What is Data Quality?

When you think about the quality of your data, what things come to mind? For me, it goes way beyond simply having accurate information. It’s much more all-encompassing & includes completeness, timeliness and relevance of the data. Think about it this way – how does it make you feel when you receive an email that starts off with “Hello <First_Name>”.  Does that fill you with confidence that the rest of the message will be tailored to meet your needs or provide you with information or an offer that is exactly what you are looking for in that exact moment?

Compare that to an email that starts off with “Hello Eric” For the sake of this article, assume your name is Eric. Or every time you see “Eric”, substitute that with your actual first name. That invokes a much different feeling, doesn’t it? For me, I feel like the person (or company) who is emailing me, knows who I am, understands what I’m looking for & is prepared to have a good conversation with me as we build a great business relationship together.

Why is Data Quality Important?

Bad data wastes time & resources. It clogs up systems like email & Salesforce. It costs companies real money. According to Gartner’s 2021 “How to Improve Your Data Quality” study, “Every year, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million.” That’s a lot of money! This cost comes in many forms: lost revenue, increased operational costs, penalties for compliance violations in regulated industries, and possibly the worst category – damage to a company’s reputation.

Overall, the cost of poor data quality can be significant, both in real, financial losses and also other negative ways. Investing in data quality management and implementing best practices can help reduce the risks of bad data as well as mitigate tangible costs and ensure that your business is basing decisions on reliable, high-quality data. 

How to Transform Bad Data into Quality Data

A few years ago, when I thought about bad data, my mind immediately went to duplicate records. Or “almost duplicates” – where one or two pieces of data about a person or company were different, and all other information was identical. But that’s just one piece of the quality puzzle. You don’t have quality data if you’re missing key pieces of information or if the data you have is no longer valid. 

What is a key piece of information? Anything that’s important to your company’s decision-making process. Anything that helps you understand who your customer is & how they make purchasing decisions. It could be something as simple as an email address, or even what time zone the individual resides in. As you think about your own data quality journey, be sure to think beyond the obvious as you look towards the future. 

The real challenge is how to maintain quality data in real time, as new data is being input or existing data is updated in Salesforce. The DQE Name module does real-time validation of all your customer contact details, names, postal addresses, emails, phones and company information with global coverage for more than 240 countries. This is extremely important for e-commerce businesses to ensure customers will receive their orders in a timely manner. It’s also crucial for call centers as they strive to provide the absolute best customer service experience.

All this ties nicely to the idea of having a single, unified customer record. Imagine this: You return to a website to browse their latest sales and a pop up appears, “Welcome back, Eric!” And you are presented with items matching your last search, items that coordinate with your latest purchase and a discount offer for your next purchase. Nice. They know who you are and value you as a customer.

Long Term Approaches to Quality Data

You may think that once you have cleaned up your data, you’re good to go. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now it’s time to develop a strategy that will keep your data quality at the highest level. Build the processes, get the right tools in place – do it now, proactively. But slow down, just a bit. Use a bit of discretion and move forward cautiously. The quality of your isn’t something to take lightly. Be sure to look towards the future and realize that change is inevitable, but having quality data should be a constant. 

Want to learn more about how DQE (Data Quality Everywhere) can help? Come visit with me and the DQE team at Northeast Dreamin or check out DQE One on the AppExchange.

There was a time not too long ago when sellers were the gatekeepers of the corporate buying experience. Sellers controlled the pace at which a deal progressed because they controlled access to the necessary product details buyers needed to make decisions about which product best met their needs. That all changed as more and more companies began offering their products on a subscription basis in what we all now know as the SaaS (Software as a Service) market.

Suddenly, buyers gained control over the sales experience due to their ability to gather their own intelligence about products from internet searches, SaaS vendor company websites and previous buyer reviews on marketplaces like the Salesforce AppExchange. Often this could be done without engaging a sales team at all. In reality, this was a monumental effort that typically slowed the purchasing process down while buyers took in all that data and analyzed it before even contacting a seller to make an informed purchase. This all helped to prove that knowledge is power. Or did it? Did the buyers really gain power and control; or did they end up succumbing to the sellers; or where buyers gained access to information and documentation, they also added countless hours of research and product comparisons to already busy schedules?

Today, InVisory assists buyers in their journey by removing time delays from identifying apps, the data gathering and analysis phases of the buying process. InVisory’s proprietary vendor categorization and scoring methodology allows its team to generate scalable research notes, and resources which help to better align customers to the right solution category, and create their short list of the top five to ten vendors they should be considering for their specific use case and business requirements. Once customers of InVisory have their short list, they can also send in an inquiry to a system implementer by completing a short form to best identify vendors that are a fit for their need.

Just how did InVisory do this? They created a place to connect Salesforce users, ISVs and SIs in a marketplace that provides unbiased, action-driven insights. Properly equipped with the necessary knowledge (power) these end users can drive more results from their Salesforce investments by shortening the time needed to discover, compare and evaluate Salesforce apps and consulting firms. The InVisory platform offers a simplified search from its curated and customized database and objective results in the form of detailed profiles for a select number of top vendors chosen by a proprietary scoring algorithm.

Not in search of a new Salesforce app right now? – The InVisory Communities helps Salesforce users connect with peers to share knowledge, find information and get other useful insights. Community members can post questions and contribute to conversations on various topics by solution category or cloud, and community members receive points for participating and can use those points to win high-value rewards.

To learn more about it, create your own profile and review the community for yourself.