Initial Data Load and Cleansing Checklist – InterAction® Administrator Answer Center

Use the following checklist to help you ensure you have followed all the steps in this process. This checklist is designed for organizations who are cleansing their contact information in InterAction. If you are loading contact information and performing cleansing using the assistance of a third party, your process may be different.

Initial Data Load and Cleansing Checklist

	Description	Completed
Analyzing Your Data Sources and Preparing your Data Quality Plan
1	Review all the contact data sources at your organization that can be used to bring in person and company contact information. For more information, see Identifying Data Sources at Your Organization.
2	Examine the data in each data source identified to determine the value of the contact information in each data source. For more information, see Determining Which Data Sources to Use When Loading Contact Information into InterAction.
3	Determine the contact information to bring into InterAction. Avoid bringing data in that you do not have a plan to use or maintain. For more information, see Determining Which Information to Bring into InterAction.
4	Evaluate each of the contact types provided with InterAction to determine which contact types should be included in your initial data load. For more information, see Determining Which Contact Types to Initially Support.
5	Because of the time commitment required to manually review the data for each contact, determine the most valued contacts for your organization. For more information, see Identifying Your Most Valuable Contacts.
6	Determine your Data Change Management objectives for InterAction. This includes doing the following: Identifying your key contact collections Determining the level of management for each collection of contacts Determining your ongoing rules for new contacts For more information, see Data Change Management Objectives.
7	Determine which users are responsible for managing the data quality for all information being brought into InterAction from existing data sources at your organization. For more information, see Data Steward Objectives.
8	Determine how you want to clean contact information in preparation for your initial deployment. You can choose to clean the contact information in InterAction or you can choose to use the assistance of a third party. For more information, see Determining Data Cleansing Strategy.
Loading Data Sources Into InterAction
9	Ensure that your InterAction database is configured to include all folders and additional fields to which you intend to add contact information during the data load. If InterAction is not yet configured, do not begin loading your contact information.
10	Extract contact data from current data sources. For details, see Extracting Contact Data from Data Sources.
11	Perform any modifications necessary to the files containing contact information to prepare them to be loaded into InterAction. For example, this may include any of the following: Defining a unique contact identifier for each contact to identify the contact in the data source from which it originated. Managing any fields that should be split out or combined. For example, the data file may have a person’s entire name in one field. Adding information to contacts. For example, if all the contacts in a data file are clients, you can add a value to a field to automatically add the contacts to the Client contact type. If you choose to use a third party to help you with your data load and cleansing effort, they may be able to perform these and other modifications to the data prior to bringing it into InterAction.
12	Configure the tool you are using to load the contact data into InterAction. If you are using the import feature, define your import mapping instructions for each data file. If all data files are structured the same, you may be able to use one import mapping instruction for all data files. For details, see Updating InterAction Contacts through Advanced Import. If you are using Application Collaboration, define your data sources for loading contact information. For details on the Application Collaboraton process, see How Application Collaboration Works.
13	Load the contact data into InterAction from the data files into InterAction.
Cleansing Contact Data
14	Review all the contacts you brought into InterAction to ensure the following: Your organization’s important contacts are linked into the Most Valuable Contact folder All contacts have a contact type set to identify the contact’s relationship to your organization.
15	Review all the contacts you loaded to identify and merge duplicate contacts. The InterAction for Data Stewards and Marketing Users guide includes a process for identifying and merging duplicate contacts. In general this process includes the following steps: Set up a folder dependency to search the database for duplicate contacts and link those contacts into the Possible Duplicate Contacts folder. Using multi-contact duplicate merge, merge all the contacts linked into the Possible Duplicate Contacts folder.
16	Determine which contacts should be manually reviewed and updated first. Typically, this list includes your organization’s most valued contacts and up to three contact types that are core to your organization’s contact management strategy. In most situations, organizations choose to start the review process with top clients and your personnel. Additionally, you may choose to review either alumni of your organization or people associated with your top clients. The remaining steps should be performed on the important contacts you have identified you want to further cleanse.
17	Manually search for duplicate contacts in each of the contact types you determined you want to cleanse and merge any duplicates found.
18	After contacts are merged, contacts may have duplicate addresses and phone listed. Use the address merge and phone merge features to consolidate multiple addresses and phones on your important contacts. Features such as multi-address merge can help you to identify the duplicate addresses on contacts and can be used to merge several different addresses at the same time.
19	Review contacts for non-standard information. Identify items such as the following: Names entered incorrectly or contact names that do not follow your organization’s standards. Addresses that do not use your organization’s standards. For example, make sure all addresses use the correct state abbreviations, have countries defined, etc. Where you find non-standard information, manually correct the contacts. In some instances, you can use the Find and Replace feature to help you make updates system-wide. For example, you can find all contact addresses that have USA for the country and update them to use United States of America. The InterAction for Data Stewards and Marketing Users guide includes a process and suggested searches for identifying contacts with suspect name information. On an ongoing basis, Data Change Management helps to prevent poor data from being added to important contacts without notification to the data steward.
20	Identify contacts that have incomplete information. For example, your organization’s standards may be the following: Ensure each contact in the important contact types has at least one form of communication (phone, address, or electronic address) entered in InterAction. Ensure that all addresses are completely filled in. (Complete addresses that just include the city and state information) Ensure all contacts on each marketing list have valid addresses or email addresses depending on the method in which the mailing is sent. A number of searches have been provided with InterAction to assist you in finding contacts with incomplete information.
21	Review all contacts in InterAction to ensure that all contacts have at least one contact type applied.
22	Complete profiles and relationship information for your organization’s most important contacts.
23	Conduct outbound verification of specific contact information.
24	For the contacts that you have identified as your most valued, ensure that the contacts are completely clean and accurate.
25	If your organization has decided to customize the Data Change Management rules for contact types or if you have created new folders for which you want Data Change Management used, make sure that the rules have been configured properly before rolling InterAction out to users.
Loading User Information into InterAction
26	Determine how to rollout InterAction to users including all the following: Which users are included in the rollout The number of users in each rollout group The time frame for each rollout When to rollout InterAction For more information, see Rollout Strategy Recommendations.
27	Review the Our Personnel folder to ensure that a contact exists for every person for whom you are going to create a user account. If a contacts does not exist for a user account you are creating, create a contact in InterAction for the user.
28	Set defaults for new user contact lists including confidential, update, and relationship settings. For details on setting new user contact list defaults, see Configuring User Contact Lists.
29	Create user accounts and contact lists for each user by importing the information for the account into InterAction Administrator. For details on user accounts, see Overview of Users.
30	Set the contact record for each user account. Users cannot log on to InterAction Web Client until a contact record has been set for their user accounts. For more information, see Connecting a User with an InterAction Contact.
31	Set Proxies for users. For instructions, see Managing User Proxies.
32	Add the user to groups, as appropriate. For instructions, see Creating and Maintaining User Groups. You can automate the process of adding users to groups through Application Collaboration. For more information, see Overview of the Group Member Data Set.
33	Set the user’s access rights to folders in InterAction.
34	Configure the new contact rules to use when users contribute their contacts to the firm list. For more information on configuring new contact rules, see Overview of Data Change Management New Contact Rules.
35	If your organization chooses to use the Smart Connect feature, configure the Smart Connect rules to use for your organization’s firm contacts. For details, see Configuring Smart Connect Rules.
36	In your organization’s PIM (Outlook), have each user identify his or her private contacts that should not be seen by his or her proxy. The user can set these contacts as Private in the PIM, preventing the proxy from seeing the contacts in InterAction.
37	In InterAction Administrator, enable synchronization with your organization’s PIM for the users to whom you are rolling out InterAction. If you have not already configured a process for Microsoft Outlook to InterAction Sync to run, do this now.
38	Ensure that the first synchronization between the PIM and InterAction occurs for all user contact lists you are rolling out. For more information on how InterAction handles contact information when it is added to InterAction during an initial data load for a user, see Loading and Contributing User Contact Information.
39	Enable User to Firm Contact sync for the user contact lists. If you are using Smart Connect, User to Firm Contact Sync must be run before a user contributes his or her contacts. User to Firm Contact Sync is the process that determines which contacts in the user’s contact list should be recommended or automatically contributed based on the Smart Connect rules defined for your organization. For instructions on scheduling User to Firm Contact Sync, see User to Firm Contact Sync Process.
40	In an email sent to the users in the rollout group, include a link to the Contribute Contacts page in the Web Client. When users click this link, they are taken directly to the Contribute Contacts page where they are taken through the process of contributing contacts to the firm list. Users may choose to review the contacts to contribute online or they can print a report from which they can review contacts. For details, see Contributing Contacts.
41	After a user’s contacts have been contributed to the firm list, data stewards can begin the process of cleansing and profiling the contacts that are new to the firm list. This process includes reviewing tickets submitted to Data Change Management for all the following situations: When User to Firm Contact Sync encountered a situation with a possible duplicate contact. When User to Firm Contact Sync created a company contact when adding person contacts to the firm list. When a person was added to the firm list without an associated company contact When the user’s contact information is in conflict with the firm’s contact information. You can configure the new contact rules used when processing each user’s contacts. You may choose not to have InterAction create Data Change Management tickets for all these situations.
42	Data stewards should continue the ongoing process for managing data quality by doing the following: Review contacts added to the firm list to set contact types and profile the contacts where possible. If data stewards cannot identify the type for a contact or provide profile information, work with the users who contributed the contact to the firm list to have the user add this information. To help data stewards identify which users have not gone through the process of contributing their contacts to the firm list, you can run the User Contact Lists Analysis report available with the data quality reports in the Windows Client.

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