Data flow management in businesses is a process of combining data from diverse data channels, improving the quality of the data and providing accessibility to the data. Contact centers and call centers figure topmost among businesses where there is a large inflow of data which requires streamlining and organizing. In any business environment, customers, products and other pertinent details comprise important data which decide the future of the business. Organizing and managing this data flow is highly significant.

Data flow management involves a series of steps. First diverse data regarding customers, products etc., is collected and converted into an understandable format by target applications. Data flow management software can be employed to identify the data patterns and re-arrange them in a logical order. The next step is data integration which involves incorporating and integrating the business rules and applying them across diverse data sources.

Next come the processes of checking the integrated data and replacing incorrect data with the correct data. The software can recode misspellings, identify ?throw away? phrases, handle special characters and match the customer and product data phonetically. In a contact center environment, the data is distributed to the contact center agents after the 3 initial steps. Effective data distribution helps the agents to complete customer data, enabling them to obtain ?the right information at the right time? to satisfy the customer. This is true in any business environment where managing data flow is crucial to running the business systematically.

Effective data flow management involves a number of technical processes, and selecting suitable software and hardware tools to perform these tasks is a major feature of data flow management. Other requirements for managing data flow are a well-trained staff and executive team who recognize the importance of data quality and integrity.