CHALLENGES OF DIRTY DATA

We are working in a data driven world and are required to make data driven decisions. Now-a- days managers are regularly bombarded with loads of data via dashboards and reports. As business tycoon Mr. Mukesh Ambani says, ‘Data is the new oil’ and as with oil, data also must be transformed to be of real value to the organization and in larger terms to the society.

The role of data scientist is in hot demand and they are constantly trying to make sense of data by building data models that can provide crucial insights necessary for organizations to grow and generate more value. However, the data professionals face many challenges that prevent them from building powerful models. According to a study conducted by Kaggle titled the “State of Data Science and Machine Learning”. One of the questions asked in the survey was, “At work which barriers or challenges have you faced this past year?” Following are the top results:

Now let’s look at how often have they encountered these problems:

Therefore, we can clearly inference that data cleanliness is clearly a big issue and data scientist spend 80% of their time cleaning data. But first let us understand what dirty data is.

According to TechTarget, database that contain errors, whether via duplicate information, incomplete or outdated materials or troublesome transferal from other systems are considered dirty. Duplicate information or incomplete records fall under the umbrella of dirty data. Therefore, information that cannot be used can cause issue for organizations.

Now let’s look at negative situations that businesses face when dealing with dirty data.

1) Revenue Loss

Almost all organizations depend on their consumer base to purchase their goods and services to keep their revenue moving. And when the data the organizations use to get in touch with their prospective customer base is dirty, the bottom line can take a serious hit. So, failing to get in touch with right customer at the right time results in revenue loss. And this loss mounts up depending upon how long it takes organizations to cleanup and manage their database. According to Experian Quality Data, the average company wastes 12% of their revenue due to inaccurate information in their records and despite increased knowledge about this problem, the figure has not changed since a long time.

2) Bad Customer Experience

When customers are interested in purchasing a product or a service from an organization, they want their experience to hassle free. You expect organizations to handle critical client account information diligently. Customers tend to lose patience very quickly when the organization is not able to pull up correct and latest information history of the respective customer. A diminished client experience can be very detrimental to organizations, affecting relationships negatively over time, according to IT Business Edge.

3) Under-Informed Business Decisions

As data is readily available these days, company management has heavily relied upon a lot of data points to make crucial business decisions rather than totally depending upon their intuition. This has in a way lead to a lot of dependency on data, but it’s impossible to conclude on an informed decision if the data is all over the place. Smart and data driven decisions are impossible when company records or data are incorrect or out of date. As per business 2 Community misinformed or under-informed decisions can be dangerous and leave businesses scrambling to compete within their industry.

4) Wasted Marketing Efforts

Marketers rely a lot on data without duplication to constantly think new ways of engaging with their audiences. They use various forms of outreach like Targeted Promotions, email campaigns, Social media campaigning. When vital customer information is wrong, the time, money and dedication that is put to strategize campaigns and attract customer is wasted. All parties are negatively affected if the organizations continue to their hard-earned resources using inaccurate information.

Dirty data is problematic for companies of all sizes and industries. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses to be cognizant of the steps they have in place to maintain organizational and customer data. As the data volume is growing rapidly through data collection at various points, the quality is somewhat compromised, posing serious questions on the sanctity of databases. Though, it may seem a trivial issue, it has a huge and lasting impact on the businesses.

Quality data acts as a driver of high productivity and good decision making, therefore Mirketa offers Advitya a leading product on Salesforce to get rid of duplicate data and incomplete records. It makes managing duplicate data easy in Salesforce. It is a deduplication application which cleanses the duplicate records in simple yet powerful 5 step wizard-based approach.

Advitya runs natively on salesforce, so data does not leave salesforce org. As there is no data transfer at any point, data remains safe and intact. You can create custom queries to search for duplicate data in your org, select master record and merge duplicates.

Check out ‘Advitya- Your Personal Data Doctor’ and clean your database in an easy step by step manner.