Data Cleansing: Crucial Step to Combat the Cost & Consequences of Bad Quality Data

As the adage goes, “quality is not a gift but it is free. Unquality things are what cost money.” The point here is that when businesses create and maintain a state of quality, the magnitude of its benefits is immense.

Organizations around the world acknowledge the importance of data when it comes to understanding their target markets and customers and taking strategic decisions for enhanced ROIs. Yet in the scramble to be personalized, they often disregard crucial facts about data quality—leading to incorrect analytical insights as well as wrong business decisions.

The quality of data can be upgraded by ensuring correct data entry points, effective consolidation, and standardization—or by investing in reliable data hygiene services. Companies can create, validate, update, enhance and enrich their business-critical data by implementing data cleansing and enrichment processes using custom tools (bots, spiders, and scripts) and manual processes.

Impact of Bad Data Quality (DQ)

Business leaders around the world understand that data runs the show—whether it is creating customer personas, wading into the world of social media, or perfecting your direct mailing strategy, the success of all these points back to data.

Stakeholders also realize a strong database isn’t just a reference material, but an asset that directly translates to success. Whether a marketing agency is looking to provide informed solutions to its clients, an organization is working to enhance its ROI, or a mail/print house is working to provide cost-effective solutions to clients, data is making the marketing process better across the board.

At the same time, if you’ve ever interacted with raw unstructured data on any scale, you may have realized that an unprocessed, unorganized dataset is less than helpful.

Plus, the onset of big data has persuaded every organization to adopt various data collection techniques. They have understood that fact-based strategic decisions yield much better results as compared to decisions based on assumptions and extrapolations. Here’s what poor DQ can do to your business:

• Financial Costs

According to Gartner, poor-quality data costs organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. This figure is too big for any business to not consider. Apart from the immediate impact on revenue, poor-quality data increases the complexity of data ecosystems, adding to future costs of data validation and verification.

• Productivity Costs

Poor DQ not only increases operational expenditures but pushes down productivity as well. Salespersons with incorrect sales data have to waste their precious time on dead leads or leads with zero returns. Hence, inaccurate data results in skewed business strategies.

• Missed Opportunities

Every year, a considerable chunk of business-critical data becomes inaccurate because of many reasons. Using old and inaccurate data can give misleading information about market demographics and customer spending behaviors, resulting in missed opportunities for marketers.

• Tinted Brand Image

Marketers know that miscommunication is a big turn-off for customers. Inaccurate or outdated data can lead your sales representatives to reach out to the wrong audience. As a result, they either get spammed or blocked and even negative branding on social media.

Benefits of Data Cleansing

Whether it is an aggregator startup, a small or medium-sized firm, or a global corporation, having an effective data cleansing and standardization process provides a range of benefits to businesses. These range from increased productivity to financial savings, as elucidated here:

• Optimized Overall OpEx

Have you heard of the rule golden 1-10-100 rule of quality? According to this, the cost of a quality defect is lower than the cost of correcting the defect. Simply put, the rule states that it costs exponentially more money to correct and identify data entry errors the longer it takes to find them. Hence, engaging in B2B data cleansing services would save much more for an organization on the financial front.

• Capitalizing on Market Opportunities

One of the tangible advantages of having clean and hygienic data is that businesses can gradually find the best customer and capitalize on untapped market opportunities. Stakeholders can get the perfect customer profile to target their offerings. Plus, clean data provides better insights into who the loyal customers are and what are their needs, wants, and preferences. Thus, they can easily formulate effective marketing campaigns to target the right market and customers.

• Maximized Productivity

Your sales reps won’t be wasting time on dead leads or calling non-responsive customers as all those problems would be already sorted. With correct information at their disposal, the sales team can focus on the right customers and attain maximum output. Besides, the resources involved in collating and cleaning data manually can utilize their time on core business activities.

• Un- Wrangling Data Silos

Because of departmentalization, data silos have become a very common problem in organizations. These departments only collect or cleanse data that is relevant to them and do not bother about the rest of the pile. Data cleansing experts understand the correlation between the same information provided by different departments and work on completing them; thus, increasing its accuracy.

• Competitive Advantage

With accurate and updated data, a company can offer quick responses to its customers for their problems and deliver a close to perfect after sales-service. Such an on-time response from the company elevates the brand’s image in the minds of the customer. Plus, knowing your customer profile to the core gives you an edge over the firms that are still working on outdated data.

Final Thoughts

To gain ideal insights from business-critical data, it is vital to update and maintain the data regularly to keep it relevant. Data decay naturally and stale data can end up giving wrong insights about the target market and customer profile, wasting a lot of resources. Professional data cleansing services can solve all your problems efficiently and effectively by delivering the right information at your disposal so that you can touch the customers just at the right spots, generating ideal results.