How Data Cleansing Can Improve Your Business

Most companies have incomplete and incorrect data in their systems. But most do not know that incomplete data can cost a business up to $15 million per year, amounting to costs of $3 trillion annually for the US economy.

Poor data includes inaccurate or incomplete information and duplicated data. When a company has bad data, the solution is data cleansing.

Data cleansing involves a process of detecting, correcting, and/or removing inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicate data entries. Typically companies have so much customer information that it is absolutely impossible to do this manually.

Therefore, data cleansing requires data wrangling or batch processing software to find, amend or eradicate faulty entries. But this is not a one-and-done scenario. With the always-changing human population, data must be maintained.

Causes of Bad Data

Over the past 5-7 years, 40 million Americans have been moving to a new home every year. This amounts to around 13% of families changing their addresses every year, and this trend has drastically increased with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other factors can also contribute to poor data quality. Data quality can also suffer from administrative errors (like misspelled names or typos), empty fields, and so forth.

This means that barring any other corrupting elements; every business has the potential to increase the amount of new bad data by 25-30% every year.

Consequences of Bad Data

Many also don’t realize that incorrect or inconsistent data can also lead to erroneous conclusions that lead to poor decisions, all based on bad data.

For instance, your data may show that 80% of people are using your service or prefer the color red, but 60% of these entries could be duplicates.

If your company relies on data for any kind of trend forecasting, operating with poor data sets will lead to poor decisions.

Bad data can also create digital bottlenecks and decreased organizational efficiency. Marketing materials can be sent to the wrong emails making your company look disorganized. Processes can be held up or duplicated. Money can be wasted on mailouts to zip codes that don’t exist or spent on marketing material based on false assumptions.

Data cleansing is all about creating clear, concise, well-organized, and most importantly, accurate and complete data. Some of the benefits include:

• Happier Clients
• Fewer Mistakes
• More Effective Communications and Marketing
• Saving money

Not to mention, data cleansing can help with finding out where data errors are coming from in the first place. If your company is seeking data cleansing services, reach out to Anchor Software today.