The Dangers of Good Data Gone Bad
Your organization runs on data. From marketing to delivery to billing, proper data management lets your staff achieve their tasks and forecast future needs. But even if your business is using data to streamline processes and fine tune communications, (and it should be!), it could still be hemorrhaging a significant amount of money per year in lost productivity, customers, and sales, due to bad data. In fact, respondents to a 2015 Gartner survey on the use of data quality tools estimated that they lose $8.8M per year on average due to data quality issues.
What counts as low quality data? “Bad” or “dirty” data is data that is:
- Out of date
- Duplicated/redundant
- In conflict with other data
- Stored in an improper format
- Missing information, or missing entirely
- Stored in a way that makes it vulnerable to hacking or being shared inappropriately
Bad data has far-reaching consequences. A billing department using dirty data might bill clients twice or generate incorrect invoices. From a marketing standpoint, bad data can make you deliver collateral to defunct email addresses, personalize your messaging based on inaccurate information, send irrelevant offers to potential customers, miss customer trends, and have an overall distorted view of your customers’ needs. Anywhere data is used, bad data can wreak havoc.
In the short-term, such mistakes annoy customers and generate extra work for your team, but what makes dirty data so insidious is that it continuously inflicts damage until it’s cleaned up. And with corporate data growing an average of 40% per year, there’s a lot of opportunity for unmonitored data management systems to cause problems.
Data quality solutions typically have a two-pronged approach: implementing manual or automatic systems to both ensure that data is entered correctly at the outset, and to clean the database regularly in case of any outliers or unforeseeable issues. Whether you are looking to assess the current state of your data, or establish procedures for keeping it in peak condition, Resolvit’s consultants are here to help.
Contact us to learn more.