When you use Data Quality Services to assist with your data cleansing, the consultants who work with you establish a process for the data cleansing.
In general, this process involves all the following steps:
- Contact information is exported from InterAction including the InterAction Contact IDs.
- The data is cleansed using data cleansing tools. This may include some or all the following:
- Identification and reporting of data anomalies for people and companies.
- Standardization and parsing of company names and person names.
- Standardization of address information.
- Contact duplication detection. Consultants find possible duplicates and include these contacts in a report, which is reviewed by your organization before bringing the data back into InterAction.
- After the data is cleansed, the consultants validate that your organization’s business rules have been applied correctly. Your organization provides feedback and updates are made to the data if necessary.
- Data is brought back into InterAction using the Advanced Import feature or Application Collaboration.
- Once the data is back in InterAction, contacts identified as duplicates are merged using the Externally Identified Duplicate Contact Merge feature.
At the conclusion of the cleansing process, Data Quality Services provides your organization with any follow-up instructions or recommendations.