Solid data equals solid business. According to Gartner research, “The average financial impact of poor data quality on organizations is $9.7 million per year.” In order to get the most value for your data, data maintenance needs to be ongoing, i.e., every day. You need to make sure that your data is duplicate free and that it doesn’t contain any inaccuracies or data usability issues.
Is the extra attention worth it? The answer is a resounding yes. Data-driven businesses leverage the data they collect to predict future trends, identify consumer behaviors and detect new business opportunities more quickly. Smart businesses create the potential for obtaining a market advantage by transforming the data they collect into answers to specific business questions. To do this, you first need to clean your data to resolve any data quality issues, such as duplicate, incomplete or inaccurate information.
Running daily data maintenance checks will benefit your business, but it doesn’t have to be a huge effort that takes you away from your revenue-generating work. Through the power of AI and easy-to-use automation platforms, you can and should be maintaining your data on a daily basis.
Good Data Maintenance Requires CRM Vigilance
Data maintenance is the ongoing process of auditing your CRM data, identifying data issues, and fixing them. Data maintenance encompasses many focus areas, such as deduplication, data quality, data cleansing, and others. What separates data maintenance from standard data cleanup projects is that the latter are more short-term and tactical, meaning that if some issues are uncovered, they will be resolved. Therefore, data cleanup is more of a reactionary approach to problems that already exist.
Data maintenance is an ongoing process that you need to perform every day and will require your consistent attention and investment. The good news is that modern data maintenance tools can help you automate many data maintenance tasks.
What is the Cost of Poor Data Maintenance?
Neglecting data maintenance allows quality issues to accumulate and consequently raise business costs. In addition to the monetary losses, there are also productivity losses. Low-data quality will slow down and demotivate your employees. For example, when sales reps try to connect with potential customers, they often rely on previous interactions. If that information is scattered among several duplicate records, the picture of that customer is distorted and outdated.
As if this weren’t enough, there are additional costs of poor data to your operating budget. Poor data quality, redundant data, and lost data can cost companies 15 to 25 percent of their operating budget, according to the USGS. All of these costs can be avoided by making data maintenance a daily process. In fact, not only will you prevent data quality issues from draining your budget and resources, but you will also increase overall productivity and empower your organization’s decision makers.
How Does Daily Data Maintenance Improve Your Business?
One of the biggest ways daily data maintenance helps to improve your business is by enabling you to extract insights based on real-time data. When your sales and marketing teams can identify trends in real-time, they are able to make immediate adjustments to dynamic creatives and campaigns. Brands that can be proactive in their customer retention efforts will improve the customer experience because they can react to inquiries with the freshest, most up-to-date insights. Real-time analytics are only possible if an organization is using the most recent data. And the only way to ensure that the data you access is relevant is by keeping it clean … on a daily basis.
Additionally, daily data maintenance improves your business by providing a higher ROI and improved efficiency. With the volume and sources of incoming data increasing, the lack of daily data maintenance prevent companies from putting that information to good use. As a result, not only do organizations lose the ability to properly identify prospects, but customers can’t be targeted with customized communications that could further engage them through upselling, retention, and renewal.
Daily data maintenance will also help to mitigate security and compliance risks. Security and compliance regulations involving consumer data, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, come with heavy fines for non-compliant organizations. Because much data includes sensitive customer information dirty data increases compliance risk. Without daily data maintenance, organizations not only increase their risk of costly data breaches but fines from these data regulations as well.
DataGroomr Provides a Path to Data Cleaning & Maintenance
DataGroomr provides greater visibility into your data and helps to resolve issues with duplicate and incomplete data. When you first connect DataGroomr to your Salesforce, you will receive an instant data quality assessment, and can generate reports on the health of your data. This type of oversight enables businesses to monitor their data every day and take action on identified issues. With DataGroomr, users can be more proactive in the data cleansing process through automation, mass merge, and other features not found in Salesforce.
Datagroomr is the only app on the AppExchange that leverages machine learning for data cleansing. This means that there are no complex rules to set up and nothing to download. Just connect Datagroomr to your Salesforce, start deduping, and get clean data every day.
Try DataGroomr for yourself with our free 14-day trial.
