Data handling remains one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations today. As we are living in an age of information overload (with reportedly around 2.5 quintillion data bytes created each and every day), it has become enormously difficult for the companies to sort out useful data from such a large amount of information available. Here is where the importance of a data cleansing software comes to the fore. Companies, looking forward to a cleaner and more organized CRM and database, take help of the data cleaning software tools (like sales force automation tools) to eliminate duplicate data and revise badly formatted and incomplete information in the databases, marketing lists or CRM. These data cleaning tools are particularly helpful for companies or firms dealing with a huge amount of information at the same time. Government organizations, banks and Multinational companies can all benefit from the use of these tools.
Why is it So Important to Eliminate Unimportant Data?
Simply, because companies base their minor and major decisions on consumer information! If the businesses are not able to maintain a “quality” database, then they might as well have serious financial consequences to deal with. For instance, if you are basing your marketing and sales decisions on inaccurate data, then you might as well fail to identify opportunities (like up selling and cross selling) which could have driven more revenue for your company.
Or for that matter, consider a situation where you have completely been unable to identify consumer preferences from the inaccurate database! It (i.e. inaccurate data) has often been held responsible for various residential consumers receiving business mails from companies which are not relevant to them. The maintenance of a quality database is important for forging long standing customer relations. It is perhaps the reason why attributes like data correctness, cleansing, consistency and integrity are so important for your business. So, inaccurate data elimination is important to ensure that customers are not targeted with irrelevant mails or offers. Make sure your client information is always updated and verified so that your employees do not waste time in calling up or mailing the wrong targets or for that matter send out mails to invalid addresses.
What should you do?
Manual fixing or cleansing of data remains a time- consuming affair (it might as well take up weeks to deal with the large swathes of data available with the bigger organizations). That is why it is more sagacious to invest in automated data cleansing tools.
Make sure you are taking these steps consistently to upgrade the quality of data available with you. Elimination of inaccurate information should be followed by proper initiatives to standardize, match and append data.
Standardizing the available information includes the use of a standard identifier for each product or consumer and the collection of the entire data in standardized formats.
When it comes to matching the available information you are required to compare the submitted records available in the same or multiple files. Appending data implies getting rid of useless information followed by the addition of more meaningful data to be used for targeting and segmentation.
