Data is unlimited — and it’s everywhere. Companies used to collect and store a finite amount of data about their products, employees, and customers in antiquated internal CRM systems. That was the age of ERP. Now, there is an unlimited amount of data about customers — and it presents both an opportunity and a challenge for even today’s best companies. 

Most are finding it difficult to manage this deluge of data. According to this year’s edition of Bluewolf’s The State of Salesforce Report, 76% of Salesforce users struggle with integration and data quality, and 70% of users waste time entering the same data into multiple systems. For customer service organizations, this inefficiency can be detrimental to both agent and customer satisfaction. How can service professionals tackle this unlimited and unintegrated customer data and ensure data is up-to-date and accurate?

This year, the best companies have invested in automated processes that continuously check data quality and alert managers to potential problems. This allows customer service managers to run reports and be notified of errors themselves, instead of relying on IT to do so and report back. Additionally, deploying self-service tools lets managers to customize their data management in two ways: first, they can customize their own rules for data quality management, like always flagging case entries without a phone number; and second, they can incorporate “human tasks” into the workflow, like pausing automation to review, correct, and approve data quality exceptions throughout the process. 

If you already have Service Cloud, your organization has a head start on this process. Depending on the complexity of your needs, you can lean on tools like free Data Quality Analysis Dashboards on the Salesforce AppExchange or Informatica’s full-featured master data management solutions that integrate with Service Cloud. 

For any customer service organization looking to get a handle on data quality — whether you use Service Cloud or not — an effective data governance strategy is key. To get started, consider these three steps below:

Constrain data input. 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.

Integrate with trusted data sources. 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 manually entering data.

Automate what you can. For customer service agents, efficiency is the key to success. Automating processes, like routing issues to the correct team or serving up relevant knowledge articles, will make it easier for agents to quickly resolve customer issues. As we all know from our own experience, a speedy resolution is the most important differentiator between a frustrating customer service interaction and a satisfying one.  

To learn more about how the best service organizations are improving the agent experience and service center processes, download 10 Ways to Improve Case and Knowledge Management.  

Clive is the Director of Product Marketing at Informatica, an enterprise data integration and management software company and a key partner in the production of The State of Salesforce Report. Read more about Informatica’s product and solution offerings.