Liam Thorpe was surprised when he was offered the COVID vaccine along with the at-risk group. As a man in his 30s with no underlying conditions, he suspected something must have been wrong and contacted his doctor. It turned out they had his height at 6.2 cm and not 6 feet 2 inches giving him a body mass index of 28,000! Although this was a humorous data error with no consequences, other data quality issues can be more serious.
The over 150,000 companies, across every industry, growing their business with Salesforce know the importance of data for delivering value to their customers. However, if that data is incorrect, your business doesn’t stand a chance of success. How many organizations are really concerned about data quality? What exactly is data quality and why is it so important?
Let’s start our journey about data quality with a quick overview.
Finding a precise definition of data quality is difficult due to the many contexts in which data is used, as well as the different perspectives such as end-users, database or business. In this article, we mainly discuss the database/business levels.
While data quality includes many aspects, in this article we specifically refer to:
| Age | When was the last time each record was updated? Customer data always changes |
| Completeness | Are all key business fields filled in? If you advertise via sms, have you collected mobile phone numbers for each contact? |
| Accuracy | Is your data as accurate as possible? Has it been checked to reveal typos? Has it been recently reviewed? For example, mobile phone numbers and email addresses can be validated, to avoid empty fields within records in their CRM |
| Consistency | Is the same formatting, spelling, and language used across records? Do you have drop-down lists to ensure consistency? |
| Duplication | Do you have duplicate records and data in your org? Have you considered merging records where a person is both a lead and a contact? |
| Excess data | Do you have any extra fields without values or fields which are not used anywhere else? Should these be researched and populated or removed? |
| Usage | Is your data being harnessed in reports, dashboards and apps? You should only store data you actually use |
Data quality is extensive and important. That’s why there is a lot of research on this topic.
Having clean data ultimately increases overall productivity, informed decision-making and reduces the risk of errors. Other benefits include:
Understanding data quality and the tools you need to create, manage, and transform data is an important step toward making efficient and effective business decisions.
There are a lot of ways to investigate data, such as by manual spot checks on a random selection of records or by exporting data to an Excel spreadsheet and looking through each row. While these methods are still used by many companies to explore and fix data, they are not the most efficient way to fix the issues.
To support data sustainability in Salesforce, different rules, techniques and applications can be used. First of all, standard Salesforce functionality should be properly configured, for example:
If you are unsure how to start cleaning your data, you can always ask professional consultants to help you. Based on our experience we can recommend the following options:
Data quality and data analysis are significant at any point in a business’s lifecycle. No matter if you started your business a week ago or founded your company decades ago, our architects and developers here at VRP Consulting can help you adjust your processes to fulfill your business requirements. To date we have created and set up wide ranging applications and functionality based on customer requirements, from initial rapid implementations to more complex projects spanning years. Every implementation reaches a point where the data quality needs to be re-evaluated – even when following best practice implementations. Why? Because businesses evolve over time, meaning their data will need to do the same. Often this is overlooked. That’s why our clients call us, to help their data keep up with their business evolution.
Vincent Spehner
VRP Consulting
Certified Technical Architect
About the author
Vincent Spehner is a Certified Technical Architect based in Cambridge, UK with 9-years experience in Salesforce and Mulesoft. His experience of integrations highlighted the need for data quality.
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