3 Simple Tips On How To Keep Your CRM Data Clean
Customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial for businesses of all scales and provides a platform for collating and managing data. CRM can help enterprises earn credibility and leverage it to increase profits. Well-organized data can drive meaningful conversations with prospects and customers, boost conversion rate and customer retention. However, to accomplish this, it is important to keep CRM data clean and well-organized.
There are many reasons you ended up with inaccurate data in your CRM. Some of the main reasons are marketing automation tactics, contacts are filling in online forms incorrectly or your sales teams filling out prospect details too hastily.
So what to do if you have a massive amount of contact data full of invalid email addresses, incomplete customer contact data, and duplicates?
Use CRM deduplication tools
Data deduplication is a well-known concept, and CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot have native deduplication features that are fast and easy to use.
Yet, data deduplication plays a more strategic role than simply saving on storage costs. If done correctly, deduplication can have an enormous impact on a company’s bottom line. The duplicate data can slow down query response times, consequently delaying the time it takes to make decisions. Additionally, duplicate data can return inaccurate results that lead to incorrect business decisions. In today’s fast-paced business environment, delays and errors like these are costly.
To mitigate that risk, deduplication is a vital step in the data-cleansing process. Removing duplicate information, either inside an individual database or as part of a data model is key to ensuring accurate, timely results from analyses.
Dropdown menu options
Any experienced CRM user will swear by having as many fields with dropdown menu options as possible, especially on external forms. Dropdown menus will collect and store standardized data making data analysis a lot easier. Dropdown menu fields will also eliminate room for human error and confusion about the collected data. For instance, if you have an open field called "Country" in your external form, people will use their preferred way of typing the name of the country. United States can be US, USA, U.S. or U.S.A which will make data analysis difficult if not cleaned properly. Offering a dropdown menu with standard options makes data collection more efficient and accurate. Instead of spending hours on mundane data cleaning, you can go straight to data analysis.
Schedule data maintenance
it is vital to monitor CRM data to ensure that data remains relevant. That requires regular reviews, stakeholders’ involvement, and a maintenance schedule. To maintain your data clean, establish a data cleaning cadence for you and your team. Dedicate an hour each week to review your CRM data and do a quick clean-up. Schedule a quarterly or annual time to perform more in-depth CRM data clean-up, and identify gaps and action steps. Remember your CRM data is only as good as your input, and maintaining a clean and well-organized database will pay itself off in the long term.
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