Duplicate information is a growing pain that all companies face and one time or another. Often because of human error, information is replicated multiple times into a repository, without ever checking to see if that information already exists. This problem of duplicate data often gets out of control before a company knows it’s a significant problem, leaving a lasting effect on the business going forward.
In the healthcare industry, we can expect up to 10% of information to be duplicate, and that number goes much higher in other sectors. While this number may not seem substantial, in fact is has a great impact on day to day company earnings and productivity. The first step to solving the problem is understanding how it impacts your business operations, and then moving on to finding a solution.
Negative Customer Experience
If any part of your company is customer-facing, or involves customer service, at one point or another your representatives have encountered duplicate information, which has negatively impacted your customer’s experience. This can cause frustration for everyone, not to mention set the dominos up to fall in accurate reporting. Many companies default to company-specific nomenclature for file naming and with document dating to help people understand with information is current. However, de-duplication technology provides a more robust solution, identifying possible duplicates before it becomes an issue.
Lost Time Fixing Records
Often times, many companies don’t know how much duplicate data, contracts, or files they really have until it’s too late. It may come in the form of unstructured data, making it harder to quantify and sort the information for later usage. When a business finally decides to take on this data management beast, it takes money and time. It is best to do a one-time overhaul, implementing new practices and applications, as well as creating a new maintenance protocol for going forward. While this doesn’t rectify the time lost by fixing records, it certainly helps mitigate the risk going forward.
Inaccurate Reporting
If you’re making important decisions based on the data and reporting your company creates, you need those reports to be accurate. Duplicate data can skew findings, so your decisions may be based on inaccurate information. In addition, systems may be slowed down by duplicate data, meaning it takes extra time to create reports. The bottom line is, duplicate information impacts your organization’s ability to accurately report findings, which leads to poor decisions, and negatively impact your company bottom line.
Budgeting Wastes
Inaccurate data can cost a company money in many ways. Not only does it take money and man power to identify and dispose of duplicate data, but it can also increase storage costs. Our partners at Salesforce highlight just exactly how duplicate information can put a drain on your sales department, marketing efforts and internal organization. “The real-world costs of inaccurate data are sky-high, with some estimates stating that bad data could cost U.S. businesses as much as $3 trillion per year.”-2019 While you may not see a day to day impact on your business from duplicate information, you can rest assured Year over Year, you are wasting valuable resources by not tackling this issue.
Duplicate Information Kills Marketing Efforts
Duplicate data and records also impact your outgoing message. Email campaigns, targeted social media ads, and old school mailers all rely on up-to-date information about your current customers, and their relationship with your company. You may pay double for an ad spend, only to find out that about 10% of your contacts are duplicates, making that spend unnecessary. Making an investment in de-duplication across your business can save you money over time, and reduce man-power hours needed for maintenance tasks in the future. Not only will this help your internal resources keep things running smoothly, but it will also pay dividends in keeping your marketing budget on track.
In Conclusion
Overall, data duplication seems like an annoying, but not overly harmful byproduct of having a large workforce, but in reality it can cause a ripple effect that negatively impacts your company. The best solution is to get ahead of the problem, the second best option is to implement de-duplication efforts to streamline you data management and set your company up for success in the future.