Data Hygiene Playbook

Data Quality Baseline Assessment

Before implementing hygiene processes, audit your current data quality. Measure these metrics across your CRM:

Metric	How to Measure	Acceptable Threshold
Duplicate Rate	Run a duplicate scan on email + company name	Less than 3%
Missing Email Rate	Count contacts with no email address	Less than 10%
Bounce Rate	Check email verification results	Less than 5%
Incomplete Records	Count records missing 3+ required fields	Less than 15%
Stale Records	Records with no activity in 180+ days	Less than 25%
Invalid Phone Numbers	Run phone validation check	Less than 10%

Weekly Hygiene Tasks

Assign these tasks to a rotating owner on your ops team:

1. Run a duplicate detection scan and merge confirmed duplicates.
2. Review and process any bounced emails from the past week.
3. Check new records created by integrations for completeness.
4. Validate that lead source attribution is correctly applied to all new records.
5. Review any records flagged by automated validation rules.

Monthly Hygiene Tasks

1. Run a full email verification pass on all active contacts.
2. Audit field standardization (state abbreviations, country codes, industry tags).
3. Review and clean up unused or deprecated custom fields.
4. Check for orphaned contacts (no associated account or company).
5. Export a report of records with missing required fields and assign cleanup owners.
6. Validate phone number formatting and remove disconnected numbers.

Quarterly Deep Clean

1. Archive or delete records that have bounced 3+ times consecutively.
2. Re-enrich stale records (no activity in 180+ days) with fresh data.
3. Audit data entry workflows and form mappings for new error patterns.
4. Review integration sync logs for recurring data conflicts.
5. Benchmark current data quality metrics against the previous quarter.
6. Update your data dictionary and field definitions as needed.