Data hygiene, a term getting a lot of traction in corporate circles, is not different from tidiness and cleanliness in your kitchen. Just like people do not want to have a kitchen where spills remain there, or containers and expired food items are left there, messy, outdated, and inaccurate information are a sales and marketing team’s nightmare. It benefits sales in terms of accuracy and timeliness of the data as well as proper structuring of the data assisting the sales team better and thus help the business.

Given that data is the king in today’s fast pacing word, it is important that data should be clean. The benefits derived from good data hygiene include decision making, consumer targeting and general organisational efficiency. Data maintenance comprises different acts and resources primarily meant to maintain data quality and relevance in its totality to let the sales and marketing staff work effectively and efficiently. In this guide, you will learn data hygiene definition, its significance, and principles that should be followed for proper data hygiene.

This much can be said – data hygiene is critically important. This makes it very significant to ensure good data hygiene so as to maximize on the opportunities and avoid cases of wasting more cash without any gains. The importance of data hygiene signifies that the management of data will help businesses to increase the general performance while targeting the most appropriate market segments. In this guide, you will get to know what exactly is data hygiene, why it is important, and the process of data hygiene that you can follow to promote its practice in your business.

What is Data Hygiene?

Data hygiene means the process and activity of managing data within CRM systems and ensuring its cleanliness accuracy and structural organization of the data in the systems. It includes several approaches to guarantee that all or most of the sales data such as information concerning leads, opportunities, sales performance as well as customers’ interaction is up to date. Having a bad kind of accumulation of unorganized, sluggish, and inaccurate data in mass can be a foe to sales drives and business.

Key Aspects of Data Hygiene

• Accuracy: The identification of any possible errors that may have been made when entering data into the database.
• Currency: Ensuring that data is always current by checking up on information and updating it where necessary.
• Organization: Organizing data in a manner that enhances and facilitates its usability to the sales and marketing departments.

Why is Data Hygiene Important?

Maintaining good data hygiene is crucial for several reasons:

1. Improved Decision-Making: Several benefits can be derived from using accurate and up-to-date data: better decision-making, identifying and building relationships with the right customers, and creating viable business strategies.
2. Enhanced Productivity: Clean data benefits sales and marketing teams since they are able to spend less time correcting mistakes and looking for the data.
3. Increased Revenue: Seasoned marketers understand that most of the efforts on the sales front are centered on the identification of the right customers to sell to using accurate data.
4. Customer Satisfaction: Clean data fosters effective decision-making as customers’ interactions are based on accurate information, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.Data Hygiene Best Practices

It is crucial to start with the understanding of issues related to data hygiene in order to make further changes. Here are some essential steps to ensure good data hygiene:

Audit the Data

Review the data collected so far to try and establish whether there are any defects in terms of accuracy or time relevance. This entails checking your data storage, recording, and analysis systems whether or not they are working optimally. Define which of the data metrics is crucial for your business and make changes accordingly to reduce the amount of dirty data.

Remove Unneeded Data

It is important to note that there is bad data as well as good data. Cut out irrelevant information that will not help you marketing or selling your products. This involves any wrong, old phone numbers, information from unverified sources, or any information that is deemed irrelevant.

Be Detail-Oriented

Be very keen when entering the data in each reel or data entry. Make sure that the format of emails, the use of abbreviations, and other data elements are kept consistent in the database. This is because standardization enhances the ability to read through texts and also assist in pointing out errors.

Make Data Hygiene a Habit

Data hygiene mean maintenance which must be done regularly. A weekly check on data entry and frequent update of the database will help in minimizing such mistakes and also bring out the most out of it. There is nothing wrong with making data hygiene a standard practice within the company.

Eliminate Useless or Outdated Data:

Hire a team to be in charge of your data health management. This team can easily solve complicated problems like identification of duplicate records and data synchronization besides performing routine audits. It can be the company’s own employees or third-party data hygiene service suppliers.

Use the Right Tools

Take advantage of enablers that would help in managing, monitoring, and increasing the visibility of data. Some of the benefits of using automated data capture tools include cutting of time and reducing mistakes for the sales crew. Such tools are Revenue Grid that sync with your CRM, emails, calendars and automatically capture and update data so that even when it comes to inputting data, your sales representatives do not need to do it because the data is already captured and is accurate.

Data Hygiene Tools

As with any process, data hygiene may not always be easy to preserve but using the right equipment makes it possible. Lean IT’s methodologies entail the use of solutions that combine data capture with CRM meaning that data is accurate and visible. For instance, Revenue Grid calendars are integrated to log the meetings into Salesforce, with the ability to create and update Salesforce entries, as well as view the team’s, analytic, and performance dashboards.

Benefits of Using Data Hygiene Tools

• Automated Data Capture: Thus, gather and update data from several sources at appropriate and regular intervals.
• Enhanced Data Visibility: Get the basic info on the team’s performance and the flow of sales activities in process.
• Reduced Errors: Reduce the occurrence of entry mistakes and free some time of sales representatives.

Data Hygiene vs. Data Cleansing

Data cleaning and data cleansing are usually used as two different terms which actually have different meanings. Data sanitation means maintaining data clean on a regular basis while data washing is the process of one-time cleansing of the whole data set for removing any incorrect or old data. One of the things that are most often recommended when it comes to data hygiene is data cleaning, which is usually a part of this process.

Data Cleansing Process

1. Identify and Remove Duplicate Data: Clean the data by removing the records that are redundancies to make the data to be accurate.
2. Eliminate Useless or Outdated Data: Delete records which contain information that may be unnecessary or outdated.
3. Remove Unnecessary Information: Do not allow unnecessary data to be kept in your database especially if it has no relevance to the company’s business strategy.
4. Fill Gaps in the Data: Continue the form with missing values or joining the data in the Org chart or table format as required.
5. Standardize Field Formats and Naming Practices: As a technical role to check and correct entries made in the computers, make sure that the data entries are consistent.
6. Evaluate Data Quality: Check the quality of data and those parameters, which have been set for data gathering.section, ‘Get Clean’ and ‘Stay Clean’ The general formatting of the section is simple and uncluttered.

Get Clean and Stay Clean

The importance of data hygiene is vital since it help create accurate and useful data for businesses. This paper therefore posits that it is possible to advance customer insight, avoid mass, and increase return on investment by successful execution of a well thought out data hygiene plan and approach. Lean IT ensures that a business organization has the required resources and knowledge in order to maintain hygiene of its data.

Conclusion

Data hygiene therefore remains very crucial for any business seek to improve its operations, effectiveness and focusing on customers. If some rules and methodologies are followed as well as the right tools used, data can be cleaned, correct and most importantly updated. Lean IT is your one-stop solution partner to get the best IT hygiene standards for your organization while getting insights that are critical for any strategic decision-making process.

Feeling up to boost your data hygiene habits now? For more details on Lean IT’s data hygiene tools and services, please use this contact. In this article, we would like to assist you in adopting a proper data hygiene plan that would improve your business processes and outcomes.