What is data cleansing?
Data. It’s the lifeblood of modern business, fuelling insights, driving decisions, and ultimately, shaping success in the larger picture. But raw data is often messy, riddled with inconsistencies, errors, and duplicates. This “dirty data” can lead to inaccurate analysis, flawed decision-making, and eventually wasted resources.
The amount of data around us has increased and so is the need of validating its quality. As this data surge has made room for inevitable errors, companies are dabbling with the subsequent data quality checks.
Did you know only 3% of data meets basic quality standards? As per Gartner, Poor data is responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses.
This is why the need for Data Cleansing is at all time high!
Data cleansing, also known as data scrubbing, is the process of identifying and correcting or removing corrupt, inaccurate, or irrelevant data from your datasets. It’s essential for maintaining data integrity and ensuring your company can make accurate, informed decisions.
Why Does Your Company need it?
Just picture your best salesperson enthusiastically pursuing a lead only to get stuck. The phone number is wrong and the email has bounced back. Yes, it’s frustrating. This “dirty data” is battled against by reps every now and then. Inaccurate, missing or duplicated information that are in your CRM system can constitute unnecessary barriers for your reps.
It’s like being lost and taking the wrong turns while traversing through a town; you may eventually arrive at your destination but after several hours of wasted efforts.
Therefore, dirty data is a silent killer waiting to feast on potential opportunities in your CRM with a possible domino impact such as:
Wasted Time & Resources: Data-detective mode takes over for your reps who spend hours following up cold leads, fixing mistakes or verifying details. This means that they lose significant selling time that could have been used to close deals.
Missed Opportunities: Inaccurate data can be likened to a blind spot. You cannot reach existing customers via targeted advertising nor find new ones using it more effectively. What if you miss out on a big client simply because their mail account was returning an error message?
Poor Decision Making: Dirty data also takes the crown when it comes to generating skewed reports and metrics. This can lead to distorted representation of things, poor business decisions and finally missed opportunities.
Strained Customer Relationships: There is hardly any doubt that sending irrelevant emails or reaching out wrong individuals will yield a negative experience for customers. Your company name can be tarnished by bad data while at the same time clients can be left annoyed and made feel like digits.
Doing proper data cleansing will make sense out of your chaotic data transforming it into one clean reliable source of truth.
Top 7 Data Cleansing Softwares
Luckily, you can tame the dirty data with several data cleansing software in the market today.
A good data cleansing software can transform your messy CRM into a well-organized filing system, ready to empower your sales team.
We have curated a list of top 7 data cleansing softwares for your company to choose their perfect fit.
Nektar.ai
Salesforce data could end up being a mess of information that can hinder the reliability of your reports. This is where Nektar.ai can help you navigate out of the clutter by putting your data hygiene on auto pilot using AI.
Here’s how Nektar.ai solves the problems with data cleansing:
- Unmatched Sync Accuracy: Nektar.ai does not only import data at basic level, it also analyzes your records using AI algorithms for establishing links between accounts and opportunities and provides confidence scores for correct synchronization. This helps in cutting out redundant entries more importantly by enabling you to view all needed details.
- Time Travel for Data Retrieval: What if I told you that you can unearth the actuals of an old conversation that happened with a particular client? Nektar helps in identifying interactions like contacts, emails and meetings linked to a given domain which are then added into newly created opportunities. Its “time travel” functionality facilitates knowledge transfer among sales people and adds context to live conversations during ongoing engagement.
- Easy Report Creation: High-quality reporting is dependent on clean data. Nektar.ai makes it simpler to generate reports by automatically syncing contacts, emails, and meetings directly into standard Salesforce objects.
- Self-Healing Energy: Nektar.ai is ever learning and adjusting. It updates CRM records in response to new information by appending manual changes made by users into the system automatically.
- Smart Contact Automation: Nektar.ai can automatically create a contact point as well as eliminate some repetitive tasks. They are created with matching domains such that they connect with previous accounts as appropriate.
Contrary to traditional data cleansing that may necessitate manual work or third party tools, Nektar.ai is an AI-powered solution that integrates well with Salesforce and does many tasks automatically. It is self-learning and ensures data always remains clean and accurate.
With Nektar.ai, you can liberate your sales team from the grind of data entry and enable them to concentrate on their core function; closing deals.
Openrefine
Google Refine, which is now known as OpenRefine, is already a well-known open source tool. It’s an open-source software like python script that can be freely used and modified by anyone.
It also helps to maintain your data in a consistent format and sorts it according to your company requirements. Apart from this, you can import data from the web sources and apply its clustering algorithms for solving complex data cleaning jobs.
Where all does OpenRefine stands out?
Free and Open Source: Cheap to install and allows for extensive customization.
Many Functionalities: Handles various data transformation, cleansing and parsing tasks originating from diverse sources.
Relational database approach: Is much stronger pattern wise than using simple flat spreadsheets.
Better Security: This helps you keep your records safe on machine with better security measures, in contract to uploading on cloud-based platforms. Remember that the interface of OpenRefine may be trickier when compared to others and requires certain technical skills before one can completely understand how it works.
Tibco Clarity
Tibco Clarity is a large scale data cleaning and management software for the cloud which is mostly used by big businesses. It can take care of a range of aspects involved in data cleansing such as standardization, deduplication, and matching. Single file format can be used for merging files from XLS or JSON.
Some of the Key Features and Benefits of Tibco Clarity:
Enterprise-oriented: Capable of managing complex data integration requirements and large datasets.
Scalable: Grow along with your data needs. This feature keeps you ahead of the curve to facilitate better decision making.
Advanced functionality: Data lineage tracking as well as data quality monitoring are some examples.
Nevertheless, there’s a higher price attached to Tibco Clarity’s enterprise-grade features which makes it less suitable for small businesses or individual users. Also, initial set up time tends to be more thereby making navigation difficult for newbies.
Winpure Clean and Match
Winpure Clean and Match is a niche specialist and focuses on a specific aspect of data cleansing: matching and de-duplication. It is very useful when you need to match and consolidate duplicate records across different files or lists. You can do this quite easily through its user-friendly interface, which can sift through files, lists, Excel, SQL, and CRMs.
Here’s how it can help:
- Highly specialized: Ideal for tasks specifically focused on duplicate management.
- Accurate matching: Leverages advanced algorithms for precise record matching.
- Data Security: It is installed locally leaving you out of the trouble of uploading your data on a cloud platform.
Winpure Clean and Match might not be as comprehensive as some other options on this list but is honed perfectly to cater to a more specific need within the wider data cleansing landscape. Also, it works depending on your RAM output.
Integrate.io
Integrate.io is an iPaaS or cloud based integration platform as a system that provides cloud-based integration services aimed at helping corporations connect different systems and applications. it provides advanced data pipeline platforms that offer ETL & ELT. The functions are user-friendly and can be set up using a no-code graphic interface.
It is also equipped with strong data cleaning facilities in its platform that do not limit their use to just linking data sources.
Why use it?
Data Integration and Cleansing: It is essential to note that as the processes of data sources integration are taking place, Integrate.io ensures that there is proper cleaning of this data before it goes to the data warehouses.
No-code interface: Data processes can be automated through low-code, drag and drop interface.
Better Analytics: Reliable reports and dashboards come from clean data.
Scales with You: The platform stretches itself to accommodate growing data volumes.
For Non-Techies too: Very user-friendly.
Melissa Clean Suite
Melissa Clean Suite is a star when it comes to address hygiene. Address hygiene exhaustively means having updated mail lists and customer data with complete addresses. Wrong Address? Melissa Clean Suite would flag it instantly with advanced algorithms thereby employing real-time verification.
It checks for accuracy across three domains:
- Does the address actually exist?
- Is it equipped with all necessary and complete details like street name, postal code, city?
- Does it follow the standard postal code regulations?
This is especially helpful for business dealing with logistics, shipping and deliveries. Imagine the cost that can be saved by eliminating undelivered packages and ensuring timely deliveries.
Another crucial feature is that it goes beyond merely flagging the gaps. It also offers enrichment meaning adding the missing information in the address like phone numbers, email addresses and demographic details.
It goes one step further by removing the potential typos, outdates information and prevailing inconsistencies.
Mammoth.io
Mammoth.io enables data owners to have direct control of the data and eliminate barriers that may hinder this. It is a one-stop platform for users which allows them to bring all their data together, merge it and change it. Users can slice it sharply while also automating the workflows.
Why use it?
Designed for non-technical users: Users can control their workflows without having any prerequisite knowledge about IT.
Decentralised Data Management: The teams can centralize the data and be in control of automated tasks that avoid repitition.
Data Transformation & Cleaning: Beyond mere cleansing, Mammoth.io provides strong functionality for transforming your data into what you want.
Top Data Cleansing Strategies
Success can be thwarted by dirty data. Information that is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent can lead to poor decision-making, wastage of resources and frustrated users. But don’t worry! Here are the best strategies for data cleaning that will help you turn your disorderly data into a priceless asset:
Set up goals and needs
Step back before diving in. What kind of data do you have and what is the goal of cleansing? Is it about removing duplicates, standardizing formats, filling in missing information in data?
Identify & address Data Quality Issues
Use some profiling tools to identify typos, inconsistencies and null values which are common with the data. Remove duplicate records, expired information or formatting differences.
Data Governance & Monitoring
Establish guidelines for governing data to ensure that quality remains steady across all the databases. Keep looking for new issues and implement cleansing processes periodically.
User Training
It’s important to ensure that everyone in your organisation understands what it means to maintain quality of business intelligence as well as how it should be done on practice. Conduct trainings aimed at finding possible operational pitfalls and problems connected with their execution.
