Aug 2022 | Data Quality |

The role of data in the modern enterprise cannot be understated. How the right data flows around your organisation is crucial to business performance. One system that is utterly reliant on accurate and timely data is your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.

The CRM platform in your business informs a number of key stakeholders and typically holds a large quantity of information, often highly sensitive in nature (such as personal customer or financial information).

In this article we’ll look at how organisations can become more efficient and resilient by putting data quality at the heart of their CRM strategy, giving their employees accurate data to deliver in their roles.

Who uses the CRM system in your organisation?

Below we’ve listed some of the typical users of the CRM system and discussed their reliance on data:

  • Sales – Often the most active user in the CRM system. They rely on customer and prospect information to be up-to-date and accurate in order to segment and approach new customers
  • Marketing – Similarly to Sales, Marketing relies on accurate data so they can better target new customers (Check out our market-leading consumer segmentation tool, Mosaic, if this topic is of interest)
  • Customer Service – The customer service function is another heavily reliant user. They use the CRM to track customer relationships and deal with new customer issues or queries
  • IT – IT has a slightly nuanced role when working with the CRM system. It’s their job to ensure technically everything works and is secure. They interact with the CRM system in order to ensure smooth business processes.
  • Finance – Plotting financial projections and analysing past performance are the main duties for Finance when interacting with the CRM system. All of which feeds into the broader business strategy.
  • HR – Many organisations keep their employee records on their CRM system as well and although it doesn’t decay at the same rate as customer information, issues with employee data can impact downstream processes.

As you can see, there is a broad range of stakeholders who have an active relationship with your CRM system and therefore maintaining the accuracy of the data within it should be a paramount priority.

CRM data never stops decaying

So far we’ve explored who uses your CRM system and now we will discuss what you can do to manage the data that enters your CRM.

In a recent survey, Experian found that 85% of organisations believe that poor quality contact data negatively impacts their operational processes and efficiency. So organisations are aware of the impact of poor data quality.

Interestingly, Australia Post reported that parcels without a valid Delivery Point Identifier (DPID) will spend about one business day longer in their network, negatively impacting the customer experience and causing the NPS to drop by around two points. A clear indication of the downstream impact of poor data quality.

And yet, what can be done to improve the quality of the data in your CRM system? Below we’ve listed three simple steps you can take to improve your CRM data quality:

  1. Review data collection strategies – ensure you are collecting accurate and consistent information at point of entry and that you have a system in place to ensure the proper hierarchies are maintained across all your business functions.
  2. Enhance records with comprehensive datasets – make corrections or simply fill in gaps in your data with household enrichment data.
  3. Merge records for a single source of the truth – utilise technology (it’s simply not possible to be done manually) to match duplicate records and ensure new records are merged correctly with existing ones.

The right tools to protect your CRM system

Experian integrates its data quality offerings into the World’s leading CRM systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and SAP. We’re a Microsoft Gold Partner and Salesforce AppExchange Partner offering sophisticated duplicate matching functionality for your accounts and contacts, full flexibility and customisable matching criteria/business rules, and improved automation and simplicity – so you can be less reliant on IT.

If you’d like to understand more about our fully-integrated data quality tools for CRM systems then get in touch today.

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