Berlin-based company mobile.de offers the largest range of services for buying and selling vehicles in Germany. The brand recognized early on how important data is for the success of its business. With around 16 million users on the company’s own platforms, mobile.de has a unique treasure trove of data at its disposal.
The challenge
In order to gain the best possible insights into customer behavior and business development and use them to make better decisions within the company, the company needed to ensure the quality of its data. Together with DEPT®, mobile.de launched a data quality initiative, establishing basic definitions and standards for data quality as well as a process to measure and sustainably improve data quality in a multidimensional and cross-divisional manner.
This opened up completely new potential for the company in terms of productivity and tailored customer services thanks to reliable insights. Additionally, the company could avoid risks and costs resulting from low-quality data, which can arise from incorrect investments, customer churn or missed business opportunities, as well as from the time and money spent on correcting data downstream.
Step by step towards the goal
We started out with the development of a “Data Quality Operating Model”, a framework of rough guidelines to gradually and permanently raise data quality to a higher level. Based on the current status as well as the needs and ambitions of mobile.de, we created a concrete implementation plan with clear milestones for the long-term management of data quality.
The approach
Data as part of the corporate strategy
DEPT® supported mobile.de in embedding the data quality project in its overall data strategy, as well as defining suitable roles and responsibilities for the long-term management of data quality. The data quality initiative is continuously being expanded to include additional company divisions, their prioritized data sources and responsible parties. This way data quality is passed back to the decision-makers in the company, ensuring the long-term use of high-quality data in all areas of the company.
Data quality made measurable
In order to deliver tangible results quickly and make the initiative visible within the company, we initially included internally prioritized data sources in the evaluation process. The project was gradually expanded to include all company divisions and relevant sources. For the actual measurement of data quality, a multidimensional evaluation process with defined quality rules and threshold values was individually developed. It included the evaluation of correctness, completeness, integrity and up-to-dateness. One or more metrics were defined for each of these dimensions, which determine whether the data quality is high, acceptable or low depending on whether they are met.
Dashboards for transparency
Of course, a one-off survey of data quality is not sufficient. Mobile.de strives for continuous improvement, so data quality is measured daily and made transparent by means of freely accessible dashboards, allowing problem areas to be quickly identified at a glance. Employees can be notified via individual alerts if the quality of a dimension falls below a set threshold so that action can be taken promptly. We developed a process for troubleshooting to help the company tackle problems in a structured manner and solve them sustainably.
Data-based decisions are becoming part of everyday work.
The result
The data quality gained through the initiative enables mobile.de to make better decisions based on reliable data and analysis of its business development and customer behavior. The increase in data quality also means increased efficiency and productivity for all employees working with data, as the tedious search for reasons for incorrect data and subsequent correction is avoided. By integrating decision-makers as responsible parties, data quality is gradually becoming part of the day-to-day work of making data-based decisions at mobile.de.
Questions?
Director Business Development
