Using InterAction to Cleanse Contact Data

When you use InterAction to cleanse your contact data, you should use the following process for the cleansing:

1. Review all the contacts you brought into InterAction to ensure the following:
   • Your organization’s important contacts are linked into the Most Valued Contact folder.
   • All contacts have a contact type set to identify the contact’s relationship to your organization.

2. 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.

3. Review the contacts you loaded to identify and merge duplicate contacts.

   In general, this process includes the following:

   • 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.
   • Initially, the System Administrator User and members of the Data Administrators group have access to Potential Duplicate searches in the Windows Client. These tools can also be used to find duplicate contacts.
4. Use the multi-contact duplicate merge feature to identify and merge remaining duplicate contacts on a folder by folder basis.

5. After contacts are merged, contacts may have duplicate addresses and phones 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 all contacts in an entire folder and can be used to merge several different addresses at the same time.

6. 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. For example, your organization enters name information into the appropriate First, Middle, and Last name fields for formal name designation. Therefore, you should correct entries like HJ Smith to read Henry James Smith.
   • 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.

   On an ongoing basis, Data Change Management helps to prevent poor data from being added to important contacts without notification to the data steward.

7. 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. For example, you should 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.

     You can define a number of searches to assist you in finding contacts with incomplete information. 

After you have completed the initial pass of ensuring that the contact information is correct, you can continue with the steps of providing in-depth profiling of the important contact types you identified earlier and help users through the process of contributing their contacts to the firm list. For details on these steps, see Final Data Cleansing Tasks.

What Tools May Be Used

Data Quality Tools

Data stewards have access to a number of tools designed to help improve and maintain the quality of your InterAction data. Many of these tools are helpful in the initial data load and cleansing process. For example, consider the following:

• The multi-contact duplicate merge feature can be used to merge any duplicate contacts that have been added to InterAction from different data sources.
• The address and phone merge features can be used to merge phones and addresses duplicated on contacts. These features are especially helpful after merging two contacts.
• The find and replace feature can be used for many standardization objectives. For example, you can use this to standardize addresses, titles, and suffixes.

Data Quality Searches

A number of searches can be performed in InterAction to identify contacts that have suspect or incomplete information. Additionally, searches are available to identify contacts that are duplicates or have duplicate information. Some of these searches are provided out of the box with InterAction. Otherwise, you can create your own data quality searches to find data in your environment that does not meet your organization’s standards.