Running Data Quality Audits of Salesforce Records—Easier Than Ever

Having to engage in an audit of any kind is not usually seen as one life’s most enjoyable activities. Some audits (like tax audits) can be especially frightening, but as a general rule doing any type of audit, at minimum, can be a chore. Auditing the quality of your Salesforce^® data is no exception to this general rule.

Still, it’s absolutely necessary to get the most out of using the Salesforce platform. Unfortunately, in the rush of day-to-day workloads, it’s all too easy to let this priority slide. Salesforce’s own research shows the following problems:

• Bypassing Data Practices: A striking 66% of development/IT teams bypass data quality practices, leading to errors and inconsistencies that audits can catch and correct.
• High Prevalence of Poor Data Quality: A Salesforce study found that the average customer contact database is 90% incomplete, with 20% of records being useless due to factors like 74% needing updates and over 25% being duplicates. This highlights the necessity of regular data audits to identify and address these issues.
• Financial Impact of Bad Data: Poor data quality costs businesses approximately $700 billion annually, equating to about 30% of the average company’s revenue. Regular audits can mitigate these losses by ensuring data accuracy and relevance.
• Time Wasted on Bad Data: Salesforce research indicates that sales reps spend 21% of their time researching incomplete or inaccurate data, underscoring the efficiency gains possible through audits that clean up duplicates and errors.

However, using the right tools and developing a comprehensive plan can help move the audit process along and reach the enjoyable end-game of elevated data quality. And that results in better data insights and outcomes across the organization’s functions and AI activities.

Where to Start with Your Data Quality Audit? Use the Data Quality Helper App

One option, the free Salesforce app, Data Quality Helper from Passage Technology, helps you find and fix records with data quality problems—quickly and easily. The first step is to define the issues you’re looking for. Is it missing fields? Is it poorly formatted data? Is it duplicate data or records? The app can help with all of that and more.

• Using clicks not coding, your Salesforce Admin can create flexible validation rules and duplicate rules in the app that quickly comb your entire existing dataset and then flag individual records that run afoul of the rules’ criteria. These customizable warning messages highlight what’s wrong and instruct what needs to be done, per the Admins’ rule requirements. In addition, the warnings stay attached to the records until the data quality issues are addressed.
• Any Salesforce user viewing a flagged record is empowered to make the changes needed. Moreover, if a user is creating a new record or updating an existing record, and a new data quality issue is generated in that moment, the rule’s warning is instantly displayed to notify the user. So the app helps prevent the creation of new data quality issues.
• All of these flagged records can be categorized and displayed in a single interface—an audit report in the form of a home page module. In a glance, you can view the depth and breadth of data quality issues to be addressed. This “to-do list,” quickly links you to each individual record for appropriate action. Or the choice can be made to ignore and remove the record from the list (although the warning on the record will remain).

Do You Have a Data Deletion Strategy as Part of Your Data Governance Plan?

One aspect of data management that sometimes gets less attention than data completeness and deduplication efforts is data deletion. Managing data storage is also an important part of auditing data quality. Retaining unneeded data makes the dataset unwieldy and slows efficiency and productivity for its users.

And, to be compliant with company retention policies, organizations must be careful when setting and enforcing rules around what data is to be kept and what data is now ready to be archived. This is left best to a systematic process rather than subjective interpretation of what to delete and when to delete it.

The Data Quality Helper app can employ data cleanup rules for mass-deletion of records on an automated schedule or on command. Once the Admin establishes the internal criteria for archiving and removing unneeded records, the app acts accordingly. Notifications alert the proper stakeholders and they can preview the targeted records before they are deleted. 

Once removed, the files can be restored by the app if needed. Of course, companies should always be using other tools to back up their data on a regular schedule, in addition to using Data Quality Helper. Such archiving practices keep the active Salesforce platform streamlined and optimized for use.

Can You Get the Data Quality Helper App for Free?

The free version of Data Quality Helper is available for installation at the Salesforce AppExchange. It allows for the configuration of two validation rules and one duplicate rule as well as the deletion of 20,000 Salesforce records each month.

If you would like to do a more comprehensive data quality audit, you can purchase the premium version of the app. It allows for unlimited rules of either type and an unlimited number of records for deletion.

Get started today—poor quality data is corrosive to productivity, providing service, and profits.