It is no news anymore that data is the new life of business because the success or failure your business depends on the quality, that’s why you have to know how to improve data quality. And how well you utilize the various data that you have collected. The major effect of the recent data explosion otherwise known as information explosion is that it has pushed businesses into a more data reliant system of work. Learn about the effective benefits of data cleansing.
In order to stay at the top of your game, there is a need for you to correctly analyze your data which would help you right business decisions, but to achieve correct results from your data analysis, your data has to be of a high quality.
The importance of high quality data cannot be overemphasized because it provides you with an accurate state of your business which then helps you to manage your resources effectively, set your priority right and ultimately take informed decisions.
According to reports published by IBM, low quality data can lead a business into loss estimated to be millions of dollars and also you may end losing your customers because of poor data quality.
Now that you are aware of the immense benefits of having high quality data, now how to improve data quality? It’s a no news that many businesses are struggling with getting high quality data from their pool of data but do not worry. At the end of this post, you would have gained knowledge on how to improve the quality of your data which would immensely improve your decision making.
Before Going To Discuss How To Improve The Quality Of Your Data, Let’s Take A Look At The Qualities Of A High Quality Data.
For you to say that your data is of a high quality, it should meet the following under listed criteria. If your data falls short of any of the criteria below, then there is a need for you to work on the quality of your data.
ACCURACY
The importance of having accurate data cannot be over emphasized because for all that it is worth, your data has to be accurate. You don’t want to send a parcel meant for Mr A to Mr Z because of inaccurate data. It would portray your business as unserious and unreliable.
RELEVANCY
Also your data has to be the right fit for your needs. Your data has to be relevant to the task or project that it is intended for. A data set that contains information of doctors is irrelevant to a project or campaign that targets the entertainment sector.
COMPLETENESS
An incomplete data is of no use to the owner of the data because you do not have all the information that you need. So it is important that you ensure that your data contains all the required value and records.
TIMELINESS
Imagine sending a good meant for Mr. A to a residence he had left 2 years ago simply because you haven’t taken time to update your records. For all its cost your data needs to be up to date.
CONSISTENCY
Your data must follow a specific format that must have been set by you or your data managers. This format is expected to be the same across all data sets.
Now that you understand what a high quality data looks like, it is now time to learn how you can improve your data so as to meet high quality standards. Learn how data cleansing service can help you to achieve above goals.
Steps To Improve Data Quality
Understand your data
The very first step to improve data quality is to understand which data you are collecting in the first place. Before collecting data you should ask these questions and they are: Why are you collecting? Where will the data come from? Is this data reusable?
The questions above would give you a better understanding of what the data you are collecting is and also help you through a process called data profiling.
Data profiling is a great tool that helps you gain insight into your data because it involves that you examine your available data and generating key information and statistics from them.
Understanding your data would form a good starting point for you to achieve high quality data so you should take out time to first understand your data.
Scan and Identify errors
The next step in improving the quality of your data is to do a quick scan and identify possible errors in your data. This is important because the correctness and accuracy of the data that you feed into your system will be decisive if you will achieve high quality of data.
One other thing to watch out is duplicate data, as these would disrupt your results and also affect your decision making.
Correct Mistakes and Errors
After you must have gained insight to your data and also identify errors, the next step in attaining high data quality is to ensure that you correct all errors and this time it is important that you make these corrections from the source . These would ensure that peradventure you need to reuse these same data, the error would have been corrected once and for all and you won’t need to do the corrections again.
Pay closer attention when collecting data from a new source
It is very important that you pay a closer attention and also vet properly if you are taking data from a new source other than your usual sources. This is because there might be a difference in the new data and format and arrangement.
Engage the services of experts
It is no doubt that data processing; cleansing and analysis can be an uphill task for business to cope with, so why not leave it in the hands of experts? These experts have several years of experience in providing services as these and they will without doubt provide you with top quality services and ultimately improve your business and help customer experience. Tricks: How To Choose a Reliable Data Processing Company?
