Data Quality Do’s & Don’ts – Part 2: The Missing Pieces of Your CRM Success Puzzle

The holidays are long over and the scramble to send out holiday mailings seems like ancient history.  But don’t  close the book yet!  How successful was your mailing?  One measure of success – or failure – is your bounce rate. If you haven’t taken a close look at your mailing performance metrics, now is a good time to do so to gain some valuable insights about your CRM data quality.

If your mailing performance was less than stellar, one common cause is missing pieces of contact data in your CRM. Without complete CRM contact data, it can be challenging or impossible to communicate with your contacts – which is the whole reason most organizations invest in a CRM system in the first place.

Without complete CRM contact data, time and intellectual capital spent on producing content and events are wasted

Firms frequently intend to use their CRM system to share relevant information, communicate expertise and invite people to events. But without complete data, all the time and intellectual capital spent on producing content and events is wasted. And in a firm where professionals are often billing hundreds or over a thousand dollars an hour, the costs add up quickly.

Not only does bad data reduce the value of the system – it also hinders CRM adoption. Let’s face it, it’s challenging enough to get people to actually use a CRM system. When they finally do decide to go looking for contact information can’t find it, it will be exponentially harder to get them to trust the system and go looking again.

This means that it’s essential that you ensure your data is not only clean and correct – but also complete. Fortunately, some CRM tools can assist you with this process. When users in your firm know the same contacts and share them into the CRM, when the duplicate records are merged, the final record will contain information from each of the users. Even if each person only contributes partial information, when the record is de-duplicated, the pieces will come together to provide a more complete record of the contact – and that information can flow to other users who all benefit.

It’s clear that managing your CRM data requires time and commitment, but it also requires dedicated resources including time, money and people. The people who manage the data, often called CRM data stewards, are critical to ensuring CRM success….