For most folks, when it comes to CRM and data quality, the answer is “Damn right, I’ve got the blues” as the great Buddy Guy put it. In my 15+ years working on hundreds of CRM projects, data quality is always a pain point for customers – always. In my experience, data quality is the single most important factor in a user’s first impression of their CRM system and continuously drives or depletes overall User adoption. The way to get users to enter accurate data into a CRM application is quite simple, they need to get back more value in return then what they put in. That value is almost always in the form of data they can trust which helps make their life easier (and sell or service the customer better). So why is data quality always a pain point? A few common reasons:
- It’s complicated – If this problem was easy to solve, you wouldn’t be reading this. There is not an easy, one size fits all solution.
- Unclear ownership – The ‘business’ often believes IT owns data quality. IT typically disagrees as they don’t know the data and can only help the ‘business’ when they can clearly define the need.
- It’s a living problem – Data quality degrades roughly 2% per month. If you trust your data today, without proper maintenance, you will lose trust in due time.
Imagine what would happen if you never maintained your home. You might be fine for a bit, but over time you’d have major problems on your hand. You should think about your CRM data in a similar manner.
We boil down data quality into four focus areas – Accuracy, Consistency, Relevancy & Completeness.
So, how do you address the four focus areas you ask? While each customer is unique, here are some common ways to measure and ultimately improve.
Like many things that are complicated, the hardest part is knowing how to get started. We encourage customers to have a strategy upfront by answering the following questions:
The answer to these questions is likely unique to your organization. Still don’t know where or how to begin? Perhaps you don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to this and need help? We’d love the opportunity to provide some no strings attached, free guidance on how to get started on your CRM data quality journey, and ultimately drive better adoption for your teams.