Data Pain: Duplicate Records, Incomplete Contacts & Disparate Systems

How Clean, Real-time Data Can Open a World of New Possibilities

Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Change is inevitable. Change is constant.” And in the world of data, change happens at lightning speed. To give you an idea of just how fast data changes–Salesforce® reports that every 30 minutes, 120 business addresses change, and 75 phone numbers change.

The problem with massive amounts of data changing so quickly is that Admins and their teams can’t keep track of it with manual processes, which is why it’s critical to choose the right apps to help manage data. For example, the Salesforce report, “Ensuring Data is of High Quality” found that on average a customer's contact database has 90% incomplete contacts. Up to 74% of the records in these customer databases need updates and over 25% of them are duplicates.

Data quality affects every department of a business, from sales, marketing and customer service to operations and accounting. What can make it more complicated is that departments within a company often use different systems or spreadsheets for managing and tracking data.

To ensure data accuracy, it’s important for departments to work together. "The number one mistake that people make is to lead with data quality initiatives, rather than leading with a business initiative. You see a lot of data quality problems that are internal to IT where the business doesn't engage because it hasn't been involved in a way that it can engage," says Steve Jones, global VP of Capgemini's big data practice in the Salesforce report, “Ensuring Data is of High Quality."

“Pretty much every business strives to be data-driven and the very foundation of this process is having the trust that your data is accurate and reliable to make big decisions. Having quality data allows you to provide your customers with the best possible experience. Without accurate data, how will you know what your customers actually want? explains Steve Pogrebivsky, in his blog, “Clean Data is a Win-Win for Everybody.”

The solution starts with businesses choosing cloud-based software, so they can get real-time updates and share data throughout their organization. When Robin Hood, a poverty fighting organization in New York City, was experiencing inefficiencies with time consuming, manual data aggregation–users were running reports, exporting data into spreadsheets, and creating pivot tables. 

To overcome this, they chose Rollup Helper from Passage Technology to help streamline their data aggregation and reporting. “Based on my experience with other tools, I appreciate how Rollup Helper promotes system best practices. For example, only one field can be used as a target field, which prevents the same field from being constantly overwritten. There are many implementations in the tool that encourage users to follow the best practices to ensure data accuracy and process continuity,” explains Hao Lyu, who is Robin Hood’s Associate Manager, Database Administrator.

“Rollup Helper simplifies and streamlines our workflow and processes, allowing us to make better and more accurate decisions based on the data we have. More importantly, it opens up opportunities for us to gain insights from our data by manipulating and analyzing it in ways that were previously impossible,” said Hao. Read more about how Robin Hood leveraged data in Rollup Helper to achieve their goals.

Passage Technology’s Lookup Helper can help you stay on top of your ever-changing data so understand your customers better while saving your sales team time. For example, when a user manually enters the information for a contact and searches Salesforce for the appropriate account, it adds extra steps and increases the chance that duplicate records will be created. 

Lookup Helper will automatically relate records based on the criteria the Admin has set. Since new users don’t need to manually fill in those lookup fields, it reduces the number of steps that are needed. Lookup Helper automatically searches for an existing match to the criteria. This reduces the chances of users not finding the record and eliminating the creation of duplicate records. To learn more read our Identify and Eliminate Duplicate Records Use Case.

Whatever your industry or use case, Passage Technology can customize a data management and report solution to meet 100% of your business requirements for Salesforce success. To find out more about how Passage Technology can help you overcome your data challenges, contact us.

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