By Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa In the retail sector the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) promises to, and in many cases already is, driving real-time business success. From enhancing data-driven insight and productivity, to improving the customer experience. With Black Friday looming, AI can potentially play a vital role in driving sales during one of the most important periods in the retail calendar. However, in the rush to adopt AI, many retailers havent taken into consideration how having poor quality data on customers could lead to gibberish, or worse, biased and inaccurate outcomes. This is what is commonly called AI induced hallucinations, which leads to poor results. For example, poor personalisation could be delivered by AI having access to incorrect customer data, such as an incorrect name or address, for example, which would have a negative impact on sales and the customer experience.

Data decay is an issue

Data decay is a significant factor impacting the effective implementation of AI. Data decays fast when customer contact data lacks regular intervention, degrading at 25 per cent a year as people move home, die and get divorced. Additionally, 20 per cent of addresses entered online have errors; these include spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, and incorrect postcodes. To avoid the scourge of inaccurate contact data its important to have verification processes in place at the point of data capture, and when cleaning held data in batch. This typically involves simple and cost-effective changes to the data quality process.

Use an address autocomplete or lookup service

A valuable piece of technology to use at the customer onboarding stage is an address autocomplete or lookup service. These deliver accurate address data in real-time when onboarding new customers by providing a properly formatted, correct address when they commence inputting theirs.