As an organisation, you ponder about many things before you decide to outsource data entry. This is because everything starting from capturing it to cleansing, sorting and verifying it requires resources. And most importantly bad data can have unacceptable repercussions. Therefore, it is very natural for organisations to wonder if the cost of hiring the data entry services will be justified.

So here is what you must keep in mind before you opt to outsource your data entry:

Automated Versus Manual Data Entry

Having a hard time deciding whether you need automated or manual data entry?

The answer is to go for both. It is crucial to understand that automated and manual data entry carry unique situation-specific benefits which mean they outdo each other in specific occasions. Nevertheless when it comes to ensuring good data quality at a quick turnaround time what you need is a balanced amalgamation of automated and manual systems that best suit your organisational requirements.

Types Of Data Requirements

Many factors define the data requirement of an organisation or industry. Insurance companies will collect claim records, hospitals will make patient records and E-commerce stores will create customer records and so on. But at its core, the concept of handling that data remains the same only the technicalities defer due to the difference in industries. Outsourcing data entry service will depend on the kind of data the organisation needs and the operations it requires to grow and develop.

Data Quality Is Crucial for Any Business

There is no doubt terrible data quality can cost businesses in massive amounts. And monetary loss only means lost opportunities. In addition to the loss of revenue, bad quality data can also have a negative impact on operational costs and increase the overhead expenses. Moreover, the damage is not just limited to monetary loss since it can harm your reputation and your credibility by causing poor customer experiences.

And lastly, it can have a major negative impact on products and development processes, drastically tanking marketing efforts and negatively affecting stock prices.

Two of the major reasons for poor quality data include human errors and system challenges. Human errors are typos for the most part which can occur because of fatigue, mistyping or destruction. Conformity can also pose a problem when an employee may forget to follow data entry rules. As far as system challenges are concerned issues can arise if the systems don’t integrate correctly and it results in data quality being compromised during the migration or data integrity is disturbed by platform updates and more.

So, what you can do is prior to outsourcing your data entry make sure the data entry services provider follows certain practises such as:

• Enforcing standards to ensure conformity with business objectives.
• Paying attention to accuracy, validity, understandability, timeliness, relevancy, completeness etc.
• Using proper matching and linking techniques to uncover unique insights.
• Profiling data to make it useful that is defining relationships, creating rules for analysis and clarifying the structure.

Just keep these 3 key aspects in mind and you will be able to find the right data entry services provider but will only save you time and money while giving you a competitive edge in the market.