Why is Data Cleansing Important?
Data is the foundation of solid customer management strategies and developing business practices. It is used for analytics, running campaigns, better customer service and accurate reporting.
A customer database will go stale at a rate of over 20% each year, or 2% each month. This happens due to customers moving, changing phone numbers or email addresses, changes in marital status, including marriage or divorce, and death. Holding inconsistent, stale, or poor data can lead to false conclusions which can be very costly in the business world. For instance, if a company’s database collects data such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and communication preferences, inaccurate and incorrect data can lead to misdelivered or lost mail (which a business can suffer the cost of resending), a poor brand image, and even losing customers.
What are Some Data Cleansing Tools?
There are many data cleansing tools out there that will verify, clean, correct and enrich particular fields of data.
The objectives of data cleansing are generally broken down into three parts. First is the maintenance of information of existing customers, which enables relevant and effective communication. Second is maintaining data that supports business function, like making deliveries, collecting payments and segmenting for further analysis or planning. Last is cleansing all data to ensure it supports compliance requirements like GDPR and other data protection laws.
One of the most common cleansing fields is basic customer contact data, which includes name, address, email and phone number. This validates, standardises and appends all address data to its local country format, as well as ensures that phone and email fields are live and callable and contacts name are correct.
You can learn more about Address Verification here, alternatively, if you would like to know more about data quality, check out our article What is Data Quality.
Data Match, Merge & Duplication
This is a popular cleansing technique that uncovers duplicate data in an organisation's database. This technique will match, merge and purge duplicate records into a single “golden record” for each customer.
Lear more about data deduplication in our What is Data Deduplication article.
Missing Data
Completing fields of missing data can be vital to achieving accurate customer records. When cleansing your data, it is good to have this box ticked, as it will add any missing fields to a customer record like a missing postal code to an address or missing forenames.
Change of Address / NCOA
Running your database through NCOA (National Change of Address) reference datasets will ensure that all your customer addresses are up to date, putting into perspective that almost 20% of the UK population moves once a year.
Preference & Opt Out Suprresions
There is no reason to try and communicate with individuals who have passed away or opted out of communication with your business. This is why it's important to suppress your records against reference databases to identify these records in your database. This will protect your brand image, save money on wasted postage and resources, and keep your data GDPR compliant.
Data Enrichment
Enriching your data with more elements opens opportunities for insight, segmentation and other business initiatives. A few key enrichments and appends are detailed demographic data—which can add lifestyle, household, and transaction data—and B2B and firmographic data, which adds wealth of business characteristics to your dataset.
How to Cleanse Your Data?
Start by getting data audited to determine the health of your data. Your data will be compared against the most updated data and reference sources to see how accurate, complete, and compliant it is. Once a report is given, you will then be able to determine in what areas you can improve your data. Some areas will need more improvement than others. Data cleansing can take some time, since databases can be very large and information could have piled up for years, which is why we recommend regularly performing data cleansing.
Why Melissa?
Melissa has been helping businesses improve their data quality for over 35 years with smart solutions that correct, verify, update and enrich customer data. Our full spectrum of data quality solutions gives businesses the tools they need to maintain clean, current and consistent data for more efficient operations and improved marketing and sales efforts. Melissa’s Data Quality Suite instantly verifies contact data at the point of entry for over 240 countries and territories, with flexible tools that are available as on-premise APIs or web services to meet your specific needs.