In today’s data-driven world, a business’s data quality directly impacts its ability to operate, grow, and advance in its respective industry. Because a data maintenance plan is pivotal in effectively managing business endeavors, every organization should have a plan in place to ensure data remains consistent, accurate and trusted throughout its lifecycle. From its collection point to its storage, processing, and analysis, a thoughtful data strategy will help your business reap the greatest degree of success from the daily information it collects.
In this blog, we’ll explore the crucial significance of data quality maintenance while outlining a few key tips to ensure successful implementation within your business.
The consequences of bad data
Without the right data quality maintenance plan in place, you leave your company vulnerable to a myriad of threats and issues, including:
- Inferior customer service: Whether data mistakes lead to misdelivered packages or a disconnect in communication, the impact on your customer experience can be detrimental to your business.
- Security vulnerabilities and compliance issues: Upholding data compliance standards are a necessary part of your daily operations. Having the right data on hand is key to protecting consumer privacy and keeping it secure—ensuring data integrity.
- Added business costs: While there are many costs to running a business, correcting the mistakes made from poor-quality data isn’t one of them. Investing in a data quality management platform is more cost efficient than correcting costs acquired from invalid data.
- Poor user insights: Can you truly market to a consumer without knowing who they are? Addressing customer pain points and taking a targeted marketing approach is not feasible without reliable data insights to back your initiatives.
There’s no questioning that trusted data has become one of the most crucial assets for companies to leverage in their operating model in the current day. With superior data comes superior results. Let’s learn more about how to get started.
4 tips for better data quality maintenance
Here’s a look at 4 strategies your business can implement to ensure optimum data quality today and into the future:
1. Embrace data automation
Maintaining data quality starts with streamlining how your data is collected and processed. In our latest research, data automation is outlined as the next level in data quality by helping organizations manage the challenges posed by manual data inputs and entries. Automated software helps manage, profile, validate, standardize, and harmonize data. In effect, this helps save both time and money by minimizing the risk of human error.
With data software, systematic examinations and cleanses can occur in a matter of minutes rather than hours. In turn, this helps to save your business money while significantly enhancing your organization's efficiency.
2. Leverage real-time validation
A successful data quality maintenance plan ensures accurate data the second it enters your CRM or database—which makes real-time validation tools and software a business necessity.
Real-time validation will be crucial in reducing the cost and time associated with your data quality maintenance strategy. By catching errors immediately, your company will avoid the unnecessary costs of remediation efforts, which often arise when data issues impact efficient operations. Additionally, these tools can help reduce the time spent on manual data entry for both your users and employees—freeing up time across the board and curating higher levels of employee and customer satisfaction.
3. Implement data cleansing
A huge part of data quality maintenance is ensuring that your existing data is accurate and reliable—which is where data cleansing enters the equation. A trusted cleansing service will remove issues that include:
- Incorrect data
- Incomplete data
- Duplicate information
- Improperly formatted data
Regularly performing data cleanses can quickly identify any outliers in your data so that you can confidently ensure consistencies across the board within your database.
4. Promote data literacy within your company
Data quality maintenance should be an all-hands-on-board initiative. One mistake businesses often make is reserving data literacy for IT professionals and developers. However, widespread data literacy can aid an organization's digital transformation and ability to remain ahead in an increasingly digital-first business environment. Consider promoting training sessions surrounding data usage within your company to enable better data-driven decision-making and collaboration.
Incorporating the tips outlined above can help your business have the necessary data quality standards and protocols in place. Now, the next step is to ensure your company is connected with the tools and resources to prosper. Our team is here to help!
