Why bad data in agent chat hurts your business, and how to fix it

Introduction: The cost of unverified chat data

Picture this: your customer places a $500 order, provides their email as “john@gnail.com” during chat support, and never receives their order confirmation. Three days later, they’re furious, calling to complain about poor service. Meanwhile, your automated shipping updates are bouncing, your follow-up surveys aren’t reaching real customers, and your team is firefighting instead of selling.

• Order confirmations and shipping updates don’t reach real customers.
• Invoices or personal details risk being sent to the wrong recipient.
• Agents spend hours chasing corrections, resending messages, and manually updating records.
• Campaigns underperform due to bounces and poor deliverability.
• Poor customer experience due to customers waiting forever.

Where data fails in agent chat

Mistyped or disposable emails

Typos (like “gnail.com”), throwaway emails, and role-based inboxes create unreachable contacts. In live chat, these errors slip through fast, compounding into undelivered confirmations and follow-ups, while real people are left waiting.

But the problem goes deeper. Spam and fraudulent emails often exploit trial offers and abuse discount codes, frequently paired with disposable addresses to avoid detection. These bad actors inflate your contact volume with fake data, driving up bounce rates and damaging sender reputation. When your email provider sees consistent bounces from your domain, legitimate messages start landing in spam folders, hurting reach even to genuine customers.

Incomplete or bad phone numbers

Missing country codes, incorrect formats, and reassigned numbers cause failed calls and messages. Without E.164 standardization and reachability checks, phone-based workflows break, impacting delivery notifications, two-factor flows, and support callbacks. In healthcare, patient appointment reminders sent to reassigned numbers can expose protected health information to strangers, creating serious HIPAA compliance risks.

Teams fixing data instead of serving customers

Every failed message becomes a follow-up ticket, escalation, or a compliance review. Admins and CX teams become default troubleshooters, pulling away time from service and growth.

Business impact: cost compliance, and CX

• Compliance and audit risks: Misdirected order details or invoices can violate privacy regulations; incomplete records complicate audits. For example, a bank sending account statements to an unverified email like "john@gnail.com" risks GDPR violations and regulatory fines. Similarly, healthcare providers sending patient appointment reminders to the wrong numbers create HIPAA exposure.
• Wasted campaign spend: Email deliverability is becoming harder: 65% of marketing professionals report increasing challenges (Shopify, 2024), while poor data quality directly contributes to a $164 million daily loss from undelivered emails in the US alone.
• Customer experience suffers: PwC says that 73% of customers consider experience a key purchase driver, with many willing to pay more for convenience and friendly interactions. Clean data is foundational to meeting those expectations.
• Lost sales and higher churn: Missed confirmations and updates erode trust, drive repeat contacts, and create cancellations and refund risk.
• Reputation damage: Bounce-heavy sends and misdirected communications harm brand and sender reputation, reducing future deliverability and reach.

Industry-specific risks

Different sectors face unique consequences from unverified chat data:

• Financial services: Account statements sent to the wrong emails create GDPR/regulatory violations.
• Healthcare: Appointment reminders to incorrect numbers expose PHI, violating HIPAA.
• E-commerce: Order confirmations with personal data sent to recycled phone numbers expose customer information to unauthorized parties.

Real-time verification in chat: what good looks like

Verification needs to be instant, guided, and audit-ready, embedded directly into the chat experience, whether it’s a human agent or AI.

Here’s the blueprint:

• Email verification: syntax, domain/DNS and MX checks, SMTP reachability, disposable/role-based detection, spam-trap screening, and risk scoring; all captured in an audit trail.
• Phone verification: standardize to E.164, validate country codes, detect carrier/line type, check reachability, and guide agents to correct inputs.
• Agent guidance: inline prompts to fix typos (e.g., “Did you mean gmail.com?”), add the correct country code, or complete missing address lines, no context switching.
• Audit readiness: track what was verified, when, and by whom. Store verification and confidence scores on the record to support compliance and downstream decisioning.
• Salesforce alignment: only verified contact data flows into Salesforce; workflows and automations are gated on “verified=true” to protect journeys and analytics.

In practice, this is what Plauti Agentforce aims to enable: proactive, configurable checks inside the agent chat with deliverability checks, spam detection, formatting, correct country codes, and audit trails. This way, only trusted, standardized records enter your CRM.

Measurable impact: from bounces to ROI

Real-time verification pays back quickly. Teams typically see:

• Lower bounce rates and improved deliverability, lifting campaign reach and conversions.
• Fewer “fire drill” fixes, saving hours per week across admins and agents.
• Cleaner automation: flows triggered on verified data reduce exceptions and manual interventions.
• Better customer satisfaction scores: fewer missed messages and faster resolutions translate to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

Industry patterns from Plauti customers show measurable improvements:

• Delivery errors reduced by up to 70% through accurate address validation.
• Data entry time reduced by 78% with address auto-complete features.
• Data entry errors cut by 20% at the point of capture.

Tie outcomes to your numbers: reduction in bounces x revenue-per-message, agent minutes saved x hourly cost, and uplift in conversion x average order value (AOV).

Best practices for Agentforce without slowing teams

• Embed verification at the point of entry in Agentforce. Don’t rely only on batch cleanups later.
• Guide, don’t block: provide instant, actionable prompts to fix data inline.
• Standardize formats: enforce E.164 for phone, normalized address lines, and verified flags on emails.
• Gate automations: triggers journeys only when “verified=true”; fall back to a resolution path when verification fails.
• Log everything: store the validation result in Salesforce for governance and compliance.
• Measure relentlessly: track bounces, deliverability, rework hours, customer satisfaction, and conversion. Share wins with marketing, CX, and ops leaders.

Example: In support workflows, verification ensures order updates and RMA instructions reach the right inbox/number, reducing repeat contacts and time-to-resolution.

Verified versus unverified workflow

What to do next?

• Assess verification coverage: email and phone; do you verify those at capture?
• Embed in chat: move from batch cleanup to real-time checks during the agent conversation.
• Enforce standards: E.164 phone, normalized addresses, verified flags, and confidence scores.
• Align automations: ensure journeys, alerts, and AI workflows only fire on verified data.
• Monitor outcomes: track deliverability, bounces, agent time saved, customer satisfaction, and campaign ROI.

Beyond chat: maintain data quality across your entire Salesforce org

Real-time verification in chat is just the beginning. Your existing records need attention, too; historical contacts, imported data, and records that bypass chat altogether. This is where comprehensive verification becomes essential.

• Schedule regular validation jobs to clean existing contact, lead, and account records in batches.
• Validate imported data before it reaches your workflows, preventing bad data from spreading through your system.
• Set up automated verification workflows that trigger on record updates, API integrations, and form submissions.
• Create verification dashboards to monitor data quality trends, validation coverage, and improvement over time.
• Establish data governance policies that make verification a standard part of your data lifecycle, not just a one-time fix.

With Plauti Agentforce and Plauti Verify, you can handle both real-time chat verifications and organization-wide data quality management, ensuring clean, reliable contact data across every touchpoint, from initial chat capture through long-term CRM maintenance.

Plauti Agentforce can be configured to deliver these checks non-disruptively, guiding agents to correct inputs and writing verified, audit-ready records into Salesforce.