This is the second blog post in a series on managing data in Salesforce. Subscribe to be notified when a new post is published and check out the other blogs in the series. 

Clean data enables better decision making and improves the effectiveness of marketing and sales. It’s also a huge commitment to keep your data clean — if not monitored properly, your data will become dirty and unvaluable again. So once you’ve achieved clean data, how do you keep it that way? Here are four strategies to keep your Salesforce data clean.

1. Hold every department responsible.
   
   
   
   A cross functional data governance committee is essential to ensure ongoing data quality. All business units should be represented in the council, and collectively own data standards for the company as a whole. According to Bluewolf’s State of Salesforce report, 61% of organisations surveyed have a group dedicated to cloud governance. Data governance is a core responsibility of every governance team.
2. Constrain data input.
   
   
   
   What do we mean by constraining data input? By using standard Salesforce functionality, you can standardize what users put into Salesforce.
   
   Data validation rules, combined with required and unique fields can limit incorrect information. Ensuring that picklist fields and lookups are used in place of 'free text' fields are additional ways to constrain inputs.
   
   
   
   A more stringent approach is to create workflow rules that route any newly created customer records to the data governance committee for approval. Only once this approval is granted the records be committed. This process may look burdensome but done well it can be efficient and reduce the burden of data cleanup later on.
3. Integrate with trusted data sources.
   
   
   
   Stopping bad data from getting into Salesforce is only half the battle. A key challenge for many companies is keeping data up to date. Phone numbers, emails, and billing addresses can become outdated surprisingly fast.
   
   
   
   Third party data sources that verify addresses and supplement existing data with demographic data like age, gender, and household income can reduce the burden of entering the data into Salesforce and help correct errors.
   
   
   
   These data sources do not have to be external. For example, if a customer can manage their own account information online or by calling into customer service, ensure any updated data from the website and service make it back to the Salesforce account record.  
4. Gamify desired behaviours. 
   
   
   
   The best people to put in charge of keeping the data clean are those who care about the quality of the data. Incentivise those same people with game-like challenges and data quality will only improve.
   
   
   
   For example, award points based on a contact records completeness. If a record has 10 fields and only four are required, award points for completing the remaining six. Publishing a league table of average scores grouped by owner, allows users to measure their own data against that of their colleagues. Rewarding the star performers and champions of good record capture with prizes and recognition creates further engagement and awareness for data quality.

Maintaining data quality is paramount to drive ongoing efficiency in your organisation. I hope these strategies will help you reap the benefits of clean data.

In the next installment of this data blog series, I will dive into data migration tactics. Check back in two weeks, or subscribe to this series and receive blogs right in your inbox.