The final task to the process of loading and cleansing contact information is to ensure all contacts in your system have the appropriate context applied and additional information entered to fully profile the contact.
Ensure Contacts Have Contact Types Applied
It is essential that all InterAction contacts have contact types applied. Contact types identify the relationship between your organization and the contact, the purpose of the contact in your firm’s collection, or the status of the contact. Important processes like Data Change Management rely on contacts having the correct contact type applied.
Create a search to identify contacts in InterAction that do not have a contact type set. After you have identified the contacts that do not have any type, check your existing systems or talk to the users who contributed the contact to determine if a type can be identified for the contact.
To assist you in the process of identifying contacts with no contact types applied, you can use two data quality reports:
- Contacts with No Contact Type - All Summary
- Contacts with No Contact Type - Detail
These reports list all contacts in InterAction that do not have any contact types applied.
Profile Contacts for Important Contact Types
For some collections of contacts (that is, contacts of a particular contact type), it is important that certain pieces of information for each contact are current and accurate. For example, you may want to be sure that for each contact you have assigned the Prospect contact type, you know the prospect’s industry, annual revenue, number of employees, etc. This information adds value for end users.
Most of the contact types you identify as important have additional fields associated with them to profile the contact with additional details. For example, a set of additional fields are used for Client contact types. Many of these fields may already have been completed with information from an external data source. For the fields that have not been automatically populated, complete the additional field information and any relationship information.
This procedure may take up to 30-90 minutes per contact, depending on the amount of information included in the profile.
Because this step is a manual process, you may choose to only profile a subset of contacts within each contact type. You should make sure you fully profile all the contacts identified as your most valued contacts before rolling InterAction out to users.
Conduct Outbound Verification of Specific Contact Information
If the accuracy of your contact data is in question for any of the most valued contacts in InterAction, you may choose to call the contact or check the contact’s Web site to verify that the information in InterAction is correct.
Review Most Valued Contacts
For the contacts that you have identified as your most valued, ensure that the contacts are completely clean and accurate. This typically includes doing the following:
- Identify all person contacts that have multiple business addresses. Review these contacts to ensure that both addresses are correct. In some cases, addresses that are similar may not be identified as duplicates or addresses that are no longer valid may still remain on the contact. You can use the multi-address merge feature to identify contacts with duplicate addresses and merge these addresses.
- Identify all company contacts that have multiple business addresses. Review these contacts to ensure that addresses are not duplicates that were missed when duplicate addresses were merged. You can use the multi-address merge feature to identify contacts with duplicate addresses and merge these addresses.
- If time allows, review phones and electronic addresses for contacts to ensure that there are no duplicate values.
- Ensure that contact profile information is completed and accurate on the contacts.
Adjust Data Change Management Rules
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.