The Ultimate Guide to Product Data Cleansing You Need to Do In 2020

Having accurate product data can help customers purchase products with confidence and it can provide opportunities for a better insight to support data-driven decisions for the organization along with operational efficiencies. 

 

What is Data Cleansing?

 

Data cleansing is the process of resolving errors and removing incorrect records from the existing database. The purpose of the Product data cleanse is to identify the incomplete, irrelevant, and inaccurate product data and then take action to correct it by modification, replacement, or deletion from the database.

 

Data deteriorates over time and it is important to have a process in place to review the product data to assure it is in alignment with what the manufacturer has in their system and it matches what a distributor carries in their system.

 

There are a couple questions you should ask to see if data cleansing is right for you –

1.      Is your company’s customer service and sales performance slowed down because of incorrect or insufficient product information in your ERP or E-commerce Platform?

2.      Are your operational processes delayed due to lack of good quality product data?

3.      Are your ecommerce strategies not getting the expected outcomes?

If you answered Yes to any of these questions, your company may be due suffering from critical data quality management issues and needs to perform data cleansing.  

 

There are some basic steps to data cleansing:

1. Identifying missing data
2. Validating data accuracy against source data
3. Filling in gaps in data set
4. Normalizing the data set
5. Removing the duplicate records 

Here are some more benefits data cleansing:

Error Reduction

Data cleansing is a way to avoid unnecessary costs that arise when organizations are spending too much time processing errors, correcting incorrect data, or troubleshooting.

Drive Customer Acquisition

Organizations that maintain their product data can attract more customers to their site with robust, accurate, complete product data which helps customers buy with confidence.

Decision-Making Improvements

Clean data can boost the decision-making process.  Accurate and up-to-date data supports analytics and business intelligence tools to provide organizations with confident resources for better decision-making which can generate more valuable insights.

Employee Productivity Increases

Clean and well-maintained product data ensure high productivity of employees who can take advantage of that information in available to them within the system and not have to rely on looking up information from outside resources like search engines and manufacturer websites.  Organizations that actively improve their data consistency and accuracy also improve their internal teams’ ability to respond to customers quickly.

Many areas of your business can benefit from clean product data:

 

Marketing: Ability to create product content quickly to run marketing  campaigns, create landing pages, and for speed-to-market on new product introductions.

 

Sales: Ability to respond to customer requests, make accurate product recommendations, and process orders quickly.

 

Purchasing/Accounting: Ability to place purchase orders and process error-free invoices/payments for increased profit margins.

 

Logistics: Ability to calculate accurate shipping costs with correct product weights and dimensions.