For Salesforce Admins, Maintaining Data Quality Is Undesirable But Necessary Responsibility

Every job has responsibilities that are more rewarding than others. No role is perfect. Everybody has to take the bad with the good, but the hope is the good outweighs the bad (hopefully by a lot).

It’s no different for the typical Salesforce Admin. They play an important role that works across many business functions—customer relationship management and revenue generation, strategy formulation and decision making, and processes for internal operations and business management. A talented Admin is truly a partner to many parts of a successful enterprise.

Poor Data Quality Limits an Admin’s Potential Contributions

Besides the opportunities to work at a high level across the business, the Admin’s primary responsibility is to maintain the health of the Salesforce platform and assist its users. Admins are vital to improve and increase Salesforce usability, to train users to be efficient and effective, and to facilitate innovative and transformative projects. Ultimately, they extend Salesforce and justify the continued investment in the platform.

However, all of these activities, and the productivity of a business’s platform users, require high quality data. Without it, the impact of the platform and its users is ineffective at best and potentially damaging at worst. Long term, a business’s future could be imperiled. Short term, the Admin’s current career prospects could be shaky at that company.

No doubt, elevating data quality may be the last thing Admins want to spend their time on. While absolutely important for the reasons cited above, the time spent cleaning and fixing data problems can detract from time spent on the Admins’ other impactful duties that could help with advancing their businesses. In addition, there’s little glory in what seems to be a thankless task. And to be honest, the lack of glory also may not be helpful personally from a career advancement perspective (but the alternative is even worse).

Admins Should Develop a Comprehensive Data Quality Plan

In order to solve any problem, the root causes must be identified. Once the sources of poor data creation are known, an action plan can be enacted to improve overall data quality over time. Of course, the success of the plan is dependent on getting buy-in from the people affected. 

Admins would be wise not to take on this issue alone. Data quality improvement is a team effort. Delegating some tasks to the Salesforce users makes sense. They're the ones closest to the data—they create and use records as part of their day-to-day responsibilities, and they would most easily recognize what constitutes good data.

Admins should focus on three areas as part of the plan:

• Are there formalized guidelines for new data creation for Salesforce users to follow? Users may be adding new records on a regular basis, affecting data quality, and they may be doing it differently.
• Existing records also require a plan for repair and maintenance. Change is constant. Data ages quickly, becoming invalid or fragmented by incompleteness or duplication. Part of this plan should also focus on data storage and deletion strategies over time.

Data Quality Helper App Is the Solution for Implementing a Plan for Better Data

If a problem can be solved through automation, that is often the best case scenario. The Salesforce-native app, Data Quality Helper by Passage Technology, can help Admins to achieve their data quality goals for new and existing records—and in a way that makes a tough job easier. The app offers these solutions:

• Enhanced Validation Rules — The app lets Admins customize special data validation rules for users creating or updating records. More uniform processes can be implemented to achieve higher quality for data. The app overcomes Salesforce’s default functionality, which is inflexible and not customizable. Admins determine each rule’s triggering criteria, whether it runs before or after a save, or prevents or allows a save. Admin-customized notifications are displayed to users when rules are not followed. The process empowers users to properly create or update the records based on the Admin-established guidelines. Learn more >
• Duplicate Data Identification and Resolution — The app makes it easy to identify, eliminate and/or merge duplicate records. With a better data set, users leveraging the data avoid confusion and errors.  The app, once again, overcomes Salesforce’s default data duplication resolution function, which doesn’t offer much flexibility to optimize results. Admins are given greater customization options for resolving the problem of duplicates. They can adjust the sensitivity matching and criteria for identifying duplicates. Then the interface helps users to pick and merge the correct data from any of the duplicates into one higher quality record.  Learn more >
• Data Cleanup Rules for Data Storage and Deletion — This app helps keep your org free of unwanted data and safely frees up costly data storage for future use. Set a storage limit and receive alerts when nearing that predefined storage threshold. The rules allow the mass deletion of records on any object, either automatically or manually. Records can be previewed before deletion, and later deleted records could be easily restored. The app also calculates storage usage analytics and trends. Learn more >

To help execute a data improvement plan, Admins can set up a Lightning Web Component that provides all users an org-wide view of all identified data problems to address. The app is available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

When it comes down to it, the typical Admin has more than enough challenges in managing an organization’s Salesforce capabilities. Poor data quality only compounds those challenges and might reflect poorly on the Admin. The Admin didn’t create the data problem, but has the power to fix it. How much longer can you let the problem of poor data quality go unaddressed? Don’t wait until it’s too late.

There is a convenient solution. Learn more about Data Quality Helper or schedule a demo/consult today.

Data Quality Helper Premium features

Upgrade to Data Quality Helper Premium Edition for unlimited enhanced data validation rules, unlimited duplicate resolution rules, unlimited data deletion of records, and priority support, plus all of the features in the Free Edition.