The importance of clean data : deduping

25 Jan 2011

Imagine your office being filled with filing cabinets – all containing the same files over and over again. The waste of space, time and resources is obvious. If you need to update one file, you need to go round the room, editing each of the identical files you have stored. You simply wouldn’t do it.

Yet when it comes to digital file storage it seems we lack that sense of order and discipline. Can’t find the record you are looking for? Create a new one! Didn’t ask the contact how their name or company is spelt? Create a new one with the name you heard or thought you heard! Search

for that record later and can’t find it? Create a new one now you have the correct name!

With precise financing, contact and time management being more relevant than ever before, having clean data has never been more important. De-duplicating your records for use in your CRM software solution streamlines your operation more than you probably think. I recently read this interesting article which made all these points succinctly, particularly as we have been busy with de-dupes for some of our clients ourselves lately.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/24/datacentre_not_deduping

There you have it in black and white – de-duping saves time, money and resources.

Sales pitch: At OpenCRM we recognise the importance of de-duping and our system deals with this in many ways – warning you when you are about to create a duplicate record, giving you the option to merge records should duplicates be present and perhaps most importantly using filters to read and analyse records to prevent duplicates being created when importing larger volumes of information.

An aside: if we performed a de-dupe on the current singles charts would we be left with one song only?!? Signed, a Grumpy Old Man