Do you want to uncover rich business insights, empower business decisions, strengthen the data analysis process, and boost marketing efforts? All of this can be achieved with clean, actionable, and standardized data.
Regardless of the niche business you are in, or the kind of data you have, the data standardization process acts as the foundation for improving business decisions, improving data hygiene & making the most out of the data assets.
But what exactly is data standardization, and why should your business leverage data standardization services? Let’s find out in this article.
What Is Data Standardization & Why Does Your Business Need It?
Data standardization is a critical process in data cleansing that involves converting the structure of different datasets into a common format. It enables companies to better access & analyze the information while enhancing their operational efficiencies.
Enterprises nowadays depend on high-quality data. Hence, feeding their system with properly cleansed and uniform data is crucial to derive better insights. However, directly using disparate data from various sources can cause inconsistency, hamper data processing, hinder management, and increase costs from rework. This is where data standardization helps!
Data standardization helps you to:
- Re-organize inconsistent data – capitalization, punctuation, acronyms, etc.
- Add missing information
- Identify & remove duplicates
- Bring data into a common format
- Identify and fix data errors
- Carry out case formatting
- Audit & standardize data sources
Additionally, hiring data standardization professionals can help you deftly collect your data from different sources and convert it into consolidated, standardized, consistent, and well-formatted data quickly.
Challenges Involved In Data Standardization Process
When performing data standardization, you may encounter several challenges.
- Handling a large volume of heterogeneous dat: It is hard to handle large amounts of data & standardize it without using automation.
- Having incomplete information: Inaccuracy & negligence in data entry can lead to missing information. At times, even customers fill incomplete information through forms. It is a challenge for businesses to identify gaps in data and fill them with up-to-date data.
- Contradictory inputs: Company databases may contain different versions of the same data, collected from varied sources like CRM, ERP, and other such systems. Identifying the right version or creating coherency in such a set is often a challenge for businesses.
- Poor data integration: As data is combined from different sources, poor integration of this data can often lead to inconsistency, duplicity, and other similar errors.
5 Ways How Data Standardization Services Can Help Your Business
1. Supports Overall Business Functions: Today, companies have access to tons of data that is readily available from different sources i.e. social media, websites, online forums, etc. However, simply gathering and processing this large amount of data directly may not give you rich business insights and outcomes. To make the most of your data assets, it is important to regularly perform data cleansing and data standardization.
By leveraging data standardization services, you can have cleansed, accurate and congruent data that acts as a foundation of all your business functions.
2. Fosters Marketing Efforts: Data has become a necessary part of most marketing campaigns. But, with extensive and diverse data sources, the need for standardizing data has also become imperative. This is where data standardization experts help. Data professionals can quickly cleanse and bring your data into a consistent format, thereby helping you to create an enhanced database of your potential customers. This brings you better results from your email marketing and other marketing campaigns.
For instance, if your customer database lacks email address standardization, there is a high possibility that your emails are being sent to some invalid or wrong addresses, leading to wastage of marketing efforts & money.
3. Augments Data Analysis: Data standardization techniques can help you get rid of inconsistencies like abbreviations, spelling errors, duplicates, and so on, leaving you with clean data. When you have cleansed, uniform, and consistent data, it becomes simple to pick up and draw patterns. Any data standardization service provider can quickly turn your data into a common format which enables you to process data seamlessly, thereby making data analysis easy.
4. Bring Consistency To Records: Data standardization usually deals with very minute yet critical incoherencies. For example, if your customers fill in their company details, they may write “Limited”, “LTD” or “.ltd”. Similarly, “Master’s” can be written as “Masters” (without having an apostrophe), M.A. (Containing periods), or MA (without periods). These inconsistencies in data can often make your database confusing. And, turning enormous volumes of data with such inaccuracies into a common format is challenging with a lot of scope for error. By using professional data standardization services, you can turn this data into a consistent format for better understanding and get the results quickly with assured precision.
5. Helps In Making Informed Decisions: Today, companies highly rely on data-based decision-making. But what if you have outdated, inconsistent, and incomplete data? Can you base important business decisions on poor data? In such circumstances, the need for data standardization services arises. Using advanced data cleansing & standardization techniques, a data standardization service provider can facilitate up-to-date and consistent data that can unlock rich business insights & fuel your company decisions.
Why Should You Outsource Data Standardization Services?
The data standardization process is a critical task and thus, it must be handled with utmost care and precision. Outsourcing data standardization services is a wise decision that helps you take this burden off your shoulders, no matter how voluminous or complex your data is.
Here’s how partnering with an outsourcing service provider can help:
- Saves A Great Deal Of Money: If you collect data in a free format from different sources, getting anomalies in data format will be a common problem. To get this data cleansed, organizations need to spend a great deal of money to buy automated tools & software or build an in-house team of data standardization experts, who can manually get the job done. This is where leveraging professional data standardization services come in handy. By outsourcing, you get access to a team of experts and the latest tools that saves immense time & money.
- Helps You Save Valuable Time: Companies today have enormous data to store, process, and manage. Furthermore, this data can be complex and may contain endless inconsistencies. Cleansing this data and bringing it into a common format can be a daunting task and may take up your valuable time. By outsourcing, you simply get access to data standardization professionals who use automated data standardization techniques to give you cleansed & accurate data in a quick turnaround time.
- Access To The Latest Tools & Software: With large amounts of data, it is almost impossible to cleanse and standardize all of it without using automated programs and advanced tools. Data experts employ advanced tools, software & techniques for this purpose. Building these capabilities and staying up to date with the latest tools can be hard if you handle the process in-house. However, by outsourcing, you get access to modern tools that help you get accurate results in minimal time.
- Support In Other Data Functions: An outsourcing vendor can not just help you standardize data but also offer you support with other data functions. You can leverage data cleansing, data enrichment, data validation, and data normalization services to further cleanse your data and fill in the missing information. Other than this, an outsourcing company can also help you with data processing and analysis services to help you derive intelligent data insights, strengthen your business decisions, and improve your ROI.
- Have Dedicated Data Experts: As data flow is consistent, so should your data cleansing & standardization process be. When you outsource data standardization services, you can opt for dedicated team engagement and have professionals work on your project dedicatedly. This will ensure that your data will be regularly cleaned and formatted, enabling you to act upon your data in the most effective manner.
Data Standardization Services: Key To Enhanced Business Insights
Data standardization is a critical aspect of the overall data management cycle that must be handled with precision & care. As the quality of data directly impacts your critical business decisions and bottom line, any negligence can lead to serious losses. Hence, it is best to data entry services in India from an outsourcing company to get exceptional quality data along with time and cost savings. Furthermore, professionals will ensure that your data is neatly organized with logical descriptions and labels, making it easy to understand the information and put it to use. However, when looking for a reliable data standardization outsourcing company, make sure to check the company’s experience, expertise, and portfolio to make the best decision.