There are a number of reasons you don’t want your customers making duplicate accounts. Duplicating accounts can cause your business a myriad of avoidable issues. However, that won’t stop customers from attempting to create multiple accounts. This article will seek to explore why they do this, what impact it has on your company, and how to resolve the issue.
This may happen as a result of a customer service rep not knowing the customer has another account with existing notes or history on the customer. Another issue is that business employees may spend their time dealing with the consolidation of data when they could be doing a more productive task. Your business may be wasting marketing efforts on the same customer twice, and poor decisions made based on inaccurate data. These are major issues that you can address by consolidating your data, and here is how to do that.
Usually, the reason a customer might make a duplicate account is that they lost their log-in information. Depending on the program you want to avoid having duplicate accounts in, there may be settings to help you. Most programs can stop users from creating an account with the same email address, IP address, first and last name combined with an e-mail address, etc. Another easy fix is if membership is something you can charge even a small amount for, customers who know they are paying for an account are highly unlikely to create a second.
Luckily for you, this problem has solutions. With the help of tools such as entity extraction software and AI solutions, clearing your system of duplicate accounts without losing any valuable information is simple. While you can try to do this manually, companies gather a great deal of data, and each customer account comes with a lot of different information that is hard to track on your own.
AI solutions, however, can match obscure data such as a credit card number or email to one used by another account and flag it the moment the customer is attempting to make the account, preventing duplication in the process. Entity extraction software can also help with accounting as your system may not be able to read an invoice or check from “Bob” as being connected to “Robert’s” account. The same goes for entities mentioned in different languages that otherwise may not be correctly read and filed by the system. With tools such as these, you won’t have to worry about your system causing issues that may upset your customers or cause problems with your record keeping.
While there is a lot you can do on your end to consolidate duplicate accounts, it’s much easier to manage if customers aren’t actively trying to trick your system. One way to make sure they don’t continue to do this is to incentivize them to stay in a single account and continue to build a relationship with your company. While many companies will put a lot of effort into brining new customers, they won’t have good deals waiting for long standing customers. Offering coupons and special offers for customers that have been with you for the long haul will encourage them to use the same account over and over. Reward points, check-in bonuses, and seasonal benefits all are encouraging to customers who are looking to build up rapport with a company rather than continually being the new guy and getting that new customer special treatment.
While duplicate accounts can be a major issue when left unaddressed, you can solve your problems with the right solutions. Whether that be taking a new approach with your customer relations or utilizing new software, you can consolidate your consumer data for better business management.
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