Data Cleansing – Guidance Notes:
If you plan on cleaning up your contacts data in your CRM account by running an export of your contacts and tidying up the information on the Excel CSV (Comma Delimited) *.csv file then please read this information guide first.
Updating and adding in additional data to then re-import back into your CRM account needs to be done correctly to avoid your database being messed up. We strongly recommend you work with our support team during this process to ensure you have followed the guidance BEFORE you re-import the updated data.
Please take a back-up copy of your contacts export BEFORE you re-import any data – this must be the same day that you re-import the data back in.
This means that we have a copy of your data to refer-back to should any issues occur inside your CRM account, this enables us to re-import it back on that same day NOT LATER when records may since have been updated by the rest of your team.
STEP BY STEP GUIDE:
1. Please keep the IC Unique ID code which is the first column on your spreadsheet when you export your contacts.
It is crucial that the IC Unique ID column is kept so that any updates or additional information added on the spreadsheet will map across directly into the relevant contact’s record inside your CRM account.
2. Please remove any columns from your Excel sheet that you are not updating such Addresses, Email Addresses and Custom Fields etc. ONLY keep the columns you wish to update – this is very important.
3. Please ensure that you remove Telephone and Mobile numbers from the spreadsheet – there is an issue with how the numbers are converted in Excel which can affect how the numbers are displayed inside your CRM account.
4. Please DO NOT add any commas (,) into the data fields otherwise this will mess up your data when it is re-imported back into your account as the system will assign the data into different columns back in your CRM account. So you could end up having data in the wrong fields!
5. Take care not to delete or merge columns from the exported data sheet. You must keep to the same format to ensure the correct or historical data in custom fields, notes, tags are imported correctly.
6. Always check your final changes with a member of our support team to ensure that you have done this correctly BEFORE re-importing back into your account. We can test the data for you in a test account to ensure that it will update the records accordingly.
Examples of Data Cleansing:
Adding Tags – If you want to add in additional tag information into your spreadsheet then please note that you will not be able to over-write the tags that already exist for your contacts inside the CRM system. However, you can ADD additional tags onto your spreadsheet which will then add the new tag(s) onto your contacts records inside the CRM account.
Please note – you will not be able to remove tags using the data to re-import into your account – as although if you remove the tags on the Excel spreadsheet – when you re-import your data the tags on your contacts will still be there inside the CRM system.
Tidying up address info - You can add in additional address information such as county, region etc if they do not already exist for your contacts.
However, please note that you cannot move one part of an address line into another field as when it comes to re-importing the data back into your account you will see you have a duplicate of the address line – as shown in the example screenshot below:
Please contact our Support Helpdesk if you have any questions or to discuss your exact data cleansing requirements.