The importance of data cleaning

When you start a small company, you may keep your operations well-organized in an Excel sheet. However, as the company grows bigger, data also begins to increase in quantity. You can’t unlock the full potential of a database or data warehouse unless you understand how important data cleaning, also known as data scrubbing or data cleansing, is. It is kind of getting rid of the dirt to find valuable crystals or stones. As one of the leading data collection companies, we strongly believe that data cleaning is vital for the success of a big company. Big firms or firms that intend to grow cannot rely on Excel sheets with unstructured data for valuable insights. In order to boost their growth and make more effective marketing decisions, it is important to analyze your data sets, but before that, what’s important is to actually ensure those data sets are clean.

What is Data Cleaning?

According to the latest estimates by Statista, 328.77 million terabytes of data are generated each day. It is estimated that 90% of the world's currently existing data was only generated in the last two years alone. With such a massive growth in data volume, it is a no-brainer that organizations will have to deal with data redundancy. When bombarded with so much data, companies must take adequate initiatives to sort such massive volumes into shorter, crisper, and meaningful datasets. Data cleansing or data scrubbing is the process of identifying and correcting errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in datasets. The goal of this technique is to improve the quality and reliability of your data, making it more accurate and useful for analysis. During such a process, data analysts use a variety of methodologies to identify and correct errors that are present in the data. This may involve removing duplicate records, correcting misspelled names or addresses, and standardizing data formats. Data cleaning may also involve filling in missing values or deleting irrelevant data points. The reason why data cleaning plays a significant role in business market research is that inaccurate or inconsistent data can lead to faulty and misleading insights. By cleaning and preparing the data, analysts can ensure that their findings are based on accurate and reliable information.

The Key to Better Decision-Making: Understanding the Importance of Data Cleaning

Data cleaning is an essential step in the data analysis process. If done correctly, the process ensures the accuracy, consistency, and completeness of the data in hand. It is undoubtedly one of the major steps that organizations can take in order to ensure accurate and informed decision-making. Here are some key points to help to illustrate why data cleaning is important:

• Improved data accuracy: Data cleaning helps to remove errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies from the data, resulting in a more accurate dataset. This ensures the reliability of the insights drawn from the data.
• Better decision-making: Accurate and reliable data is essential for the overall success of your market research studies. By cleaning the data, organizations can be confident in the accuracy of their analysis and make better decisions based on the insights derived from the data.
• Enhanced data quality: Data cleaning processes help to remove duplicate records, correct misspelled information, and standardize data formats. After the process, the data becomes more consistent and easier to work with as opposed to when in its raw form.
• Increased efficiency: It helps to streamline the data analysis process by reducing the time and effort required to clean and prepare the data. This allows data analysts and data scientists to focus on analyzing the data rather than having to clean it.
• Improved data integration: When integrating data from multiple sources, data cleaning can play a crucial role by ensuring that the data is consistent and accurate.

The Costs of Neglecting Data Cleaning

Failing to appreciate the importance of data cleaning can have serious implications for organizations. Here are some of the potential consequences of failing to clean your data:

• Inaccurate insights: If your data contains errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies, any insights derived from it will be far from accurate. This can lead to incorrect conclusions and misguided decision-making, which can eventually have significant financial and reputational costs for your organization.
• Wasted resources: Not cleaning your data can result in wasted resources as analysts and data scientists will need to spend more time cleaning and correcting the data, rather than analyzing it. This can lead to delays in decision-making and missed opportunities for the organization.
• Poor data quality: Uncleaned data can make it difficult to analyze. This can lead to data integration problems and issues with data sharing, hindering collaboration and communication within the organization.
• Regulatory compliance risks: Organizations that fail to clean their data may be at risk of non-compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. This can result in financial penalties and damage to the organization's reputation.

How to Get Started with Data Cleaning

By now, it is evident that data cleaning can help you with the preparation of full-proof business research reports. If you are not sure how to proceed with data cleaning, then this section is for you. Let’s discuss the different steps involved in the data cleaning process.

Data cleaning is basically divided into three steps.

1. The first one involves figuring out what’s wrong with your data, which means jotting down everything that you find inconsistent, weird, fascinating, or empty.
2. The second one involves choosing the right cleaning technique based on the type of data dirt you’ve detected.
3. Once it’s cleaned, you repeat the first and second steps.

If you have a reliable team that’s exclusively responsible for detecting corrupt or inaccurate or inconsistent records from a database, your company is bound to grow more efficiently. It gives you clarity on how you can make your marketing more impactful and also allows you to analyze your data without any inconvenience. Clean data sets basically make data mining easier and significantly help in making better and more successful strategic decisions.

Not only that, but data cleaning also enhances your data quality and imparts an enhanced level of productivity. After you’re done with it, all the noisy, incorrect, or inaccurate data or information is gone and you are eventually left with information that’s of the best quality.

In a nutshell, data cleansing gives you three major benefits:

1. It saves a lot of time that you, otherwise, might have spent analyzing faulty or inaccurate data.
2. It prevents you from drawing wrong inferences, which would certainly affect your future marketing or operational decisions.
3. It enhances the speed of computation in advanced algorithms.

So, by now, you might have started thinking of heavily indulging in data cleaning from now onwards, in case you were not serious about it. Data cleaning can be one of the most important aspects of a company’s success plan if it is genuinely paid attention to. As one of the best market research firms worldwide, we highly recommend considering the importance of data cleaning to all our clients. It is as significant as on-field or online data collection and data analysis because, as discussed above, you cannot draw meaningful, valuable inferences from data sets unless you’ve ensured they are devoid of inaccurate or inconsistent or unstructured information. For a faster and effective data analysis, data cleaning is a prerequisite

Final Word

While it is important to make data-driven informed decisions in a world of cutthroat competition, you need the right kind and quality of data! To gather the right type of data, you cannot ignore the significance of business research. The best way to gather valuable data is to employ proven market research techniques, and more importantly, clean the data before use. When looking to partner with the best business research company, look no further than Unimrkt Research. We are a business research company you can rely on when it comes to performing market research for startups. Over the years, we have served across different industries on a global scale and in a variety of languages. To know more about our market research services, call +91-124-424-5210. You can also email sales@unimrkt.com or fill out our contact form, and we will respond at the earliest.