One solution is to pay a data quality company to clean and deduplicate your data. During this process, data is typically matched up electronically against a postal database to append and standardize mailing addresses. The output generated is typically a very large spreadsheet of potential duplicate matches, which then must be manually reviewed and validated by someone on your team. After the review, data can be fed back into the CRM for deduplication. The entire process can take weeks or months and can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. However, if you consider that manually standardizing and deduplicating the same data could sometimes take a full-time data steward almost a year, sometimes the cost and time savings can seem justified.
Alternatively, there are now outsourced professional data stewards you can hire to assist you. These data quality professionals can work with your team on a full-time basis – or just lend a hand part-time when you need additional support during a rollout or to assist with a project. You can hire one or several data stewards and have their help for as long or short a period of time as you need. While outsourced data stewards function as members of your firm’s team, you don’t have to deal with hiring or managing them - and the cost can be significantly less than hiring a full-time internal data steward.
One final note: while data quality depression can be serious, you don’t have to face it alone. Reach out to colleagues, peers or industry organizations for help. Additionally a CRM success consultant can often provide you with information, ideas and best practices. Feel free to call us anytime for data quality assistance or outsourced data quality professionals. But if you don’t get help for data quality depression from a CRM Success consultant, get help… somewhere.
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