Enrichment

An enrichment pass that overwrites existing values will eventually replace something a human verified with something a crawler guessed — and nobody will notice, because both look identical in the interface a week later. Filling empty fields only is the conservative default, and it is the one that keeps a database trustworthy over years.

Where an overwrite is genuinely wanted, it should be a separate, explicit action with the old value retained. Silent refresh is the mechanism by which good data becomes average data.

The valuable output of enrichment is not the field. It is the answer to where did this come from, recorded per field: which URL, which pass, on what date. Without it, a wrong value cannot be traced, a stale value cannot be aged out, and a compliance request cannot be answered.

It also makes the data usable in an email. A fact you can link to is a fact you can reference; a fact of unknown origin is one a rep has to re-check before writing, which means it is not saving anyone time.

Two temptations produce most bad enrichment data. The first is deriving a person from an address — turning info@ or sales@ into a named contact. The second is deriving an address from a name and a domain and then presenting the guess with the same confidence as a published address.

Both are avoidable with rules rather than judgement: drop role accounts, only derive a name where the local part is plausibly one, and mark everything discovered by crawling as unverified.

The SalesShift enrichment crawler reads a company's own site, fills only empty fields, drops role accounts, records provenance per field — URL, fields, timestamp — and marks every discovered address unverified. Erasure requests are checked before any insert, so a later crawl cannot resurrect someone who asked to be removed.