Everything You Need to Know About Data Hygiene

Data is one of the most valuable assets for businesses today, driving decisions and shaping success. By 2025, global data volume is expected to reach over 79 zettabytes, making it more important than ever to maintain accurate, well-managed information. Poor-quality or outdated data can lead to costly mistakes, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. This is where data hygiene plays a crucial role.

Ensuring clean and reliable data requires continuous effort and investment, but the rewards—better decision-making, efficiency, and compliance—are well worth it. So, let us take a closer look at what exactly is data hygiene and how can it benefit your business

Keep your databases clean, update data on time, format for better accessibility, and make sure the data you have is error-free - that is data hygiene. The term "dirty data" refers to duplicated, incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated data, while maintaining data hygiene removes these inconsistencies from datasets. Data cleaning can help businesses avoid errors that affect various aspects, from operations to crucial decisions.

Making these decisions with dirty data can be costly. In fact, studies have suggested that dirty data can cost businesses up to 25% of their potential revenue.

Reliable data can be useful for forecasting, customer insights, and strategic planning. Poor data quality can lead to faulty analytics, missed opportunities, and incorrect operations. It can also lead to compliance risks, reputational damage, and a spike in costs associated with correcting errors.

Data hygiene ensures that your decisions are grounded in reality and data is used in the right way. With an abundance of clean and dirty data coexisting out there, sorting clean data out is all the more important to ensure good operations and the longevity of your business.

Good data hygiene ensures accuracy, compliance, and efficiency, helping businesses make informed decisions and build trust. Clean data reduces errors, lowers costs, and enhances customer relationships, ultimately driving long-term success.

• Better Compliance with Regulations

  Assuring compliance with regulations and compliances like GDPR is beneficial in avoiding any potential penalties or lawsuits for businesses. It also helps you gain and maintain stakeholder trust. With good data hygiene, businesses can ensure that their customer data is protected and handled securely. They also lower the risks of potential breaches to ensure compliance with local, national, and international laws.

• Increased Efficiency & Reduced Costs

  With clean data, your business reduces the risk of making errors and ensures a good ROI. Cleaning duplicate data, correcting inaccurate data, reformatting data for better accessibility, and organizing data entries - all of these steps can empower the simplified operation of many processes within a business and lead to cost savings. Clean data can help businesses save hours of manual labour in operations, boosting the efficiency of the workforce and optimizing operational costs along the way.

• Improved Customer Relationships

  In the age of spam calls, bot messages, and promotional emails, customers are rightfully frustrated when they get irrelevant messaging from businesses. Maintaining good data hygiene with updated customer records and information can help businesses reach out to acquirable customers, reducing acquisition failure. Additionally, it can also enable personalized and timely interactions to improve existing customer relationships and build brand loyalty.

• Informed Decision-Making

  Clean data = clean decisions. With good data hygiene, your business is less susceptible to making uninformed or outdated decisions that can result in the loss of stakeholder trust or financial losses. Accurate and tested data provides the grounds for building better strategies to achieve defined goals and can also bring to light hidden opportunities to capitalize on.

Maintaining data hygiene is crucial for accurate decision-making and business success. However, challenges like rapid data growth, inconsistent entries, and weak governance can lead to errors, inefficiencies, and compliance risks.

• Rapid Data Growth & Integration Challenges

  As mentioned, with so much data out there, it can be a gargantuan task to sort it out properly. As markets and consumer demand expand, so will the data. Integrating various datasets can make it much harder to ensure good data hygiene. This problem statement also highlights the importance of third-party risk management for businesses. Without a sound data management strategy, businesses can fall into the pit of poor decisions and financial losses.

• Inconsistent Data Entries

  Inaccurate data is not just factual errors. It can also be small things like misspellings, blanks, and outdated information. For instance, team members entering data inconsistently, failing to update records, and not formatting data entries properly can lead to poor insights, which will ultimately lead to less reliable decision-making

• Lack of Data Governance

  Corporate compliance and data governance don’t always go hand in hand. A business has to design its own data governance structure and ensure that it always possesses clean data to avoid any non-compliance risks. Irregular auditing, poor monitoring, and standardized data cleaning processes can lead to costly outcomes for a business.

Over 80% of businesses cite poor data quality as their biggest roadblock to success. Maintaining data hygiene is no small task for businesses where huge chunks of contradictory data are floating around. Professional data cleansing services can empower businesses to make accurate decisions and forecasts to streamline their processes and bring in positive outcomes.

Dun & Bradstreet offers personalized solutions to provide data cleansing services. Efficiency, compliance, and good decisions are all on the table for businesses to capitalize on. Check out our data hygiene solutions today.