How to do data cleansing in Salesforce?

Once you understand the health of your organization’s data, it’s time to take action. It’s likely that things are OK; maybe good, but definitely not great. It’s likely your organization could benefit from a data cleanse.
Do you want the bad news first?
The bad news is that “dirty data” means you’ll actually have to do the dirty work of manually cleaning up duplicate, inaccurate, or missing data.
The good news?
Salesforce has made it easy to remove and improve data with a few simple tools.
1. Remove it
Duplicate data can easily take on a life of its own. However, merging duplicate records is key to an effective data cleanup process.
Duplicate Check for Salesforce is a free tool that finds duplicates, prevents duplicate records, and merges duplicate data.
Cloudingo is a tool that not only allows you to deduplicate records, but also allows you to update records in bulk with customized rules, delete inactive or stale records, and schedule automated cleanup.
While removing duplicate data from Salesforce, also take the time to assess if the record is actually valuable. Has it been inactive for over a year? Has the record gone stale? If so, don’t be afraid to remove it.
2. Improve it
Once data has been properly removed or merged, assess what’s left and determine how to enrich it with the most accurate, up-to-date information.
Data.com Clean is a tool not only allows you to understand the quality of your data, but it provides access to data from trusted sources so you can fill in the blanks quickly. Likewise, contact and business profiles are updated with the latest and greatest data, improving overall data accuracy. An added bonus — customer research and insights are also available to build stronger customer relationships and richer pipelines.
If you wish to take the scenic route, another option is to simply reach out to customers. However, be strategic about it. Generate a report of records that contain null values for a field in which you’d like to collect data for. Based on this report, you’ll now have a list of contacts to target for a marketing or sales campaign. While this is an effective way to collect missing data, it’s also a great opportunity to reconnect with stale accounts.

Once you understand the health of your organization’s data, it’s time to take action. It’s likely that things are OK; maybe good, but definitely not great. It’s likely your organization could benefit from a data cleanse.