Salesforce Data Management: Importance & Challenges

All businesses are being driven by data today, data is at the center of all activities being carried out in businesses, enterprises, and organizations. Decision makers are now relying on qualitative and quantitative data, to make better and informed decisions, it has become essential today to stay up to date with their competitors, and to provide exceptional customer experience. Data can provide deep insights into customer behavior, market trends, and ongoing competitors’ activities for businesses to create and update their business strategies to tackle all of these. As all business decisions, today are highly dependent on data, hence proper and flowless management of data has become essential to facilitate informed decision-making.

Proper data management helps in minimizing potential errors by establishing processes and policies. These processes and policies help to build trust in the data being used, as reliable and up to date, which helps the organizations to respond more efficiently to market changes and customer needs. Therefore, proper data management has become essential for all businesses today. Since a large amount of data is being utilized across various channels within an organization, it has become a challenge to properly acquire, validate, store, and protect different kinds of data. To meet this need of businesses today, Salesforce being one of the top CRM solutions providers in the world offers an effective Data Management module. Data management Salesforce is the most viable solution for the effective management of datasets, it ensures accessibility, reliability, and timeliness of data, enabling managers to take effective and informed business decisions.

Why Data Management is so Important Today?

Data can bring valuable insights that can help improve companies today on all fronts, be it customer relations, employee management, or the release of new products. However, this is significantly dependent on the quality of data being used for these decision-making processes. These decisions will only be beneficial to the organizations if the data being used is of high quality, updated, accurate and complete. Therefore, it is very important to effectively manage and control the amount of complex data that is growing exponentially, otherwise, following issues can arise and create enormous problems for businesses in their operations.

Data Duplication

Data duplication can hinder the progress of people working in teams, as they may not always be sure that the version of data in their use is the final updated version. And they may realize its impact after investing significant time in duplicate and outdated versions of data, which can cause a loss of productivity along with frustration.

Loss of Valuable Records

Data, if not managed properly can severely cause threats of loss of valuable information. If the process of storing and retrieving data is not designed to be reliable enough, there are always chances of loss of valuable information, which can cause major setbacks to any business.

Inconsistency and Ambiguity of the Information

There are high chance of the company’s valuable information becoming inconsistent and ambiguous if not properly managed and controlled. This can result in a loss of efficiency for any business. For example, at any time if any manager wants to review some information of previous years, and not being able to retrieve it as quickly as possible will hinder his workflow and may act as a blocker for future decision-making.

Privacy, Security & Governance Issues

The biggest threat, organizations are facing today is the theft of confidential data. With the ways of work evolving including remote working and expansion across various channels, it has become really challenging to protect and secure confidential information, hence why a proper data management system has now become a necessity.

How does Salesforce Data Management Platform Help to Overcome These Issues?

To avoid any inconvenience or loss of productivity due to mismanagement of data Salesforce data management platform offers the implementation of standard operating procedures and policies for data acquisition, assessment, processing, and storage. This helps companies to make reliable and first-time correct versions of data available for stakeholders and teams.

Data management Salesforce has everything companies need to gather all the knowledge they have in a systematic manner. Managers can now view all their customer-related data in one place using a simple drag-and-drop interface. It is also compatible with many third-party options such as Datorama, Insight Builder, Interaction Studio, Tableau, MuleSoft, and others, that can provide Salesforce with the power it needs to improve functionality and customer interactions. 

It includes the following basic options for effective Data Management:

Master Data Management

Master data is basically the basic lists of information available in the company for example individuals and organizations, their roles, such as customers, suppliers, employees, products, and financial structures, such as ledgers and cost centers. Salesforce offers master data management which is a technology that ensures the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency, and accountability of the enterprise’s official master data assets.

Ensuring Backup of Valuable Data

While working with large sets of data, it becomes essential to protect it through backup systems, so that loss or corruption of valuable data can be avoided. Salesforce data management provides effective backup solutions.

Import & Export of Different Types of Files

Salesforce Data management platform allows the import and export of different types of files from different platforms. This functionality come in handy when a company is working simultaneously on various platforms and needs to access data from external devices and applications. 

Reporting and Dashboarding

Salesforce Data Management has made it very easy to Organizee data by defined criteria and to represent vital information graphically. These are powerful tools to gain quick insights into particular areas of interest to come up with on time better business decisions.

Integrations

As discussed above Salesforce Data Management platform can easily be integrated with third-party applications to enhance its functionality and to create the exact solution a company needs. 

Governance

Salesforce Data management offers strong policies for maintaining data privacy, quality, and consistency. This is crucial because it has now become essential for all companies to protect their data with the most advanced solutions available in order to avoid loss due to data theft or mishandling.

Data Management Challenges in Salesforce 

Although Salesforce data management is one of the best possible solutions for effective data management, still there are a few challenges that companies face during the process, some of which are:

Multitude of data

 The biggest challenge today in the world of data today is that it is being generated exponentially from several various sources. Hence, it becomes really difficult to keep track of all of it and manage its effective and retrievable storage. 

Constantly changing Compliance Requirements

With the evolving world of internet security and strict review of governance policies of companies, compliance requirements with respect to data handling are always being improved and hence are changing constantly. So, it becomes a challenge for data management solution providers to stay up to date with the current compliance requirements and design their systems accordingly. 

Bringing Data to Use

Most of the time organizations lack the skill and insights needed to make the most use of the data they are gathering. They are unable to pick the key points and visualize them in different manners which can help them in better decision-making. Hence Data management platforms like Salesforce needs to step up to provide visualizations in different forms to help companies for better and more informed decision making.

Data Storage issues 

Organizations must stay up to date with frequent changes in data storage techniques. The data which is stored across multiple systems needs to be quickly and easily transformed from its original format into the format needed for analyzing it. This becomes a difficult task because of Salesforce data storage limitations.

Summary

When an enterprise takes effective measures for flawless data management, it translates exceptionally into its workflow and helps it to improve drastically on all fronts. Salesforce Data Management helps businesses to do just that by ensuring the availability and reliability of data in systems. It also helps to identify and resolve any data-related issues quickly, hence helping to increase productivity.