6 Tips & Tools to Improve Data Quality in Salesforce

Part 1 in our Series on Defining Data Quality in Salesforce:    • Defining Data Quality in Salesforce  

Are you looking for ways to assess the quality of your data in Salesforce? Are you interested in discovering ways to capture better quality data from users while avoiding the junk? Let’s look at a few tricks and tools we can use to help promote data quality within our organizations.

When we want to assess our data quality, we don’t have to look any further than AppExchange. For those who aren’t familiar, AppExchange is an enterprise cloud marketplace housing over 7000 apps to help you address business problems. If you go appexchange.salesforce.com and search for ‘data quality analysis dashboards’, you’ll find this great data quality tool provided by Salesforce Labs.

It shows you a range of visuals to help you find gaps in your data. This high-level guide is a great starting point on your data cleanup journey.

Now that you’ve reviewed this dashboard, you likely have a few data quality problems to address. Don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. Most organizations have progress to make on this front. When it comes time to improve your data quality, we need to address the problem at the source -- the point of entry. There are validation tools built-in to Salesforce to help us make headway on these thorny problems.

Before we start solutioning, we need to make sure we understand what the problems are. Our data quality reports were a great start and you or your users have likely run across problem areas. Maybe it's duplicate account records or the same data entered in a hundred different ways. Perhaps it's missing data on critical fields. These known issues likely highlight a fraction of the issues hiding in our environment. The best place to start is reviewing the data in every object – standard or custom – to identify where we can do better. We need to catalog those fields to define what we are expecting and what changes need to be made to meet our business objectives. If we walk through our business objectives, we can start to build a clear picture of what our data should look like.

Once we have that picture, our focus can shift to tooling. One of the best tools in our toolkit is the picklist. With the picklist, we establish a predetermined list of values the user can pick from.

Think about this rating field on the Lead object. Imagine we hand over defining the statuses to your users with no guidance. Do you think they would restrain themselves to three consistent options? Me either.

Another great option to boost your data quality is to establish required fields. If we didn’t require a sales contact name and either phone or email, that contact wouldn’t have much value. Unfortunately, our data can turn into a patchwork of useless information if we aren’t diligent about setting required fields where they are needed. We can accomplish required fields by setting field level requirements, when creating page layouts and by setting validation rule requirements.

Next is validation rules. We touched on it when we discussed implementing required fields, but validation rules can do much more to protect our data quality. Essentially, it defines what data is acceptable, and kicks back anything that is not. We get to customize the message back to the user, providing specifics around what it will take to satisfy the validation condition.

When multiple users are interacting with Salesforce, we can get stuck with a lot of duplicate records. Duplicate Rules can help us throw validation when we see a new record that mirrors an existing one.

One last tip we should keep in mind. We should only use free text as a last resort. Attempt to standardize on the correct data types whenever possible.

So, we’ve put in a lot of checks to clean up our data at the point of entry, but who is to say the data that our user’s entered is actually correct? We can lean on AppExchange again to help us verify that the data corresponds to reality.

If you search for data quality in the AppExchange, you’ll see a host of options. Several allow you to verify the user's address, phone, and email address. Others will help you cleanse your data once it's already in your system, boosting your data hygiene. These apps can be a great addition as you strive to achieve maximum data quality for your Salesforce environment.

If you are struggling with data quality concerns and could use an expert to help advise your team, consider the company I work for -- Improving. We have a team of brilliant Salesforce data consultants who can help you identify, plan, and implement measures to improve your data quality in Salesforce. We'd love to have a conversation to see how we can help. Please reach out to us at https://improving.com.