How To Keep Your Business Data Reliable?

Business data is crucial to keep your organization running. Data helps you make important business decisions, automate workflows, and measure your progress. Various teams in your business such as marketing, sales, and customer service need data to perform their daily tasks. Data is not just for big businesses; even small businesses need data to create processes which run their business.

When your business data is reliable and accurate, you can smoothly implement daily tasks. It can also give you correct insights into your marketing and sales campaigns. With the help of business data, you can manage communications with your prospects and customers. On the other hand, unreliable data can cause more problems for your organization. You may face many challenges in your marketing or sales campaigns, and you would not get accurate insights about the performance of your campaigns. There are many things that can go wrong if you have unreliable business data.

In this article, we will look at some ways how you can ensure that your data is reliable.

Use a CRM system

A CRM or customer relationship management system can help you centralize all your contact data. It collects, organizes, and manages all customer information. You can track your customer’s buyer journey, streamline communication, and enhance customer experience. With the help of CRM, you can also automate daily tasks, for example, sending a follow-up email to a prospect. This enables you to stay on track and remember when you last communicated with a prospect or customer.

CRM helps you sync all your data and share it with all the teams in your organization. For example, sales and marketing teams can easily collaborate on campaigns with the help of CRM data. It is important to invest in a good CRM software that is better suited for your organization and budget. Setting up your CRM system is the first step to ensure that you have reliable data.

Find out where new data is coming from

Unreliable data enters your system through a source. It’s important to look at where new data is coming from. Bad data can enter your CRM system when you are manually importing it. Maybe the data you are importing has duplicate information or wrong formatting. Or maybe different team members are importing conflicting data that is causing confusion. This type of unreliable data can clutter your system and make data maintenance more complicated.

When you know from which sources data enters your system, you can review it prior to importing. You can make changes and update the data before you enter it into the system. This minimizes error and complication within your CRM system.

Segment your data

Organization is key to keep your data accurate and fresh. Segment your data to ensure that it is organized. To segment your data, you can include different properties that will give you more information about your contacts. The database can be divided into various categories based on preferences, location, buying history, etc. of your contacts.

Segmentation can add value to your data. It can make it easy for you to manage your marketing campaigns and reach out to your customers. Organized data is easy to access and leverage when required.

Keep your database clean

To make your business data more reliable it is important to keep it clean and free from clutter. You can get rid of the following data:

• Incorrect data
• Duplicate data
• Outdated data

All these types of data left unchecked can make it more expensive for you to maintain your data. Fixing these errors can take up a lot of time and cost more money. To prevent these duplicates and other bad data you can set up criteria for data entry and maintenance that can prevent bad data from unreliable sources. Ensure that you communicate these standards to various teams who are entering data so that all the data is synced from accurate sources.

Get rid of data silos

A data silo is a group of raw data that is accessible to one department but not available to the rest of the organization. This reduces transparency, trust, and efficiency within an organization. It prevents your teams from collaborating on any tasks. To get rid of data silos, use a central CRM between various departments. This can enable all teams to sync, share and connect data between various platforms in your tech stack.

Make report dashboards accessible

Data insights should be available to all the teams who need the relevant data. For example, marketing and sales teams collaborate on many campaigns, so both teams will need insights from the campaigns. Report dashboards should not be private but should be shared with the right people associated with those tasks. This promotes transparency between teams and helps them become more efficient. When teams have access to these dashboards, they do not have to waste time by asking someone to share the relevant data with them.

Create a dashboard with the most important KPIs and make them visible to all members of the team. This can help all the members in one or more teams to collaborate and reduce the chances of errors or discrepancies in your data.

Promote data literacy

It is important to get all the members of the team involved and educate them about how to maintain data. You can train these team members to deal with data. This way team members can understand how data should be entered in the CRM system with no errors. They will also know how to use this data when required and maintain it regularly to keep it accurate.

Team members should also be aware of how bad data can negatively impact your organization. Proper training can enable team members to keep your database clean and error free.

Regular data maintenance

Data maintenance should be done regularly to ensure that your data is reliable. Doing regular data cleanups and updates can help you keep your data accurate. It will also ensure that you don’t accumulate many errors that can take a lot of time and money to fix. Not doing regular data check ups can make data maintenance more expensive later.

Get various team members to pitch in and keep data updated regularly. Once you educate your team members like discussed above, it can ensure that they make minimum errors while importing data and regularly check the database for any bad data.

Reliable data ensures that your organization gets the most accurate insights and results that can help you make good business decisions. Your database is an important asset of your organization, and you need to pay attention to it. This is the data you will use for your daily business operations, various marketing, and sales activities, and much more. Ensure that you follow these tips that can help make you keep your business data reliable.