In the hypercompetitive realm of data-intensive, data-dependent businesses, up-to-date, useful, and “hygienic” data is critical to maintaining a smooth workflow. Data entered, managed and archived through any type of electronic process is inevitably destined to accumulate errors over time. Upon entering the system, these errors cause irregularities and the creation of unhygienic data. This term implies that a certain percentage of your company's data is one or more of the following: inaccurate, incomplete, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, corrupt, or redundant. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Data cleansing involves detecting and then removing all “dirty” data in a company's back-office processes. This process, undertaken through the use of dedicated technological tools and internal programs, constantly examines and manages all organizational data to identify any defects, regulated by pre-set standardized algorithms. Once imperfect data is identified, incomplete data is then added, inaccurate data is eliminated, and duplicates are removed. What do you get? Business data is the information based on which organizational decisions are made and the daily workflow is maintained. A robust data cleansing system ensures that business data is reliable, which would subsequently improve outcomes and better serve business processes. This process allows businesses to save valuable time and money, while increasing overall transactional and functional efficiency. Poorly managed databases represent compromised customer data integrity and mismanagement of customer actions. Professionals and companies are encouraged to actively invest in data cleansing programs and tools to prevent any potential decline in the organization's data proficiency. Proper data hygiene also saves your business from a variety of financial and staffing impacts, including the costs of processing errors, manual troubleshooting, accidental shipments to the wrong addresses, or incorrectly delivered zip code products. Benefits: Increases the success of customer acquisition efforts Data maintained hygiene significantly improves a company's customer acquisition efforts simply by ensuring the creation of a more efficient list of prospects using and containing accurate data. During sales and marketing activities, companies can count on the highest possible returns on online campaigns as the chances of encountering outdated addresses and profiles are minimized by the clean data. Data hygiene tools are also capable of seamlessly managing multi-channel customer data, enabling organizations to run highly successful marketing campaigns. Simplify the decision-making process Customer data is the cornerstone of accurate and impactful decision-making. Accurate, current and complete customer information is essential for making successful decisions. Hygiene data supports improved analytics and overall business intelligence, thus facilitating more robust and well-informed decision-making and subsequent execution of action plans. Such decisions are more likely to contribute to overall organizational success. Restructure Business Practices Removing duplicate data from the corporate database allows companies to streamline their business practices and save a significant amount of time and money. ThereData cleansing also facilitates determining whether particular job descriptions within the company can be changed or integrated elsewhere. Hygiene data also ensures that accurate and reliable sales information is constantly available, thus giving the company the ability to easily evaluate the performance of a particular service or product in the market. Maintaining data hygiene using apt analytics helps companies identify appropriate times to launch new services or products into the market. It can also highlight some previously unconsidered marketing avenues. Increase Productivity A clean, well-managed database assures companies that employees will make the best use of company time. Data hygiene also prevents organization personnel from attempting to reach customers using outdated or incorrect information and saves potential errors such as creating invalid vendor files within the system. By offering employees clean, pre-vetted data, data hygiene management programs thus maximize staff productivity and efficiency. In this way, clean data also reduces the risk of fraud. Increased Revenue Commercial companies benefit from exponentially higher response rates following the implementation of an enterprise-wide data cleansing system, which guarantees increased revenue. Duplicate data is among the most harmful forms of dirty data, believed to have a significant financial impact as it drains company resources when twice as much is accidentally spent on a single customer. Data cleansing eliminates duplicate information immediately after identification. Hygienic data helps companies dramatically reduce returned mail, and time-sensitive information that needs to reach customers directly can be conveyed to them quickly and conveniently. Maintaining data hygiene is a multifaceted effort involving multiple concurrent processes. Data cleansing can be done manually or electronically. However, when done manually, ensuring data hygiene includes a process of analyzing piles of data to correct typos and spelling errors, correct labels, delete obsolete records, and completely missing or incomplete files. Fortunately, this time-consuming process is not required for companies to comply with due to the introduction and widespread use of efficient electronic data cleansing mechanisms. Data cleansing for organizations involves more complex operations, so it is usually performed using computer programs and applications designed to follow a set of algorithms and procedures initially determined manually by senior management. The procedures are based on a specific set of purposes, for example to delete records that have not been updated or accessed for a certain period of time, to perform automated spell checking and error correction, or to address any cases of accidental duplication. Many more sophisticated applications also offer the ability to fill incomplete or missing data spaces based on preset information. Data cleansing is not a one-time process. Big data is in constant flux, and every month a certain percentage of this data becomes obsolete or redundant. Likewise, the continuous updating, analysis and further accumulation of big data also means that the overall number of errors and defects in the data is also continuously growing. Continuous data hygiene management ensures that your data always remains healthy and strong. Furthermore, a dedicated program that performs incessant data cleaning ensures extremely data delivery.