Recommended Data Maintenance Activities

In order to maintain a high level of data integrity, it is recommended that you perform the following data maintenance activities:

• Identifying and Managing Suspect Data
• Identifying and Managing Incomplete Data
• Identifying and Managing Duplicate Contacts
• Identifying and Managing Duplicate Addresses
• Identifying and Managing Unassociated People Contacts
• Identifying Archivable Contacts

For firms with medium to large scale databases (greater than 25,000 total contacts) or complex data issues, LexisNexis InterAction offers Data Quality Assessments and Data Quality Services. For details, please contact our Consulting Services team (contact information on the InterAction support site) or your Account Manager.

Identifying and Managing Suspect Data

Suspect data is defined as contact information that may be invalid or improperly entered. Suspect data, when viewed by users, may reduce confidence in InterAction as a source of valuable information. It also may result in inaccurate and/or poor marketing to these contacts based on this “suspect” information.

Data Change Management creates suspect change tickets when edits are made to contacts in the Web Client for all of the following categories:

• Addresses
• Phones
• Web Addresses
• Email Address
• Company (for person contacts only)

The suspect data searches discussed in Recommended Data Maintenance Searches focus on identifying suspect name (person and company) information for contacts that may not be highly managed. Contact name information can be reviewed when a user adds a contact type to the contact if the contact type is a “submit” or “review” for this ticket type. However, if the contact is not covered by these rules, suspect data searches are valuable identifying inaccurate or invalid information.

Perform a search to identify suspect data

See Create a Search for information on creating a search. Consider using one of the standard maintenance searches and modifying it for your needs.

Run recommended suspect data searches every 3-6 months based on the recommendations provided in the associated table.

1. Create a temporary folder for your suspect contacts or link to the Data Review folder and conduct follow up research as necessary on each contact. Follow up research could include any or all of the following:
   • Access a company’s web site to determine the correct spelling and complete name of the company.
   • Determine who last edited/created the contact based on change tracking information searching and ask them to confirm the information.
   • Call the contact directly to confirm the information.
2. Delete records that are not valid person or company contacts (for example, part of a bad import or internal testing).
3. Remove from the Data Review folder as reviews are completed.

Data Entry Best Practices

A critical first step with any InterAction deployment is getting data to an initial state of high quality. This level of quality is best achieved by entering data correctly from the beginning. You can help ensure data is entered correctly by implementing the following steps:

• Create a custom data entry style guide that you can make available to InterAction users. For an example of a data entry style guide, see the End User Education area of the LexisNexis InterAction Support Center Web site. Data stewards can, using Data Minder’s Data Normalization section, establish rules for data in new contacts.
• Enter data consistently.
• Use the Data Normalization utility in Data Minder to update old data in the system and enforce data standards.
• Educate users. For example, instruct users not to ignore duplicate contact warnings.

Identifying and Managing Incomplete Data

All valuable contacts should have a minimum of at least one method of communication from the organization (mailing address, phone, or electronic address). Depending on the type of contact and the marketing/communications strategy for the organization, all three of these methods of communications should be complete for the contact.

The recommended incomplete data searches discussed in Recommended Data Maintenance Searches provide a mechanism to track by folder or contact type whether the appropriate level of contact information is being maintained.

The CDM - Contacts with Incomplete Address, Phone, and/or Email search should be run to assess whether these contacts should be maintained (and perhaps follow-up with them) or not. You can run this search to focus on specific pieces of missing data (e.g., missing city, state, postal code, etc.) that you need in order to stay in touch with them.

We have included general recommendations regarding which searches should be run at what frequencies for our out-of-the-Box contact types. Review and adjust these recommendations as appropriate to use as a guide for your data maintenance plan.

Run out-of-the-Box incomplete data searches every 3-12 months based on the recommendations provided.

1. Perform a search to identify incomplete data. The CDM - Contacts with Missing Address, Phone, and/or Email Search allows you to search one or multiple data fields and the folders you specify.
2. Create and set a date additional field to indicate which of these contacts have been reviewed/validated. See Using Additional Fields in InterAction Windows Client for more information.

3. The next time you run the searches, add a parameter to remove contacts that have been validated in the past 3-6 months to the search.

   This way you will not keep reviewing the same contacts for information that is still incomplete because it is unavailable (for example, there is no email address).

Identifying and Managing Duplicate Contacts

The InterAction Windows Client provides an array of saved Shared Searches which can be used to search for duplicate contacts. You can use both those searching Potential Duplicate People/Companies [by ...] and those titled DQ - Prioritized Cleanup Potential Duplicate [Companies/People by...].

See Recommended Data Maintenance Searches by Contact Type Schedule for further information on how frequently you should run these searches.

Modify the out-of-the-box possible duplicate searches for your highly managed contact types and manually link your search results into the Possible Duplicates folder.

Data Minder provides a new interface for displaying possible duplicates and a new process to compare and merge possible duplicates and their data fields. Data Minder’s home page includes a Duplicate Contact Summary dashboard. In Data Minder, use the Duplicates tab to see what contacts have been identified and need action.

In the Windows Client:

1. Run Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge against the Possible Duplicates folder on a weekly basis and resolve duplicates. This will handle duplicates for your most important contact types.
2. Remove the contacts from the Duplicates folder that you resolved.
3. Repeat this process on all contacts in specific contact collections every 3-12 months based on the recommendations in Recommended Data Maintenance Searches by Contact Type Schedule.

Identifying and Managing Duplicate Addresses

Multi-Address Duplicate Merge allows you to identify and merge duplicate addresses for multiple contacts across a folder or search result in a single operation. This feature is particularly useful as an essential part of your data quality maintenance activities for company records. Duplicate addresses cause uncertainty among users that are attempting to update their contact information. Also, when there are duplicate addresses on company records, the updates to those addresses will not be shared with all contacts, but only those sharing that particular version of the address. Multi-Address Duplicate Merge can also be used in the same manner with people contacts.

For more information, see Multi-Address Duplicate Merge.

1. Run Multi-Address Duplicate Merge for companies every 3-12 months.
2. Run Multi-Address Duplicate Merge for people every 6-12 months.

The searches listed above should each be run twice.

• First, start with the strictest criteria to identify exact matches.
• Then, run the searches again, ignoring differences in suites/floors and street numbers to find other likely matches.

See Recommended Data Maintenance Searches by Contact Type Schedule for more specific timeframes.

Identifying and Managing Unassociated People Contacts

Ensuring people contacts are associated with the appropriate company contacts is central to InterAction. This connection makes it much easier for the address and phone information for all people who work for the same company to be kept up to date. It is also an integral component of Relationship Intelligence. The change is made once on the company contact, but realized on all of the associated contacts.

Data Change Management (DCM) new contact rules govern what happens to new contacts created where the company is not already an InterAction company record. These rules can auto-create a company record or notify a data steward to do so, depending on your chosen method. These rules apply to all new contacts regardless of their contact type or folder membership and significantly reduces the volume of unassociated contacts entering the system. See Handling Unassociated Company Notification Tickets for more information.

For those contacts that are not covered by DCM new contact rules, the following recommendations are provided to ensure associations get created in the most efficient manner possible. The recommended frequency for handling unassociated people contacts is detailed in Recommended Data Maintenance Searches by Contact Type Schedule.

1. First run Association Cleanup in unattended mode to catch the most obvious associations. This will enable some clean up to be done without human intervention.
2. Run an unassociated contact search. See Create a Search for information on creating a search. Then, reference Recommended Data Maintenance Searches for the company association criteria to use.
3. Access each contact and choose the Associate Company button.
4. Type in the first word of the company name to insure the most comprehensive search results possible. This will prevent you form mistakenly creating a new company contact when it already exists, even if it is named slightly different. Because of the many possible company naming variations, it is advisable to take this precaution.
5. Determine whether there is a match among any of the returned results.
6. Create a new company as appropriate.
7. Run Association Cleanup on associated contacts in the folder to do clean up on addresses and phones. Association Cleanup corrects duplicate company phones and addresses for already-associated contacts.

Identifying Archivable Contacts

There are two primary reasons your organization may want to begin identifying contacts for archive or movement from existing public folder collections:

• Data steward resource allocation - Contacts that are unused or that provide little value to the system are an unnecessary drain on limited data management resources.
• Unneccesary user noise - For organizations with large databases (more than 200-300k contacts), contacts that are not being used are a distraction when searching for a contact, creating new contacts through the New Contact Wizard, identifying potential matches, etc.

Users that are upgrading InterAction may want to consider identifying candidates for archive as part of the upgrade effort to ensure the upgraded database contains the most useful information possible. While we do not recommend deleting contacts that are not being used by the system, we do suggest running the recommended Contacts that are archive candidates search and potentially moving such contacts into a limited access, non-enterprise folder so that they will not be included in system-wide searches.

In addition, the following searches can help identify contacts to evaluate:

• CDM - Contacts Known by Only One Active Employee
• CDM - Contacts Known Only by One Alumnus
• CDM - Contacts Not Known by any Firm Personnel
• CDM - Contacts with No Activities in Date Range

Archiving a contact includes the following:

• removing the firm to contact association; the company association is removed
• making an archived contact personal; when a contact is archived, if the contact is in a user’s contact collection, the “share with firm” link is broken
• and removing the archived contact from all lists; the contact is removed from all Marketing lists, Working lists, and Contact Type folders

See Recommended Data Maintenance Searches for details.