The purpose of the blog is to identify a number of simple techniques that can be adopted by your business to ensure the quality of the data in your CRM is maintained to an immaculate standard.

1. Preparing and updating your CRM ‘Data Quality Days’

Planning and preparation is key for every task, and CRM data is no different. Every year at CRMC during the quieter periods of the year, we keep aside some Data Quality preparation days, to ensure that the information we hold is correct. We assign 20 key clients to each employee who has to ensure the data is correct and updated if necessary.

By scheduling dates into the diary employees have an expectation and accountability of ensuring data is maintained to a high quality. It also makes them aware of the importance of quality data, continually amending and updating data will make their lives easier, promote better practices and ensure your clients are kept engaged. Importantly this will also impact on the effectiveness of Marketing, helping to create better alignment between Sales and Marketing.

2. Adopting a ‘Do it now’ culture

Sales professionals lead busy lives and keeping data updated can be a struggle at times. With improved mobility and access to CRM on the go, Sales professionals, whether they are office or field based, now have the capability to log into most systems ‘on the Go’, on either a mobile device, laptop or a tablet to update data as soon as possible.

By instilling a ‘do it now’ culture everybody within the organisation can then be expected to update and amend contact information in your CRM promptly. So, if they see an error or a misspelling they will take ownership and amend it there and then. When things get put off, often, key pieces of information are lost prohibiting effective use of the system. Unfortunately, it is not an overnight fix and will take time and effort, but by changing your culture you can improve the quality of data.

3. Checking and cleansing your data

Data quality is important if senior management are to take advantage of their customer data in a meaningful and productive way that gives value to the company.

Data quality issues include:

• Accuracy

• Integrity

• Cleanliness

• Correctness

• Completeness

• Consistency

There is significant business value to be achieved by managing and ensuring your data is clean but all too often senior management find it difficult to justify a business case for data cleansing.

Consider the impact of the following to your business:-

• The cost to the business of processing errors

• Wasted Marketing efforts

• Manual trouble shooting

• Incorrect or invalid invoice data

• Impact on the business and marketing departments reputation

You can now begin to appreciate the importance of keeping your data updated. It is a central aspect of any CRM system, incomplete transactional data is like putting petrol in a diesel engine; it will grind to a halt very quickly.

A lack of clear and up-to-date information has the potential to jeopardise those customer and supplier relationships you have worked so hard to maintain and keep.

4. Monitoring Bounced and Returned Emails

Failures such as bounced emails and returned mail usually mean a failure to sufficiently clean your database. Make sure you monitor the number of returns or bounces as it can be used as a metric to understand how effective your data cleaning procedures are.

Also, it is a vital component for your Email Marketing Strategy, be sure to correct the information in your database as you become aware of it. If you can’t correct it think about removing it completely or try to find out who the most relevant point of contact is now and adjusted accordingly.

5. Who is the Data Quality Commissioner?

Yes, the Commissioner! You want to find an employee within your business who will take ownership of the points mentioned below and ‘Champion’ these initiatives. This is important as we all know maintenance is key to avoiding silly mistakes on the system that can be quite impactful. By correctly selecting your ‘CRM Champion’ can save a lot of time in the data management process.

Conclusion

As I am sure you are beginning to appreciate, there is more to managing and maintaining high quality data than meets the eye. The aforementioned steps should provide a platform to improve the effectiveness of your CRM and deliver a database with high quality information that will enable both Sales and Marketing to do their jobs more efficiently.

To help you to organise and better understand your data, CRMC are currently offering a CRM Optimisation Workshop. This will teach you to use data to align your processes to get the most out of your system. To find out more, click the button below.

Find out more about the 'CRM Optimisation Workshop'

by Charlie Barrett