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How to clean up your database

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Are you experiencing a situation where your database is starting to become useless because so many records are outdated? When an organization begins a database, typically of customers or clients, it is always with the great intention of staying organized and tracking of customer records. But like many organizations, you may have amassed thousands upon thousands of customer records as the Internet took off and reduced the difficulty of storing and keeping records. When is it time to clean up your database?

Over time, you probably want to revisit old records in your database. You may be a non-profit trying to send out mailers to your donor list or a healthcare company looking to send reminders to former patients or an eCommerce company trying to send out marketing fliers to previous customersโ€” it is impossible when your records are stale.

Why do I Need to Clean up my Database?

  1. People move. Anyone maintaining a database of customers knows people can be extremely difficult to track down once they move once, twice, three, even more times. How can you maintain accurate customer records when you no longer have a good physical address?
  2. Phone numbers can change. It happens less often than ever, but we still live in an age where people may occasionally obtain a new phone number. A great example is when a customer moves from one state to another; they may update their phone number to obtain a local area code. Once they update their phone number, youโ€™ve lost them if you havenโ€™t updated your customer records.
  3. Names can change. People get married, divorced, combine last names, change their legal name, etc. Names constantly change and it can be overwhelming to locate the same person if you do not have their most up to date information.
  4. People pass away. Though death may not be the most comfortable topic, it is still an important thing to consider. When someone passes away, their information in your database is now adding noise. Would it be possible to find people associated with the deceased, such as a spouse or child, that would be an appropriate fit to replace in your database?
  5. Increase growth. If you are calling or mailing out to folks who are no longer associated with that phone or address, do you find that it is a good use of time or more of a frustrating challenge and necessary evil? People in your database will not voluntarily update companies that theyโ€™ve moved or changed their phone numbers, but there is value in tracking them down.

Depending on your needs, we have multiple solutions to help you update your records and increase your bottom line. Companies in industries like lead generation and real estate have found value and cost savings in using our APIs to find and update their records. Organizations like non-profits and health care companies have also used our solutions to clean up their database to ensure that they have the right records to reach out to the right customers and maintain a great customer experience.

When you are hunting down verified phone numbers on Facebook or manually updating addresses, your teamโ€™s productivity can grind to a halt. Can you justify leaving your database untouched with outdated records? Why bother with a database if your records will become outdated and no longer relevant? Is it truly worth having an employee manually scour the Internet to maybe find updated data?

At Ekata, we link a digital identity back to the human behind the screen. Every day, we help companies, both big and small, and non-profits clean up their databases by ingesting their records and returning accurate, complete data. If your bottom line is hurting because you have a giant list of useless records, Ekata can help you update your records seamlessly by using our suite of APIs to automatically ingest and return the data most important to your team.

Our pioneering identity verification solutions have real world impacts on organizations across the globe. Weโ€™ve worked with healthcare providers to find updated phone and address information for past patients, helped homeless shelters and rescue missions reduce returned mail to past donors by flagging addresses that are invalid or do not accept mail, improved contact for education organizations by indicating which emails were no longer valid, and so much more.

If you handle names, phones, emails, addresses, IPs, or a combination of the five identity elements, Ekata can help you update your records quickly. Your developer can write rules around whichever API is most appropriate for you and obtain a key to query and return data from Ekata to smoothly clean up your records. Suddenly, you have a current, valuable, and profitable database that you can use to maintain better customer relations, optimize your workflow, and save time and money.


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