Quality data in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is not only the lifeblood of your organization but also the secret to putting you on the right track to generate high-quality, sales-ready leads and boost your revenue pool. For your CRM to provide optimal results and help you with your routine marketing and sales operations, it must be maintained and monitored regularly.
The data needs to be cleansed, enriched and protected to deliver information that will help you maintain, understand and sustain strong customer relationships, provide them the service they deserve as well as meet business goals. In addition to this, cleansing, enhancing and updating customer data will enable you to implement an effective CRM strategy. So, how do you make sure that your CRM contains high quality data? By following these steps:
Analyze Your Data
Before beginning to clean the records, eradicate bad data and enhance its quality, you need to understand the overall state of your database. The first and foremost step is to analyze and benchmark data quality.
To find out how dirty your database is, determine:
- How inaccurate and bad is your data?
- How many duplicate leads does your database contain and where are they coming from?
- How is the overall quality of existing data?
You need to establish a data quality dashboard to ascertain these details and other actionable information.
Clean your Data
With a report suggesting that 30% of lead data goes bad every year because of changes in phone numbers, email addresses and employers, you have to understand the cost of decayed data and rectify it. Do it by following these steps:
Data Standardization: If your company doesn’t follow predefined standards or policies to determine how the data is keyed into the CRM, there are high chances that your system contains different iterations of data. The solution to this is data standardization – creating an organized and consistent environment to enter data into CRM.
Data De-duplication: Identifying and removing duplicate entries from your CRM can give you a clear understanding of who your customers are. You can follow match, merge and purge techniques to clean the existing CRM data and stop duplicates from entering the system again.
Completing Missing Data: The next step entails filling in the missing data files in your CRM system to ensure that the information about each prospect is complete to the last detail.
Data Validation: Once you have rectified inaccurate entries, eliminated redundant, obsolete and duplicate information, and added missing information, it is time to check the data validity via set validation rules. This will ensure that your customer data is clean, correct and meaningful.
Protect Your Data
Without a data protection strategy, your records will continue to decay and lose value. Not only do the titles, phone numbers and email addresses change, but a lot of data is entered inaccurately and inconsistently. Protecting your data means preventing duplicates from entering the system, standardizing data values regularly, completing missing data and validating the records at frequent intervals.
Without improving the quality of your existing data and adding value to it, you are certainly limiting your data potential. When you complete the contact information of your existing and prospective clients, you not only get a 360-degree view of each prospect but also save time and costs of sending bad emails. Thus, the need is to monitor data quality over time and make sure that the CRM system is clean and updated.
How SunTec Can Help?
SunTec provides an expansive range of data cleansing and enrichment services to help you with CRM implementation. Our experts identify anomalies, eliminate duplicate and redundant information, and append the records to ensure they are accurate and up-to-date. Furthermore, we follow local and global standards to standardize name and address data, enrich the data by following data verification & validation techniques, and monitor its quality over time.
In brief, we help you answer these questions:
- Which customers have not done business with you in a while?
- Is your data correct, complete and current?
- How many duplicate contacts are there in the CRM?
- How can you maintain a consistent style/ format for data entry?
Our services are engineered to ensure quality performance, and maintaining long-lasting relationships with customers.
Getting Started!
SunTec India can help you convert disparate, duplicate data into reliable source of consolidated, accurate information so that you can make timely decisions. To learn how, please get in touch with us today! You can also drop us a line at info@suntecindia.com and we will get back to you shortly.
