Finalise and Review Recording Process

Before we discuss the type of checks that can be conducted to ensure records of communication and other records represent customer views, are free of bias and opinion and comply with organisational requirements, let’s define what is meant by bias.

Watch the following video to learn more about unconscious bias and the steps for overcoming it.

Knowing your stakeholders is essential in today’s business. This contains paying attention to the views and opinions of stakeholders as well as pursuing their feedback. In the end, these are the individuals who will shape and affect future successes (or failures).

In business, biases can be costly and cause us to make decisions that are not objective, resulting in missed opportunities or, in the worst-case scenario, leading to claims against an organisation and fines. This is an important factor to consider, especially when dealing with complaints. Your records must be accurate and free of bias. The following example illustrates how easily our personal bias can influence our perceptions of customers and situations in a work context.

Scenario

Tyler was working when a client entered World Traveller dressed in dirty work clothes and had a scruffy appearance. He asked about a poster promoting cheap deals to Hawaii and indicated he wanted to book the tour. When Tyler contacted Jet Airlines, they advised the only remaining ticket would cost an additional $1500. When Tyler explained this, the customer responded, ‘No worries, book me in!’ Tyler was surprised because he expected the client to argue or try to reduce the ticket price, which had been promoted based on his appearance and attire.

This is an example of where Tyler’s bias influenced his view of the client and his capacity to pay for a high-end tour. The client was, in fact, a history buff and was prepared to pay whatever was required to go to Hawaii to see the Arizona memorial of the warship bombed in WWII.

Techniques to avoid bias

The first step to avoiding bias is to accept that we all have them and that we often rely on ‘gut instinct’ when assessing a person or situation. However, you can see from the previous scenario that Tyler’s bias led him to make an incorrect assumption about a customer’s financial capacity ability.

Ensuring that all the information collected from stakeholders is free of bias and opinions is essential to get all the accurate and precise data you need. The following techniques will help you avoid bias and opinion and comply with organisational requirements:

• Read the information provided by a stakeholder (for example, a complaint) carefully
• Ask open and closed questions to gather information and confirm understanding
• Use tools to allow you to collect required information, for example, the CMS
• Refer to your organisation’s policies and procedures; for example, staff at the World Travellers would refer to the World Traveller Recording Stakeholder Interaction Policy and Procedure
• Collect and use data objectively.

To learn more about these points, select the following headings.

These will help you make considered opinions and decisions. Finally, you should always monitor your own behaviour and set ground rules for behaviour.

Before we identify what checks can be done to examine the record's completeness and discoverability, let us define what is meant by the terms ‘completeness’ and ‘discoverability’.

Completeness

• Data completeness is not about guaranteeing 100% of your fields are completed. It is about deciding what items of information are important and what are optional. For example, you would certainly need phone numbers, but you may not require fax numbers.
• Completeness indicates the level of knowledge and information about your customer or stakeholder and how precise this information is. For instance, children and seniors may not have email addresses in contact data, or some contacts may not have landline or work numbers.
• Data completeness, therefore, does not mean that all data attributes must be current or populated. Instead, you will have to categorise and choose which data sets are vital to keep and which can be overlooked.

Your organisation’s policies and procedures will state what fields must be completed.

Discoverability

A CMS will contain vast amounts of information related to stakeholders. Users must be able to locate (or discover) the right customer (or stakeholder) efficiently. Therefore, in this module, discoverability refers to how a piece of content or information can be found or accessed in a search on the CMS database.

Data, for most businesses, is often gathered for record-keeping reasons. The record is usually kept for potential reference to accomplish a greater purpose, such as making better company decisions. Another reason data is gathered is to make the decisions that will impact the success of a business, enhance its practices and improve revenue. For many companies, managing quality data can seem like a tremendous task. However, having precise and business-ready data is a highly integral component to ensure that companies do not experience the adverse effects of ‘bad’ or ‘dirty’ data.

The importance of having complete and discoverable data

Complete and discoverable data is crucial to guaranteeing CMS data quality and enhancing the quality, and fixes many common issues. Below are the common issues when there is lack of data completeness in a CMS:

• Make your data difficult to search and filter: Complete and discoverable data makes inquiries and categorising easier and more inevitable.
• Harm your reputation: Ever sent an email to ‘jane’ instead of ‘Jane’? Or worse yet, describe to someone as ‘{First Name}’? These minor errors break the veil of one-to-one personalisation and damage your business’s reputation.
• Break integrations with important software: For instance, inconsistent phone numbers could cause difficulties with a sales team’s auto-dialler software, leading to wasted chances.
• Slow down data cleansing processes: When data has inconsistencies, there are many various types of issues that can crop up. These can be challenging to identify in the CMS will slow down your groups as they require by-hand managing to resolve them.
• Improved relationships with stakeholders: Collecting data about your clients helps you get to know them better. You can use information about your clients’ preferences and interests and give them content that appeals to them and even predicts their needs. This can help you develop strong relationships with them. Proper data management also helps prevent you from delivering replicate content to clients, which can become infuriating to your audience and damage your reputation.
• Easier implementation of data: High-quality and complete data is also much simpler to use than poor-quality data. If your information is not complete or reliable, you have to spend considerable time fixing that data to make it functional. This takes time away from other activities and takes longer to apply the insights your data discovered. Quality data also helps to keep your business’s various departments on the same page so that they can work simultaneously and more effectively.

What does it mean for data to be missing?

Missing information refer to rows or columns that have null, empty or incomplete values.

Examples:

• Missing last names, phone numbers, email addresses in a CMS
• Missing age and employment years in an observational data set
• Missing income figures of employees in organisational data

Causes of missing data

• People’s reluctance to provide data (such as income figures, sexual orientation etc.)
• Data entry mistakes that are the result of poor data standards (web forms that do not have mandatory fields)
• Fields that do not apply to the target audience (for example, a column requiring business name will be left empty if the majority of responders are retired).

Types of missing data

• Structural: Data that is missing because it must not logically exist. For instance, people who do not have children leave the [No. of Children] column blank.

What checks can be done to ensure the record's completeness and discoverability

Checks that can be conducted to examine the record's completeness and discoverability include those in the following table.

A CMS must allow users to search for a stakeholder in multiple ways. For example, if a customer’s name is omitted, the customer can be found by using a date of birth (for example). This is often an issue for an individual whose name can be spelt in different ways. For example, consider the name Megan, which can also be spelt as Meaghan, Meagan, and Meghan. In this case, if you were unsure of the spelling, you could search under a different field, such as phone number, customer number or date of birth.

As volumes of data rise in today’s ever-changing governing environment, it has become a prerequisite for companies to apply consistent and responsible records management practices. Record management refers to the systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposal of records. It also includes the processes an organisation puts in place to capture and maintain information about business activities and transactions in records.

Most organisations will have multiple applications to capture customer interactions (including customer management systems). Some will use software such as Microsoft Dataverse records to channel these multiple data sources into one location. This is done by directing data from various applications and external sources into Dataverse with the help of record creation and update rules. This allows an organisation to automatically create or update system or custom records from incoming activities, such as emails, social activities, or custom activities, without writing code.

This process can improve the efficiency of your sales, marketing, and service teams' efficiency and increase the quality of your data.

Processes for an effective records management system

Policies and procedures

Your records management program must support rules and procedures both legally and operationally. Policies and procedures put the standard in compliance records management system. They must include the management of all documents and media types, as well as email. Your business may have distinct policies for records retention, active files, unused files, emails, and several other areas of information management.

The records management policies and practices must be conveyed clearly and applied regularly throughout your organisation. Consistency and consistency are important drivers to set the groundwork for a profitable records management practice. When delivered in a proper, well-managed manner, your policies and procedures will work simultaneously with your business continuity plan and disaster recovery program.

Open World Traveller’s Stakeholder Interaction policy and procedure saved in your learning portal to find out more about the process around records management.

Compliance and auditing

The successful outcome of a business records management system will never be accomplished if employees are not fulfilling a business’s records management policies and methods.

Components of records management should include:

• Retaining schedule complies with up-to-date laws and regulations
• Indexing precision and accessibility of records
• Preparation and communication among staff and departments
• Protection and preservation of documents
• Appropriate and consistent destruction of inactive files.

Disposal of obsolete records

Once you have prepared your files and decided on the right retention policy, it is time to dispose of unnecessary records. Obsolete or unnecessary records should be disposed of after five (5) years as per requirements from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

Organisational security policy

An organisational security policy is a set of guidelines or methods that an organisation enforces on its procedures to protect its sensitive data.

The organisational security guidelines that are needed by the evaluated configuration are as follows:

• Only those users who have been allowed to access the information within the system can gain access to the system.
• The system must restrict the access to screening of, revision of, and destruction of the information in protected resources to approved users who have a “need to know” that specific information.
• The users of the system are held responsible for their actions within the system.
• Labelled Security only: The system must restrict the access to information based on the resulting criteria:
  • Sensitivity of the information that is included in objects, as represented by a label
  • Formal clearance of users to gain access to that information, as represented by user profiles

Implementing the access rules inhibits a user from gaining access to information of higher understanding than the user is operating at and inhibits a user from causing information to be reduced to a lower sensitivity.

The process for the classification of information is made based on principles that the organisation specifies. This classification is usually centred on relative value to the organisation and its concern to limit the dissemination of that information. The determination of categorisation of information is outside the extent of the IT system; the IT system is expected only to implement the classification rules, not to ascertain classification. The process for determining clearances is also outside the range of the IT system. It is based on the company's trust in individual users and on their role within the organisation.

What is proofreading?

Proofreading includes reviewing for grammar, correct use of language, and format. It’s the final touches needed to ensure a business document is correct, consistent, and professional.

When do I proofread?

Proofreading is often confused with editing. Editing involves revisions of the document, often with major changes, to ensure alignment with goals, the accuracy of the information, or tone modification.

Only once those major edits are complete can the document move to the proofreading stage. Proofreading ensures the final content is free of linguistic and formatting errors.

Proofreading Techniques

The following list is strategies you can use to proofread your work.

1. Read aloud
   Take your time and read every word when proofreading. When you read as you would usually, your mind often corrects mistakes without you even realising that you are doing it, you see it as it ‘should’ be written rather than how it is ‘actually’ written.
   When you read aloud, it helps you identify errors such as duplicated or missing words and punctuation. It also highlights awkward sentences because they will sound more awkward out loud than on the page.
2. Align with company style guides
   Most companies have style guides to ensure consistency in documents. Ensure you have these guidelines close at hand while proofreading.
   These guidelines may range from font choice to preferred spellings to margin size and more.
3. Remove excess words
   A writing style that is concise and direct is easier to read and is much less likely to be misunderstood. Use the minimum number of words you need to get your message across clearly. Adding extra words or using overly complicated words and jargon if they are unnecessary and do not add value to the message makes it harder to understand.
4. Explain or remove jargon
   Don’t use jargon unless it is essential to the message. If you must use jargon, each term should be explained in plain English.
   If you are going to use acronyms, the first time it is mentioned, it should be spelled out completely, with the acronym following in parentheses. For example, in this learner guide, we have referred to Customer Management System (CMS) so that the reader will understand what we mean when we use the acronym CMS later in the text. Terms that are difficult for the reader should be removed and replaced with more accessible wording.
5. Check sentence structure
   A proper sentence must have a subject, a verb, and express a complete thought. Simple, right? Yet, sentence fragments and run-on sentences can sneak into an otherwise great text.
   Review each sentence for proper structure and punctuation.
6. Review flow and sequencing
   A high-level review must be performed on the document at least once. This overview examines the document's flow and sequencing to ensure that it is well-organized.
   Examine the formatting, arrangement, numbering of photos, tables, and appendices, as well as the overall presentation.
7. Use software
   When it comes to proofreading, technology is your friend.
   Microsoft's Spelling and Grammar tool, as well as Grammarly's online editor, are both useful tools for catching spelling, grammar, and syntax issues that spellcheck may overlook.
   As a first scan, use these tools. They will catch errors that can be detected. Word choice and homonyms, on the other hand, are frequently only discovered by the human eye.

Common proofreading mistakes

1. Check homophones
   Not and knot are homophones, which have the same sound but different meanings. A rapid reader may misinterpret a term that sounds correct for being correct. Homophones are a headache to check, but they're necessary.
   In corporate communication, including ‘accept’ where ‘except’ is intended can be awkward or even harmful.
   Make sure you've chosen the right word.
2. Check apostrophes
   Apostrophes are frequently misused. Although apostrophes are rarely used to indicate plurals, they do so frequently.
   While mixing up companies with company’s may not be disastrous, it is confusing and unprofessional.
3. Fact check
   Employees, colleagues, and clients rely on the data entered into the CMS for information and decisions. Accurate data entry is essential. Whether it is the client name spelling, contact details, purchase history or complaints, each detail must be correct.
   Fact-checking these details will ensure the CMS is valuable and useful.
4. Verify numbers, times, and dates
   Numerical data is frequently the most important and the most easily mistyped.
   Each number must be double-checked. A budget line with a missed decimal or zero might be disastrous. The time, including the time zone, should be double-checked. Dates must be accurate to the month, day, and week.
5. Verify names
   It is impolite to write a staff member's, colleague's, or client's name inaccurately or altogether incorrectly. It can cause confusion, but more importantly, it demonstrates a lack of attention to detail towards essential persons in the business communication: the reader or subject.
6. Test hyperlinks and phone numbers
   Website and phone numbers are both useful. If they are incorrect, though, they might be exceedingly frustrating or ignored.
   Click on each hyperlink, put in each online URL, and dial each phone number provided in the document during the proofing process to guarantee they will correctly direct the reader.

Key points

Records management should comprise the following elements:

• The retaining schedule adheres to the most recent legislation and regulations.
• Precision indexing and record accessibility
• Staff and departmental preparation and communication
• Document protection and preservation
• Inactive files should be destroyed in a timely and consistent manner.

Organisational security guidelines include:

• Only those users who have been granted access to the system's information are permitted to utilise it.
• Access to screening, revision, and deletion of information in protected resources must be restricted to approved users with a "need to know" for that information.
• The system's users are held accountable for their conduct within the system

The final activity for this topic is a set of questions that will help you prepare for your formal assessment.