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Data is the core of a company’s existence and the foundation on which it grows. However, the kind of data you have on your premises or on the cloud is critical. So, you need to know if your data is clean or not. Now you will ask, what do we mean by that? Is it possible that data can be clean or dirty like clothes and kitchen tops? Well, the answer to that is a resounding yes. In brief, clean data is data that is free from all types of inaccuracies, duplications, etc. Clean data helps your company to be efficient and run smoother.
Dirty data can cause issues and prevent information transfer to genuine clients or potential clients while sending messages to clients that never reach. Dirty data can cost businesses between 10 – 15% of their revenue as per some studies in the USA. You can tell if data is dirty or not if you do a thorough study of it. If you find information like addresses incomplete, email IDs have been entered wrongly or telephone numbers with missing elements, these all are examples of dirty data that impact your business on a day to day basis.
As a business owner, if you are planning to sign up for a Customer relationship management tool (CRM) such as Salesforce, then you need to get your act together and clean up your data.
Recommended read: Why Customer-Relationship so important?
Here are some tips on cleaning the data with you. I hope it is of help to you all!
Diligence in entry-stage – Prevention is better than cure goes the old English adage. It applies to all aspects of daily life and is also relevant during the data entry stage. Callousness here, an oversight there, or a hurry can result in inaccurate data creeping into your system. Hence it is advisable to go slow, cross-check or double-check data. Thus you will be saving your company a lot of grief down the road.
Review data – It is essential that the company owner, concerned department, or personnel take time to cross-check the data entered to weed out inaccuracies. One way to achieve this is to ask your current list of clients etc to send their updated contact details.
Remove duplicate contacts – Duplicate contacts are a headache for companies. You can do this manually if you are a small business or turn to some online applications which are available to Salesforce users.
Regular data maintenance – The bigger the company, the more effort should be put in by the team members to constantly review and take action against dirty data. You could set this up on a monthly basis as a task. “A stitch in time saves nine” is relevant here.
Also Read: Why you need Salesforce CRM managed services and its benefits
In the above steps, your investment in a good CRM will pay dividends. With this, we hope you realize the importance of clean data and CRM resulting in an impact on your bottom lines and efficiency. Start the process today and save yourself a lot of niggles. If you have faced problems because of dirty data, share your story with us. It will help others in our community
About the Author
RS Maan
Maan joined Salesforce Ecosystem in 2008 with entry of Salesforce in APAC region. He worked on many of the underlying Salesforce Products & it’s functionality, including Heroku, Chatbots, and Einstein before leading Codleo Consulting - Leading Partner of Salesforce.com & Salesforce.org. In his spare time, he immerses himself in travel, books and spirituality.
