I’ve decided to start sharing some of my experiences with outsourcing. It’s amazing what can be done, and hopefully what I share will give you some ideas.
A friend of mine contacted me with a problem – They had over 3000 contacts in their Outlook Email program that they’d accumulated over 10 years or more. The contacts were synchronized to their iPhone, and it was all a bit of a mess. They were after some way of cleaning up the data without doing it manually, like a program or tool.
I suggested outsourcing the data cleaning to the Philipines using oDesk… The response was the same as I normally get… “You can do that…?”
I put the following job description up on oDesk:
Hello. I have a large list of contacts exported from Outlook. There are some duplicates, misspelt duplicates, and others. In total I believe there to be about 3000 contacts in this list. I need a hard-working, self-starting and proactive data entry/analysis person to go through and “clean”; this list i.e.: Merge all duplicates into single contacts. If duplicate data exists for any contacts, use your ingenuity to make sure all the data is available.
Within 2 hours I had over 150 responses. I picked a lovely woman from the Philippines who had good feedback, had a history of work on oDesk (2,985 hours), and most importantly who’s personalized message to me about the job indicated they had a) understood the question and b) good speak very good English (which is important for communication).
Once I hired her using the oDesk process, I sent thought the following email with a CSV dump of my friends contacts attached:
Hi <Outsourcer’s Name>
Here you go…
I have compressed it into a CSV file. Please maintain the header row structure, as it has been taken directly from Outlook where it will be reimported.
The main thing is to merge duplicates. There are several entries that are duplicates with typos, etc… I trust you to use your discernment as to whether they are duplicates or not.
Remove any unusual characters like #, @, ! etc… from the titles.
Note that there are several entries for Companies, Services, etc… without a person attached to them. Please DO NOT merge these into other contacts. Please deduplicate these where necessary.
As a low priority please standardize the capitalization in the words.
If you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to ask. However, I trust that with your skills and proactive approach you’ll be able to complete this task well without needing too much input from me.
Thanks!
Casey
That’s where we are up to so far… I’ll keep you posted with the progress.
NOTE: Yes, my friend did agree to let his contacts list sent to a 3rd party, yes, I made them sign an NDA, and yes, there is a slight risk involved in doing stuff like this. You have to evaluate if it is worthwhile on a case by case basis.
You should check out oDesk, it’s free to sign up and post jobs.
