The Significance of Data Hygiene Maintenance

In the hyper-competitive realm of data-dependent and data-heavy businesses, up-to-date, useful and “hygienic” data is critical in the maintenance of a smooth workflow. Data which is entered, managed and stored through any type of electronic process is inevitably bound to accumulate errors over time. Upon entering the system, these errors result in irregularities and the birth of unhygienic data. This term implies that a certain percentage of your company data is one or more of the following things: inaccurate, incomplete, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, corrupt or redundant.

Data cleansing involves the detection and subsequent removal of any such “dirty” data present within the back-office processes of a business. Undertaken through the utilization of dedicated technological tools and internal programs, this process constantly examines and manages all organizational data for flaws, regulated by pre-set standardized algorithms. Once imperfect data is identified, the incomplete data is then appended, inaccurate data is deleted, and duplicates are removed.

What Does It Accomplish?

Company data is the information based on which organizational decisions are made, and the day-to-day workflow is maintained. A robust data cleaning system ensures that the company data is sound, which would subsequently improve outcomes and serve business processes better. This process allows companies to save valuable time and money, while simultaneously heighten the overall transactional and functional efficiency. Mismanaged databases account for compromising of customer data integrity, and maladministration of customer-related actions. Professionals and firms are encouraged to actively invest in data cleansing programs and tools to prevent any potential decline in the organizational data proficiency. Proper data hygiene also saves the company from a number of financial and personnel impacts, including the cost of processing errors, manual trouble shooting, accidental shipments to incorrect addresses, or wrongly delivered post-coded products.

Benefits:

• • Boosts success of customer acquisition efforts

Maintained data hygiene significantly improves an enterprise’s customer acquisition endeavours simply by ensuring the creation of a more efficient list of prospects using and containing accurate data. Throughout sales and marketing efforts, businesses can rely on the highest possible returns on online campaigns since chances of encountering outdated addresses and profiles are minimized by clean data. Data hygiene tools are also capable of seamlessly managing multi-channel customer data, enabling organizations to conduct highly successful marketing campaigns.

• • Streamlines decision making

Customer data is the cornerstone of accurate and impactful decision making. Accurate, up-to-date and complete customer information is essential for successful decision making. Hygienic data supports improved analytics as well as overall business intelligence, thereby facilitating more robust and well-informed decision making and subsequent execution of the action plans. Such decisions are likelier to contribute to overall organizational success.

• • Restructures business practices

Removing duplicate data from the company database allows enterprises to streamline their corporate practices and save them a considerable amount of time and money. Data cleansing also facilitates determining whether particular job descriptions within the company can be changed or integrated elsewhere. Hygienic data further ensures that accurate and reliable sales information is consistently available, thus offering the company the option to easily assess the performance of a particular service or product in the market. Data hygiene maintenance using the apt analytics aids companies in the identification of opportune timeframes in which to launch new services or products in the market. It can also highlight certain previously unconsidered marketing avenues.

• • Escalates productivity

A clean and well-maintained data base guarantees businesses that employees will make the best use of company time. Data hygiene also prevents organization staff from attempting to reach customers using outdated or incorrect information, and saves potential mistakes such as creation of invalid vendor files within the system. By offering employees pre-checked clean data, data hygiene management programs thus maximize staff productivity and efficiency. In this manner, clean data even reduces risk of fraud.

• • Greater revenue

Business enterprises enjoy exponentially higher response rates following the implementation of a company-wide data cleansing system, and this ensures increased revenue. Duplicated data is among the most harmful forms of dirty data, which is understood to have a considerable financial impact as it drains company resources when twice as much is accidentally spent on a singular customer. Data cleansing eradicates duplicated information immediately following identification. Hygienic data aids companies in the drastic minimization of returned mails, and time-sensitive information which must be reach customers directly can be conveyed to them in quick and convenient manner.

Maintaining data hygiene is a multifaceted endeavor which involves multiple simultaneous processes. Data cleansing can be done manually as well as electronically. However, if done manually, ensuring data hygiene comprises a process of combing through piles of data to correct typing and spelling errors, correcting labels, eradicating out of date records and completely missing or incomplete files. This time consuming process is thankfully unnecessary for businesses to comply with due to the introduction and widespread use of efficient electronic data cleansing mechanisms.

Data cleansing for organizations imply more complex operations, therefore it is usually performed using computer programs and applications designed to follow a set of algorithms and procedures initially determined manually by the senior management. The procedures are based on a specific set of purposes, for example to delete records which have not been updated or accessed for a certain time frame, to perform automated spell checks and error-correction, or to address any occurrences of accidental duplication. Several more sophisticated applications also offer the option of filling incomplete or missing data spaces on the basis of preset information.

Data cleansing is not a one-time process. Big data is continually in flux, and each month a certain percentage of this data goes stale, or becomes redundant. Similarly, the continual updating, perusal and further accumulation of big data also means that the overall number of errors and faults in the data also incessantly grows. Continuous data hygiene management ensures that the data remains perpetually healthy and strong. Furthermore, a dedicated program which performs incessant data cleansing ensures the delivery of judiciously accurate data at any given moment, ensuring that all inherent functional departments have timely access to accurate, merged, comprehensive and reliably clean data.

Expanding businesses necessitate greater numbers of resources in order to preserve accuracy within the databases. A clean database undoubtedly helps organizations achieve business goals in a more timely, streamlined and convenient fashion. Hygienic data significantly contributes to the realization of more effective marketing activities, avidly improves customer relations and future customer acquisition, and quickens the steady progress towards the achievement of organizational objectives.

Big data ensures that company can elevate its sales and marketing efforts to greater levels of effectiveness and efficiency, however big data also necessitates that the elements facilitating its management are ever-present and of the greatest possible quality. Data cleansing is one such integral factor, which is critical to accomplishing the ultimate management and utilization of company big data, resulting in considerably more effective marketing and exponentially greater lead conversions.