With most industries relying on data today for their business growth, especially data-intensive industries like banking, insurance, retail, telecoms among others, managing data to be error-free becomes important. It is known that one way of achieving maximum efficiency is to reduce all kinds of data errors and inconsistencies. If the company aims to optimize its working and increase their profits by using data, then data quality is of utmost importance. Old and inaccurate data can have an impact on results. Data quality problems can occur anywhere in information systems.
Data scrubbing, also called data cleansing, is the process of amending or removing data in a database that is incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated. A data cleanse involves the rectification or deletion of outdated, incorrect, redundant, or incomplete data from a database. The goal of data cleansing is to make sure that the information contained within a database is accurate and complete. According to the CMO of a reputed Silicon Valley technology giant, data cleansing or data scrubbing is the first step in the overall data preparation process
As per a recently conducted survey, 60% of the prospects database gets outdated within years’ time of creation and spend a lot of time cleansing their old lists, which results in increased time to sale and on some occasions also loss of sale. Data cleaning might seem dull and uninteresting, but it’s one of the most important tasks.
Dirty data can contain such mistakes as spelling or punctuation errors, incorrect data associated with a field like an email id, job title, phone, location, etc., incomplete or outdated data, or even data that has been duplicated in the database. Data gets populated in the CRM from various sources, multiple people use it and populate the details and over a period of time, it gets either duplicated or becomes redundant since the prospect you are chasing for a sales moves into a different role or a different organization.
Benefits of Data Cleansing:
- Improves Efficiency: Having clean data can help you in generating leads a lot faster. You’d save a considerable amount of time on the sale.
- Reduces Error Margin: When you don’t have accurate data of prospects, you inadvertently end up following up with the wrong guy.
- Helps keep track of changing business environment: With clean data, you can keep abreast of changes in personnel, changes in roles and location of prospects, etc.
- Reduces time to Sale: Having clean data makes it much easier and faster for the sales guys to target the right prospect.
- Increases the lead flow: Cleaner data would result in your campaigns getting targeted to the right prospects in much higher numbers which would in turn result in more leads.
aMarketForce’s data scrubbing and cleansing services help our customers keep their CRM data up to date and always help them target the right customers. Below are a few services that aMarketForce provides for data cleansing/scrubbing:
- Remove irrelevant values
- Remove duplicates
- Correct typographical errors if any
- Update missing contact information
- Convert data types
aMarketForce is an ISO 27001 and 9001 certified and GDPR compliant outsourcing company that serves as the back-office support team for sales and marketing departments of companies around the world.