Data hygiene is an essential part of effective call center management. Also called data cleansing, data hygiene is a series of procedures employed by call center supervisors and managers to ensure databases are up-to-date and run efficiently for the purposes of maintaining a smooth operational call floor. Read on to learn more about the importance of data hygiene, its availability, and its data enhancement.

Why is data hygiene important?

Without data hygiene, you run the risk of increasing your call center's operational costs and decreasing its efficiency, especially when it comes to customer relationship management. Continual and consistent data hygiene keeps customer information databases current. Supervisors and managers are able to prioritize operational procedures based on which customers remain active in their systems and purge the accounts that are inactive. This equates to enhanced customer relations, phone, mail, and email marketing campaigns, and financial control. Why spend time, effort, and money on people who don't like phone solicitations, promotional mailings, and market-based emails?

What procedures are specific to data hygiene?

Depending on the needs of your organization and its management, any and all of the following procedures are specific to data hygiene:

• Name and address duplication prevention
• Address U.S. Postal Service compliance measures
• Address verification through the U.S. Postal Service
• Customer account preferences, such as contact preferences

What solutions are available for data hygiene?

A number of data enhancement services are available to streamline your call center and its databases, aiding in data hygiene. Melissa DATA , global provider of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning solutions, offers a host of data hygiene product solutions, such as:

• Suppression services to decrease unwanted solicitations and increase the efficiency of your phone, address, and email mailing lists
• Email append services to increase customer communication efficiency
• Address append services to add residential and business addresses to your phone numbers lists
• International address verification to enhance direct marketing, postal, and delivery services to your callers and customers in over 240 countries
• Postal service enhancements, including Canadian change of address processing and undeliverable mail services
• Data management enhancements, including a duplication elimination service

What else does Melissa DATA do?

Melissa DATA offers free reports on your call centers data quality and free demos on data enhancement software, tools, and services for download and trial. Go to http://www.melissadata.com/ to learn more!

What other applications associated with call centers are available?

 Castel Detect is a cutting-edge LIVE voice analysis software application that allows your agents to respond effectively to customers before call escalation occurs, reducing your center's liability exposure. Visit Castel Detect to learn more NOW!