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With the importance of data quality across various industries, you probably have done data cleaning within your database.
Its purpose is simple—to determine inaccurate data and improve the quality through correcting detected errors. However, what you know about data cleaning is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, you must be wondering—“what is data cleaning, and why does my business need it?”
As an operating enterprise, you can process and store vast customer data. However, as time passes, your customers change details in their personal information, such as addresses and contact numbers.
You might need to update your data constantly to reduce data entry errors. Otherwise, these errors will transform data into inaccurate information that may affect your sales conversion and customer satisfaction.
What is Data Cleaning, Its Importance and Benefits
Data cleaning is analyzing, identifying, and correcting dirty data from your data set. For many businesses, keeping data as clean and up-to-date as possible is crucial. Organizations that have a clean database reap numerous benefits. They can reduce gaps in their business records and improve their investment returns.
Data cleaning is a data management task that minimizes business risks and maximizes business growth. It deals with missing data and validates data accuracy in your database. Also, it involves removing duplicate data and structural errors. With error-free data, you can use customer data correctly, such as sending accurate invoices to the right customer.
For businesses that are consuming data immensely, data cleaning is critical. By removing unwanted data, more space is allocated to the data that has yet to be collected. Also, it simplifies your data analysis by keeping valuable data only. With properly cleansed data, it’s easier to generate useful business insights and actions.
Having clean data has tons of benefits. Not only does it organize your database, but it can also improve your business performance. Below, we gathered some benefits of data cleaning that you should not miss out on. For sure, it will help you understand the impact of quality data on your overall business strategy:
1. Effective decision-making process
In some organizations, large data is more likely scattered across various departments. More often, this leads to incorrect data. More bad data will likely be generated when there is a disconnection among departments. Also, errors in inventory, payments, and shipments may occur.
You can’t make effective decisions with incorrect data. When insufficient data is all you have, your day-to-day business decisions would be in peril. Your sourcing, purchasing, and inventory decisions are greatly affected. Without recourse to data cleaning, your ineffective decisions will eventually result in financial losses.
Clean data can support better analytics, thus enabling you to make effective business intelligence solutions. To achieve clean data, you need data cleaning for your organization. Data cleaning collects, reconciles, manages, and connects varied data sets to achieve updated information management. With shared clean data across your departments, better decision-making can be obtained.
2. Accurate internal systems
From office and canteen supplies to payroll, clean data plays a huge role. Without it, it’s where information comes in as incorrect and incomplete. Also, accurate internal data minimizes mistakes in communication. Thus leading to an easy way to resolve issues in the workplace.
Moreover, clean data enables your employees to access documents quickly. Also, it leads to a streamlined process of collecting and distributing feedback fluidly. Another is that it lets everyone keep engaged in all organizational activities. Hence, with accurate data, it’s easy to facilitate effective communication in the workplace.
3. Better marketing and sales efforts
Keeping your data clean significantly impacts your marketing and sales efforts. Research reveals that “dirty” data can drain your lead conversion by a staggering $83 per 100 records in your database.
Also, 2% of the information in a marketing leads database is estimated to go stale monthly. Hence, dirty data impedes your company’s potential to reach significant returns on investment.
On the contrary, clean data can boost your customer acquisition efforts. It’s important to note that such efforts are essential to your overall revenue. Moreover, it’s possible to accelerate marketing performance and increase marketing efficiency with clean data. To illustrate, you can only improve your marketing outcomes by ensuring quality in your data management.
4. Valuable customer insight
Having clean data provides you with better insights about your customers. This supports your ability to create a positive customer experience. With a clear picture of your customers, improving marketing messaging, sales strategies, and even customer service is easy. Also, accurate data lets your marketing campaigns speak well to your target audience.
Meanwhile, your analytics will draw wrong conclusions about your customers if you keep dirty data. In addition, your customer service may be jeopardized if customers are offered poorly targeted messages. Therefore, you must ensure your customer data is always of good quality. This will help you get the most value from your customer insights and analytics.
5. Reputation management strategy
Duplicate data is one of the repercussions of ‘dirty’ data. When left unmanaged, it can wreak havoc on your business. Imagine your sales team calling one customer multiple times in a day. More often than unrequested contact, this will result in lost profit.
Moreover, when you send emails to outdated addresses, you increase bounce rates and spam complaints. As a result, customers will probably abandon your business if they receive irrelevant information from you. To protect your brand reputation, you need a data cleaning process to ensure you only reach the right people. Also, this can be an excellent strategy to maintain your brand integrity.
6. Reduce compliance risk
With dirty data, your business can jeopardize your GDPR compliance efforts. This happens when you email a customer who recently removed their consent to receive marketing emails. This action is a clear breach of data protection laws on consent. To avoid such violations, you must have data cleaning to remove corrupt data that hampers your GDPR compliance.
Regular database cleansing helps ensure the organization does not contact people who have opted out of communications. This will help avoid the hefty fines associated with breaching GDPR and other legislation. You can also protect identifiable information within your maintained database. This includes but is not limited to trade secrets, marketing efforts, and business partner interactions.
7. Increased productivity
When your employees always deal with dirty data, productivity is lost. Instead of focusing on their core activities, they are caught up in analyzing data problems. However, when data is cleaned in one place, it saves much time. It also allows your business to maximize the capacity of your workforce.
Your employees are not productive when they contact customers with out-of-date information. It wastes their time and does not translate to revenue growth. Keep a clean database to ensure you get value from your employees’ efforts. Also, this helps your employees to make the best use of their work hours.
8. Growth in revenue
Dirty data results in enormous financial losses. An average business may lose 15% to 25% of its revenue by having dirty data. Errors ranging from incorrect demographic data to lack of customer data are indeed costly. To negate the impact of dirty data on your finances, it’s best to keep your data clean.
Clean data allows you to perform customer segmentation and target customers better and more efficiently. This will increase customer response rate as well as customer engagement. When clean data is highly prioritized, you can generate an increased ROI. At the same time, the quality of your sales and business relations will improve in no time.
Ensure an Error-free Database with Magellan Solutions
Cleaning your database alone can be a painstaking task, especially if it takes a good chunk of your time and resources to complete. But don’t worry—even though you have inconsistent data, there is always a way to ensure error-free customer data within your database. There is no need to deal with time-consuming processes. Outsource it to have effective data management.
There are several reasons why outsourcing data cleaning is in your best interest. First, having skilled professionals clean your data can increase your lead generation. Second, you can reduce the time spent on fixing data errors and optimize the productivity of your skilled resources. And lastly, your service provider has the right automation solutions to handle your messy data with dispatch.
Magellan Solutions offers various outsourced business solutions, including prime-quality data management. With over 18 years in the industry, we assure your enterprise of reliable, efficient, and confidential data management.
Do you want to clean up your database to ensure only the highest data quality remains? Fill out the form below to get a free consultation.
