Your data entry staff is letting you down because pay and incentives are low,
plus you haven’t done enough work yourself.
Bad data entry, let’s face it, it sucks.
And it’s not only costly because you paid a person (or people) to do what you thought would be a job. It’s costly because a wrong email address or phone number prevents you from contacting someone who could’ve been a loyal customer or client for your business.
And while some of the blame goes on the person who did a poor job, the other part of the blame might go on you for not managing them well enough.
5 Reasons Your Data Entry Staff Lets You Down
No Attention to Detail
Making mistakes is definitely the biggest reason your data entry staff lets you down.
- Typos
- Forgetting to input data into a field
- Inputting the data in a wrong field
For businesses, it’s frustrating and unacceptable to see such errors.
At some point, you angrily tell yourself, “I could have just done this data entry work myself!”
Wrong Incentives
Do you tell them that you expect to have x amount of data inputted within y amount of time?
Have you sampled the work out yourself to see if the time you allotted is enough time to complete the task?
The problem is that if the time is too short, they’re incentivized to rush right through it.
Enter as much info as quickly as possible just so that you think they did a good job… at the expense of accurate data.
They Take Way Too Long
Again, if you’ve sampled the data entry work yourself, you’d get an idea how long the project should take.
But if you haven’t, now you’re at the mercy of your staff telling you they’re done… when they choose to be done.
In that time, you’re paying extra.
Making sure the data is accurate is one thing, but dragging out the work is another. If you’re a small business, these small costs add up.
You Never Checked Their Work
Maybe you blindly trusted in them doing a good job.
It’s straightforward. This is not rocket science. How difficult could data input be?
But days later after the project has been finished, you look at your CRM system only to realize the data is a mess.
- Names and email addresses are misspelled
- No attention to proper spacing and punctuation
- Incomplete or missing fields
Seeing so many errors, you lose trust in your employee(s).
The major takeaway is that for next time, as your staff embarks on a new data entry project, check to see if their initial work looks up to par.
If you notice mistakes, at least you can catch them early on and have the staff paying closer attention to their typing.
You Get What You Pay For
How much are you paying for the data entry? Minimum wage?
Sure, it’s understandable you don’t have the budget to hire someone ultra-professional, but when you’re paying the lowest wage the law allows for, the quality of workers to hire is likely to be lower than when offering higher pay.
When the pay is low, so are the employees’ incentives.
If they feel like they can’t advance in the organization and/or they know they could easily find a job somewhere else, they won’t be concerned that they didn’t type in the business leads’ email and phone numbers correctly.
This is not to say that there aren’t hard-working and detail-oriented people who’d actually do a great job at the wages or salary you can afford; there definitely are.
But it’s harder to find those great employees when the offered pay is so small.
How Businesses Can Get Better Results from Their Data Entry Team
- Pay closer attention to employees’ work early on.
- Share immediate feedback.
- Do the work yourself; see if there’s enough time to complete it without compromising quality.
- Offer higher pay to attract higher quality employees.
- Sidestep the manual data entry process and look into automated data entry tools for CRMs.
Make the Necessary Adjustments
Poor-quality data entry from your staff is a real pain.
But before you go and blame them for a bad job (which they do deserve some blame), think about how you could do a better job as their manager, making sure their work looks good at the beginning and how long it should take.
If you are the one who hired them and are in charge of their pay, consider if more money would attract better employees.
Whatever you end up doing, at least you know the reasons for the problem and how to fix them.
NameDrop’s automated data collection solutions make it easier
for businesses and trade shows in dealing with data entry.
Want to see how NameDrop works?
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Why the Trade Shows and Conferences Industry Need More Automated Processes