Data Hygiene
I Get It! Development, Inc. is often brought into companies to help clean up data like
customer information, account listings, parts catalogs and others. Our
clients are really never prepared to believe how much time will be involved
in just sorting out good data from bad. In some cases, we’ve even
recommended that an old database just be thrown out and a new database
started from scratch – never a popular recommendation.
If you’re skeptical, go into your own Outlook contacts list and look at
who is in there and what information you have. If more than 40% of the
information in your personal Outlook contacts folder is accurate,
congratulations! You spend a lot of time scrubbing your data.
For most of us, however, dialing a number at random from Outlook will
result in a wrong number. Your business contacts have moved companies, or
your friends have discontinued their land lines and you don’t have their
mobile phone in Outlook. Contacts you met at a cocktail party and promised
to email have since gotten tired of getting spam on their old email and got
a new email address. It never ends. Ever.
InfoUSA is a company that provides
residential sales leads to local gyms and restaurants. They provide
business leads to IT outsourcing companies and office supply stores.
Companies like InfoUSA do nothing but data hygiene. Their employees
constantly call the contacts in their database to make sure their
information is accurate. They check annual reports and marketing collateral
to make sure they have the latest information. And even with all of this
work, they place an expiration date on their data. They recommend that you
check any leads you purchase in six month’s time because the data has
probably changed by then. Do you go through your entire contact list every
six months? Does your company?
In fact, does your company have anyone in charge of its customer data?
You’ll frequently hear that customer data is an extremely important asset
and yet customer lists are left out on the network where most anyone can
alter them. No one individual is charge of polling salespeople’s phones,
accounting’s GL, marketing’s mailing lists and making sure they all match.
Can you imagine if any employee had the same access to the general ledger
that they do to customer information? Many employees don’t have signing
authority to purchase even $100 worth of blank CD-ROMs and printer paper,
but have full rights to alter the customer database. That’s placing an
incredibly low value on what is supposed to be critical data!
As you prepare mailings or get ready to call a list of your customers, ask
yourself who is in charge of the data you’re using. If you don’t have a
ready answer, or that person isn’t at a Director level or higher, you might
wonder whether its worth the cost of the customer contact campaign. Spend a
few days (or weeks!) validating your customer data first (or buy new data
from a company like InfoUSA) and get in the habit of scrubbing it often.