assess the potential of your data for critical analyses like price elasticity. This will enable more informed decision-making and strategic planning based on reliable data insights.
Do you want a free demo to try how SYMSON can help your business with margin improvement or pricing management? Do you want to learn more? Schedule a call with a consultant and book a 20 minute brainstorm session!
