Best practices for CRM cleaning and cleansing customer data
For businesses, being able to contact customers is a large part of their success. Being able to communicate with consumers helps to build their trust and thus increase sales. But what happens when this communication takes too long or is never received by the customer? This can lead to a loss of revenue and reputation for your company. One large cause of this is inaccurate or missing CRM data.
Here are some reason and methods of keeping your CRM data clean:
What is CRM cleaning?
CRM cleaning is the practice of making sure the data within your CRM system is clean and accurate. CRM cleaning can include getting rid of outdated, repeated, incomplete, and irrelevant data. This process can help organize your data in a way that maximizes your business opportunities and sales. Often, this process comes in the form of a tool that can be integrated into your CRM system to customize and clean your contact data as you see fit.
Why CRM cleaning matters to your business
CRM systems hold critical customer information that can help lead to sales generation. Along with this, it can also be used across various other departments within your organization.
One of these departments is marketing. Clean and accurate customer information can help them contact potential customers with their marketing campaigns. Reliable CRM data can also impact customer service. With complete customer information, customer service representatives can look back on a customer’s entire relationship with the company and be prepared to help them however they need.
Without accurate CRM data, all these departments can have a hard time performing their day-to-day responsibilities—like creating targeted campaigns or providing a swift customer service call. With incorrect and unstandardized data being a preventable problem, taking the time out to clean your CRM data can help stop potential losses in sales.
Best practices for CRM cleaning
Setting up a maintenance schedule
While CRM cleaning may seem like a “one and done” task, it involves constant maintenance. To help with this upkeep, setting up a maintenance schedule can help you stay on track with your CRM system. A schedule like this means setting designated dates to perform certain cleansing task such as:
- Retiring old data
- Filling in missing data
- Removing inaccurate data
With a set schedule, your CRM will stay up-to-date and never revert to being inaccurate and messy.
How to keep your CRM data clean
Delete or merge duplicate records
One method of maintaining a clean CRM is to make sure there are no duplicate records in your system. If there are duplicate customer records in your CRM, it can cause confusion within your departments as to where to place the information. This can lead to a split record, where the customers information is split between two different record, affecting the customer experience negatively. To prevent this, it is best to merge these corresponding records into one record. With a single customer view in your CRM database, sales reps and customer service reps will be able to accurately find and list a customer’s contact information. This will lead to accurate marketing data free of duplicate data.
CRM data cleansing services
With CRM cleaning being such an arduous task, doing it by hand would take up too much valuable time. To help with this, there are a suite of data quality management integrations that can clean your data efficiently.
Experian’s Global data quality for Salesforce is a tool that can help verify a customer’s phone number, home address, and email as soon as they are entered into your system. This ensures that you always have the right contact information for your customers, and you don’t have to spend hours cleaning mistakes in customer data.
We also have data cleansing tools that can be integrated to Magento, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP. With these tools, you can be confident that your CRM data is accurate and ready for use.
Make sure you have the right tools to improve your data quality and reach customers effectively.
