Customer data management is extremely time-consuming for most organizations. More than most know, in fact.
Every data management process is made up of many smaller individual tasks. Sometimes, the steps required to cleanse, format, and quality check fixes on a single field can mean dozens of steps.
That’s a problem.
First, it means that fixing individual fields in your data, such as a customer's first names, is actually much more time-consuming than you would think at a glance. A single field can have dozens of different issues. Some of those issues are common, such as capitalization problems, and predictable. Other issues may be less predictable, such as symbols being included in first names.
If you edit the data in Excel, there may be many different formulas that you have to use, and manual checks to do before you can confidently mark a dataset as being cleaned and prepped for use. But some of those formulas will need to be run in a certain order. There are dependencies.
That means that there is also an educational element that comes with data management and data updates. The task itself is difficult. But every time that you need to update a specific data field, you have to make sure that the person that you are asking to complete the task is trained in how to do it appropriately. You will use different processes and approaches for different data fields. In many ways, education and having a documented workflow is just as important as the task itself, if you want it done right.
But even at this point — when the person knows how to complete the task and the why behind it — they still have to actually do it. And data management and cleansing can be redundant, boring work. It can make some people want to tear their hair out.
Still, it needs to be done. There is no way around that fact. If you want to inject data into your customer campaigns, you need some confidence that it will work.
This is where Insycle’s Recipes are here to help.
Insycle’s Recipes allow you to automate a series of data management tasks , in the correct order, to fully cover all of the common updates a field may need.
A first name, for instance, may need to be formatted from uppercase or lowercase to proper capitalization, have middle names removed, symbols and numbers eliminated, or populated based on an email address.
Typically, you’d have to do this in Excel. Or you would use Insycle and create individual templates for all of the separate steps on your way to preparing a CRM data field for use.
But now with Insycle Recipes, you can pick one of the suggested recipes or build custom templates for all of those individual tasks, and then execute them in order, on a set schedule. This can be done across every field in your CRM, automating a majority of your data management tasks, creating documented workflows, and streamlining education for your teams.
A data management goal or task might seem easy on the surface-level. Maybe you want to fix the first names of customers in your database. Shouldn’t be a big deal right? Make sure each record has proper capitalization, fix some glaring issues, and you’ll be good to go. Right?
That’s never the case.
The actual task of fixing first names, which should be one of the “easier” data management field updates that you assign to team members, is much more complicated than it would seem on the surface.
You have to export your customer data and find a good way to filter the data so that you can hand your team member an organized Excel file filled with only the right records from your database. Then, make sure it is distributed to the correct person. Later, you’ll receive an updated Excel file back and have to re-import back into your CRM.
The person that you deliver the data update assignment to also has to be trained to perform the task at hand. You can’t just send an Excel file to just anyone, say “clean up these first names,” and expect them to know what to do. There would be no consistency between different members of your team. You need a standardized workflow and processes for every field in your customer database, depending on what your goals are.
So there is an educational element required even for basic tasks. Documentation of those processes is critical — or else you’ll receive inconsistent work across datasets, with different people following a different process.
But — you’re likely to find that there are many different types of errors in your first names — more than you would expect. Some names aren’t capitalized. Others are completely capitalized. Some will be misspelled, or contain symbols and other typos. You’ll have to find a way to not only filter the data but define formulas for fixing different types of errors. In the end, you can bet on a significant number of records having to be fixed by hand.
All of this culminates into processes that often are more complicated and time-consuming than most teams realize. Eventually, data management can become a drag on organizations. The redundant and painstaking nature of manual data cleansing may also make your employees resentful, as they know their true value is in more impactful tasks.
Still — data issues wait for no organization. They are always going to be present, impeding your marketing, sales, support, and success teams. Instead of allowing data problems to grow in your database, break the larger task down into chunks, and watch your organization rise through the data management phases.
Insycle’s Recipes solve these problems, by allowing you to string together individual tasks (templates) into a longer sequence (Recipes), which can then be automated to run on a set schedule. Essentially, Recipes allow you to automate multiple tasks to run together in a specific order.
This helps teams with customer data management in several critical ways:
Let’s take a look under the hood and examine exactly how Insycle Recipes help you simplify multiple data management tasks into one seamless operation.
Recipes in Insycle consist of a series of templates, combined together into a single process, where multiple templates are executed one-by-one, in a specific order.
Looking at the example of first names that we’ve been covering throughout the article, there are many individual tasks that need to be completed before your first names can be considered cleansed and ready for use.
These include tasks like:
Previous to the release of Recipes, you would complete each of these tasks in Insycle by creating templates for each individual task and running them separately. You can still do that — but Recipes give us a better way to organize and structure our templates for a broader look at how we update fields.
Additionally, it makes education and training for your data management processes much simpler. All of the steps are perfectly laid out for employees to follow. Many of the processes, once set up, can be automated so that they require no manual actions to complete.
Before we debuted Recipes, you could create all of the templates that you wanted, but they would be free-floating and disconnected from one another. There was no simple way to figure out all of the steps involved for updating a specific field, or what order those steps would need to be run in.
Recipes make it possible for your team to immediately understand what is possible with Insycle, and provide a simple, step-by-step list for completing certain specific data update and maintenance tasks. The documentation is handled for you inherently by the Recipes feature itself!
With Insycle Recipes, your teams will save a ton of time on data management. It will be easier for you to train new employees to handle critical data management tasks. And, you’ll remove a lot of the redundant data work that your teams hate.
Take a look below. You can see that all of the different tasks that we outlined above have been added to a Recipe for cleansing a first name.
Each of these templates can be automated and scheduled to run on a regular basis.
You can add any template that you create in Insycle, from any tool included in the suite.
This means that your Recipes are not set in stone. You can add or remove new templates at any time to evolve your processes over time. In the Recipes screen, you can also edit the order of the templates included in the Recipe. Certain tasks will require that other tasks are performed first to work appropriately, and you can ensure that your Recipes run in the correct order.
You can still automate individual templates to run on a template-by-template basis. However, with Recipes, you can automate multiple templates to run, in the correct order, using Recipes. Just click the “Review” button.
When you click "Review", you'd be promoted with the usual 3-step process:
If, for instance, you wanted to clean first names in your CRM once a week — you could schedule this Recipe and all of the individual templates within it to run once a week. Your team never has to pass around Excel files or manage data update assignments again.
Here’s another example of a Recipe. This recipe includes several templates for deduplicating contacts in a CRM.
If you can dream a process for fixing a data field, you can build it and automate it with Insycle Recipes.
Consider how much time your team could save using Insycle Recipes. You only have to build each Recipe one time, using the templates that are already available in your Insycle account. You could immediately eliminate many of your manual data management tasks. Imagine never having to export your data and utilize complicated Excel formulas again.
Insycle’s Recipe feature gets you as close as possible to that being a reality, across all of your teams — while saving you dozens of hours every month and saving many headaches among your teams.
With Insycle’s Recipes feature, you can save your team’s time and automate mundane and routine data management tasks across your organization.
By bundling multiple processes into Recipes, you can simplify the organization of data automation, process documentation and workflow, and internal education.
Insycle is a complete customer data management solution. With Insycle, you can automatically cleanse, standardize, deduplicate, import, update, and export your CRM data in bulk, on a set schedule. When you aren’t handling routine data management tasks, your teams are more effective and able to focus on the big-picture strategies that drive growth.
Want to streamline your customer data management operations? Sign up for your free Insycle trial today.