The business environment of today demands that every player in every industry extract as much value as they can from their data to remain competitive in the market. This is a double-edged sword as a company can rely on multiple sources and extraction techniques for obtaining that data. On the minus side, however, it also means that the company has to manage large volumes of data that contain several types of data issues, lowering its value.
One of those issues is incompleteness or broken data. Data appending is a data management process where professionals fix this broken or incomplete data by adding relevant data snippets to it. This process is also used to add new data to old data segments to maintain their validity. By doing so, you eliminate the problems that come with incomplete/broken/obsolete data like delays in data processing, operational bottlenecks, false analysis results, detrimental decision-making, etc.
This blog contains details about how data appending can be beneficial to your business’s various aspects, and how the process is conducted. It is designed to provide greater impetus for you to get the right data appending service done on your company’s data and experience its multiple benefits.
Table of Contents
What are the Benefits of Data Appending for Your Business?
Whether it’s customer information, product tracking data, or any other kind of valuable info- having a way to store and manage it is essential for your business to run smoothly. Here are some ways data appending can help with those functions:
- Improves Data Accuracy
Broken, obsolete, and incomplete data are a bane to businesses because their usage results in inaccurate outcomes due to the inherent lack of data accuracy. By correcting these issues, data appending helps to improve your company’s data accuracy. The other ways it improves data accuracy include corrections to data entry errors, fixing metadata breakages, and enabling correct categorization of present data. The increase in data accuracy helps improve business data intelligence, making your company’s data warehouse a truly valuable asset.
- Reduces Data Bloat
Data appending gives cleaner data because it removes unwanted segments from the system, leaving only the important, necessary data. This may seem counterintuitive since the removal of data bloat involves deleting data and not adding more. But data appending reduces data bloating because it substitutes unnecessary data with necessary segments. By using data appending, you can remove returned mail, bounced email addresses, and wrong phone numbers from your database, to name a few examples. While it may not reduce overall space consumption, at least that space is now not consumed by unwanted data.
- Gives Access to More Information
Users may access more detailed information about people or organizations with the help of data appending. These could include sexual identity, employment functions, awards, anniversaries, and rating agencies, on top of regular identifiers like name, phone number, email ID, etc. Businesses generally utilize this process to enhance their marketing and customer service initiatives.
- Helps Improve Market Segmentation
Data appending is also useful for creating datasets that are tailored to specific market segments. For example, you might append data about your company’s employees to a dataset that contains information about people in your community. Additionally, by appending data, you can create more detailed reports so that you will be able to better understand your customer base and how they interact with your products and services.
- Cuts Down Resource Losses
If you process incomplete/broken/obsolete data, it means you are wasting precious resources on efforts that will ultimately not give you rewarding results. Doing the same after appending the input data with accurate segments helps you utilize those resources in a way that is beneficial to your business. Thus, you prevent resource losses by opting for data appending.
What are the Processes Involved in Data Appending?
When it comes to data appending, there is a lot that goes into making the process as smooth as possible:
- Uploading and Formatting
First and foremost, the data that needs to be appended must be identified. Once this information is compiled, it needs to be converted into a CSV file format. This is because the appending service provider requires that all files sent their way are in a standard format. Once the CSV file has been created, it will need to be transferred to the append service provider’s secure FTP server. From here, the appending team will work on compiling the data into a single file.
- Comparing and Improving
After gathering the data, it is matched against similar datasets. This helps to identify any errors or discrepancies in the data. If there are discrepancies, they must be eliminated before submitting them to your database or system.
- Cross-verification and Confirmation
Data appending is about ensuring that your dataset is accurate and complete. This means making sure all information is properly entered and formatted, as well as checking for any missing or incorrect data.
Hence, a cross-checking process happens where the processed data is compared with the original segments found in your storage as well as the new data used for it that’s found at its source. The data is said to have reached acceptable quality once this cross-checking yields no discrepancies between the compared data sets and the client’s criteria.
- The Opt-Out Email
The opt-out message is automated, meaning it is sent to the appended email address without the need for human input. This would allow the customers the chance to communicate with you in a more personal way or if they do not want to receive database updates via email.
- Download the Appended Files via FTP
Once the appending process is complete, the outsourcing agency allows clients to download relevant files using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP is chosen because it is a simple way to transfer files over the internet, including large ones like those of enterprise data. You may discuss with your outsourcing agency if you require the transfer to occur via some other mechanism.
Why You Should Outsource Data Appending Services
Businesses, regardless of size, have a lot of functions that need to be performed using their vast stores of enterprise data. Maintaining such large data sets can be difficult in-house, and can prove to be too much for your organization’s personnel to manage due to its sheer volume. Every drawback your company experiences in this endeavor gets amplified because of that volume, and with more data being added daily, it can quickly turn overwhelming.
They will not only hurt your bottom line but will also bring down the morale of your employees. It may even bring lawsuits to your doorstep as chances of poor data security management during appending in-house can be high due to the probable lack of experience of the person behind it.
This is where outsourcing data appending services comes in handy – they can help you process and manage your data more efficiently, while also providing various other benefits. Some of the key benefits of outsourcing data appending services include:
- Reduced Workload
With an outsourced provider handling all of the work involved in data appending, you free up your staff to focus on other tasks. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity and reduced costs associated with managing the data set.
- Increased Accuracy
Outsourcing your data appending services means that you’re guaranteed high levels of accuracy when it comes to processing your data. This is due to the specialist knowledge and expertise that these providers have in this area, which enables them to produce accurate results consistently.
- Greater Flexibility
When it comes to data appending services, you’ll always want to be able to accommodate changes and updates as they occur. With an outsourced provider taking care of all the necessary work, this is easy to do as they constantly update their methods and staff skill levels.
- Better Data Security
Outsourcing agencies continuously handle vast data quantities from high-level clientele. Hence, they will have robust security measures in place to prevent data threats from affecting any part of their operation. When you outsource your appending project to such an agency, your data security and privacy will be taken care of.
- Reduced Expenses
Having processes like list appending services done in-house means having to pay for all of the associated requirements of everyone involved in it, besides the salaries and perks of professionals. It can quickly turn bad for your ROI , here, outsourcing helps to overcome this by removing such costs. There are advantages of economies of scale and currency exchange values to be noted as well.
Take away
When the success of a business is based on decision-making that uses the results of enterprise data analysis as the guiding force, then the baseline for that data’s quality should be high. There cannot be any room for data errors, as even the minutest ones can affect those analyses’ results significantly. It is why data appending is non-negotiable for your business; it removes the smallest amounts of incompleteness from your company’s data. Your data warehouse turns into a seamless virtual landscape that is fertile for harvesting intelligible data that won’t skew data analysis results. You can better guarantee this outcome if you outsource data appending services to experienced professionals at an agency. Then, you avail not only the benefits of data appending but also those of outsourcing, making your operations lean and efficient while increasing the returns they provide.
Author Bio
Jessica is a Content Strategist, currently engaged at Data-Entry-India.com- a globally renowned data entry and management company -for over five years. She spends most of her time reading and writing about transformative data solutions, helping businesses to tap into their data assets and make the most out of them. So far, she has written over 2000 articles on various data functions, including data entry, data processing, data management, data hygiene, and other related topics. Besides this, she also writes about eCommerce data solutions, helping businesses uncover rich insights and stay afloat amidst the transforming market landscapes.
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