Is Poor Quality Salesforce Data Hurting Business? Prevent Its Creation in the First Place

“Garbage in, garbage out” is an unavoidable, universal truth. It applies to numerous situations. The output is only as good as the input. And this is certainly true when it comes to using the Salesforce platform and deriving business insights and value. How good is your data quality?

The Role of the Admin in Data Quality

Salesforce Admins are tasked with the day-to-day management of a company’s Salesforce org, so this is an extremely important question to them. Poor data quality in the platform negatively impacts the entire enterprise, but especially for Admins because of their responsibility to maintain a Salesforce environment. It’s like the old saying about baseball umpires: “If fans notice the umpires during a game, something is wrong.”

Ultimately, it falls on Admins to support a business’s Salesforce users, in any number of ways. Everyone needs the platform to run smoothly. But even a well-run platform can’t be useful if the data is bad—it damages business decision-making and strategy and it results in a failed investment in Salesforce. 

Plus, with the growing business use of artificial intelligence (AI) based on company data, whether in Salesforce with Einstein or with external tools, negative consequences could be amplified.

Developing a Plan to Stop Bad Data Creation

In most businesses, it’s up to the Admin to remedy this situation—and let’s face it, it’s not a very rewarding task. One way to address the challenge of data quality is to develop a comprehensive plan for initial data creation processes. Admins also will likely need an another plan for cleaning up existing data, but that’s a separate discussion. 

First, the plan should delegate the responsibility for ensuring good quality data to everyone throughout the business. In reality, it’s too big of a job for only the Admin. The plan should empower the users—the people who in most cases are entering the (potentially bad) data—to minimize problems and fix them.

Next, examine your business processes and determine the sources for bad data entry. What steps could be taken to minimize the occurrence? Some issues to consider:

• Establish guidelines and enhanced validation rules for cleaner data creation
  • The usual focus is on external (customer) data, for all-important conversions and revenue. 
  • Don’t overlook internal (business) data, to keep operations across functions running smoothly

• Employ tools to prevent duplicate records
• Institute notification system that spurs users to take action right away

Finally, Admins should look for technology solutions that fit into the plan. Ideally, such a solution would complement the people and processes considerations above. It should also be native to Salesforce and easy to set up and use.

Data Quality Helper App Improves Data Creation by Users

The 100-percent-native Salesforce app, Data Quality Helper from Passage Technology, is up to the task of executing your comprehensive plan. It’s easy-to-use with clicks not code, and delivers greater Admin power and flexibility than many other solutions or Salesforce’s default features. The free app can be downloaded at the Salesforce AppExchange.

• Admins can create enhanced data validation rules for an endless number of data entry situations—before or after a save, preventing or allowing a save, whatever combination is desired by the Admin’s defined criteria for that particular use case. For example, these reinforcement rules can be positive (errors in internal PTO entries) or negative (missing external Account fill-in fields) in nature.
• The app also helps to prevent duplicate data creation. Using adjustable matching sensitivity set by Admins, users are shown other potential duplicate records. Then they are empowered with options for merging and saving records as they wish into a single record, eliminating clutter and confusion across the platform.

The rules, criteria, warnings, and enforcement for data creation are fully controlled by Admins. Warning messages about bad, invalid, or missing data are customized by Admins for content, style and presentation. These notifications also follow the affected records until the issues are resolved, if that’s what the Admin chooses. Warnings may also be ignored by a user if the user deems the data they input is valid (after the warning is presented and the setting is Admin-configured to allow ignoring warnings). So data cleanup can happen immediately or be followed up later—they don’t just disappear after initial warnings. Also, a Lightning Web Component can be set up to provide an org-wide view of all identified data problems.

Users benefit from these guidelines, manage data better, and become more productive. In the end, entire enterprises are elevated by having higher quality data.

Having bad data creation processes drags down the potential of the Salesforce platform, wasting precious time, money, and limited resources. How much longer are you willing to let poor data quality go unaddressed? The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to fix it and save your business.

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, and priority support, plus all of the features in the Free Edition.