Data Cleansing and Validation

What exactly is data cleansing and validation and why is it so important?

All organisations hold large quantities of data enabling them to access valuable customer insights, target prospects, meet compliance regulations and understand a particular target sector. That’s why good businesses thrive off reliable data and understand the importance of keeping it up to date and in optimum condition.

But what happens when your data is stale and ineffective? Are you applying the due diligence to make sure that your data keeps performing – and improving – over time?

93% of global companies predict data issues following the Pandemic

We all know that personal and business information can quickly become outdated. Changes to address and phone numbers, job roles and names can change. Not least to say that offices are now working more remotely, and you may find the usual channels to communicate with your clients and prospects has now changed.

Depending on the size of your database, changes can be happening regularly. This will render your data to become less effective over time – with costly returned mail, increased email bounces and wasted telephone calls.

All this activity is a drain on your resource, your costs, and results in poor ROI.

Data cleansing is where the data that you hold is investigated. This means that all data is regularly audited to make sure that performs to the best of its ability. Best practice is to regularly apply a data cleansing and validation process to weed out any out-of-date entries, check the telephone and email addresses are still live and any duplicates removed. A thorough ‘scrub’ or ‘cleanse’ of data should also reformat the data making it consistent and readable. And for those operating in a B2C market, we strongly advise that you run your business data through the mortality register as contacting persons that are deceased can be insensitive and could do your brand or business more damage than good.

73% of businesses report that digital transformation has made them more reliable on data

With customer experience and data security cited as business priorities, regular data is vital for any business that wants to perform at its best and remain compliant. But for many organisations, they either lack the skills and tools to do this correctly or it’s just something that they don’t have time to do.

That’s where Controlaccount can help.

Data cleansing – How we can help make your data work better for you

Here at Controlaccount, we do not underestimate that value of reliable data. We understand how not taking care of data properly can negatively impact a business’ reputation as well as its bottom line.

We work with businesses that do not have the time to cleanse their own data and deliver back to them their data in a formatted order, with names, addresses, telephone, emails addresses checked, duplicates removed and a screening against the mortality register. We can also enhance incomplete data by our data appending and enrichment services.

We often recommend starting your data validation and cleanse journey by a simple, regular data audit - we recommend this happens as an automated process every 28 days. From here we can see inaccuracies that might be dragging your data down. We will work with you to understand the data that will benefit your business and advise of ways in which the data can be improved. There are many options available to a business to keep their data in check – for some businesses this may be running an API directly into their CRM or credit control databases, for others it may be a simple monthly or quarterly cleanse to remove inaccuracies, duplicates, and dead data.

As with all Controlaccount services, we will find a solution that best suits your needs and budget.

For a consultation on how we can help your business manage, cleanse and validate its data, call 01527 388388 or drop us an email sales@controlaccount.com