Acuate Data Quality

9 Most Popular Data Quality Charts (Part 1)

I don’t know about you, but when I receive a lengthy business report I always have a feeling of ‘oh no!’ I’ll admit it, I love looking at charts and diagrams…I feel I can see the right questions to ask immediately…what the chart shows and what the chart doesn’t show. I can then decide to read the report or seek answers elsewhere. When you’re busy, this has to be the best way to see information. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is never truer when analysing data quality results. In this first of 3 posts, I’m going to briefly... Read more →

ABC = Always Be Cleansing

My nephew’s thinking of a career in sales. While researching on the internet he came across the infamous sales movie Glengarry Glen Ross starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin. For all sales people out there, this is just ones of those movies you watch, whether you agree with the contents or not, but for some young sales people, the testosterone driven environment is really encouraging. One of the most famous scenes is where Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent from the parent company to motivate an underperforming sales team by unleashing a torrent of verbal abuse. In that scene... Read more →

Why It's Worth Building Your Own Targeted Data

When you fancy a particular meal, sometimes going to the right restaurant is what you need, but if you know it’s home cooked, then it’s likely to taste so much better. Well, that’s my feeling about creating a targeted data set. Buying is sometimes right, but often, building your own is so much better. Before I start on the pro and cons, I have to say, for some target markets there are some very good niche data suppliers out there, in which case buying is a no brainer. However, there are many companies that are just not happy with the... Read more →

How Data Quality Affects Telemarketing

I recently came across a lovely Telemarketing company with a compelling proposition of guaranteeing good quality appointments for his clients for a fixed price and the client would get to determine the quality, a good deal all round! So, here is someone delivering what they promised, but their results are dependent on two key factors: The message The data As an experienced marketer, one can control the quality of a message until it gets the conversion rates you require. However, this company relies on the client providing their data as basis for the telemarketing campaign. If the quality of the... Read more →

Don’t Waste Time With Mediocre Data

“There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment” – Norman Vincent Peale For me this quote sums up why some companies have good data and why others have poor data. It’s their enthusiasm about data. When you’re not so enthusiastic about your data, then it’s likely your data will be mediocre or of poor quality, but if you’re enthusiastic about data then I’ll bet you have good quality data. So here are 5 suggestions that will move you from mediocrity to excellence: Having an Evangelist If you may have the overall responsibility for your... Read more →

The Fear of Data Cleansing

Have you been through that experience where you procrastinated or had a fear about something, only then to overcome it and think to yourself ‘that was a lot easier than I thought and what took me so long to overcome it’. You then realise it’s all in your head. So you may be wondering how one can have a fear of cleaning data…it’s only data after all, but no need to mock it…you’ll be surprised how often this happens. Fear happens when you see a threat from danger, pain or harm. In our context, it’s the pain that triggers this... Read more →

What's The Missing Piece During Data Migration

Do you remember the time when you decorated a room or a house, and after many days of toil you looked at the final product only to see bits of your new wall not painted, or the paint on the skirting has edged over to the wall, and so on, and you keep on spotting tiny errors here and there. You then go through the process of tidying this up, and if you’re like me, you’re wondering how you missed all this, I was always sure I worked thoroughly. We’ll, we are only humans, and we are going to miss... Read more →

Don’t Let Your CRM Stop You

This is got to be one of the most frustrating aspects of helping companies achieve exceptional data quality; it’s the CRM’s inability to import cleansed data easily. For the larger CRM systems the task of re-importing cleansed data is not too onerous, but merging duplicate data can be a real challenge. Now it’s understandable that merging two entities in a CRM application is complicated, here are two good reasons why: (a) Because of all the linked information. For example, an account may have contacts, opportunities, orders, activities, tasks, etc. attached to it, so all of these have to be merged... Read more →

Data Quality Doesn’t Need To Be A 80/20 Game [Video]

So here’s my take on how the majority of companies (not all) see data quality (admittedly some do not see data quality at all, but that’s another blog post.) Many see data quality as a percentage game – 80% good data is good enough – and there is plenty of merit to warrant this approach, but as I’ll try and explain taking data quality from maybe a 80/20 game to 95/5 game or 99/1 game or even 100/0 game is doable and the upside significant. I can hear people screaming about 100/0 game but for some companies this is an... Read more →

Segmentation – The Secret to Unlocking Your Marketing

Imagine you’re 16 years old, it’s the first day of your public exams, it feels a little scary and certainly you’re apprehensive. Your life’s path could be defined by these very results. Even writing this now gives me a sense of past nervousness, so I can’t imagine how it feels for today’s students. Now rewind to a few months earlier when you’re in the midst of creating a revision plan. If your revision plan consisted of a single method of learning for all your subjects, then the likelihood of you doing well in all your subjects is far less than... Read more →