Introduction

Throughout your organization, contact information is kept in many systems. Users may maintain a list of contacts in a spreadsheet program, your marketing department may have a database of contacts to which they send mail, or you may have a time and billing system that manages information about your organization’s clients. All of these data sources contain potentially valuable information to bring into InterAction.

However, you cannot be assured that each of these systems has the best information for each contact. Some sources may not have been updated in a long time, so information may be outdated. Other sources could have information that is poorly formatted or incomplete.

Additionally, you may have other opportunities to add contact information to InterAction after you have rolled out the system. This information may not be current, accurate or complete. Consider the following:

• The Marketing department purchases a list of contact information from another organization.
• A new employee joins your organization and brings a list of contacts with him or her.

Focusing on Data Quality - Loading InterAction Data

Providing users with quality contact information they can rely on is extremely important to your implementation of InterAction as a CRM solution at your organization. When a CRM implementation fails, it is frequently because users cannot rely on the information being correct. Your organization’s focus on data quality starts when you initially load contact information into InterAction.

There are three keys to providing users with data quality when loading data into InterAction:

• The quality of the data you provide is more important than the quantity of the data.
• High quality data is achieved when processes are defined and followed for data maintenance.
• Following a plan for identifying bad contact data and cleansing this data results in higher initial data quality when implementing InterAction.

This guide provides detailed recommendations on how to perform the initial data load and cleansing process. This process includes the initial load of data for all users and organization sources during your initial deployment of InterAction. The initial data load and cleansing process has been developed using feedback from customers who have implemented InterAction, as well as experiences we have had with over 400 customers. Following these recommendations helps you maximize your opportunity to successfully implement InterAction and avoid many of the common pitfalls associated with loading contact information from several different sources into InterAction.

How Do I Get Started?

LexisNexis InterAction has developed detailed process plans for loading information into InterAction and cleansing contact information. Additionally, many tools have been developed for bringing information into InterAction.

Getting Assistance

LexisNexis InterAction Consulting Services and some business partners offer the ability to assist you with the process of converting and loading your contact information into InterAction and cleansing your contact information to ensure data quality before rolling InterAction out to users. For more information on LexisNexis InterAction’s Data Quality Services, see the Consulting Services section of the InterAction Support Web site. Additionally, LexisNexis InterAction business partners may also offer data cleansing services.