5 Best Practices for Managing CRM Data Quality

It's estimated that bad data costs businesses trillions of dollars a year in the United States alone.

Financial risks can escalate rapidly, with the 1-10-100 principle of data quality claiming the:

Relative cost of addressing bad data before it enters the customer relationship management system (CRM) is $1
Cost of fixing existing problems is $10
Cost of handling the situation after poor data causes a major failure is $100

This underlines how important it is to check and maintain the quality of the information stored within your CRM. Bad data poses a major risk to business success because it hinders your efforts to deliver a high-quality customer experience, as well as costing you time and money when errors occur and have to be fixed.

With that in mind, here are five things you can do to manage data quality in your CRM:

1. Prioritize completeness and accuracy

Incomplete records are a common issue where CRM data quality is concerned. It's important that every customer record in your system has certain key pieces of information, to make life easier for staff who rely on it to find the data they need to do their job properly.

This is particularly significant for sales reps who want to be equipped with the right knowledge before engaging with a lead or customer.

One of the ways to maintain completeness is by making the most important fields within individual CRM records mandatory, ensuring the record can't be created without key data like the customer's name and contact details in place.

It goes without saying that the information entered into your CRM should be accurate. Inaccuracies impact customer satisfaction and will result in your team losing trust in the entire system.

Introducing regular procedures to validate and update your customer data can help you minimize these risks.

2. Beware of duplicate data

Duplication can be a major threat to CRM data quality. Any business that conducts a thorough check of a CRM system that hasn't been audited for a while is likely to find a lot of duplicate records.

This can lead to confusion, inefficiency and wasted time when users are searching for details on particular customers.

One of the best ways to address this problem is to implement regular processes with the specific aim of finding duplicated data. This will help you identify records that can be combined and redundant information that can be deleted altogether, creating a more streamlined and reliable system.

3. Know who has access

Human influence and error are factors that should always be taken into account when it comes to verifying the quality and reliability of any system. This is especially true if you rely on manual data entry and management to keep your CRM in good condition.

It's therefore important to know who has permission to edit and update the information in the system. Giving permission to too many users can raise the risk of data flowing into your CRM unchecked, or alterations being made without full awareness of how crucial it is that these changes are accurate and necessary.

Restricting access to trusted, experienced users who’ve received effective training on how to use the CRM platform could be a wise move, particularly if you’ve had issues with human error in the past.

4. Engage with users

One of the most effective measures you can put in place to monitor the quality of data in your CRM is regular engagement with the people who use it most often and rely on it to achieve their goals.

Regularly inviting feedback from the sales team, for instance, on how reliable and accurate they find the system can give you a valuable insight into the quality of data contained within it.

"Look at your CRM through the lens of the salesperson. Consider how they're going to conduct day-to-day business and what it will take for them to be successful." - Randy Batson, executive director at EY, in Introhive's 'Unlocking the Power of Relationships with Automation'.

5. Embrace automation

Your CRM - much like many other business tools, functions and departments - could have a lot to gain from automation.

Introducing effective technologies to automate certain key tasks, such as data entry and detection of duplicate data, can help avoid some common problems and drive the quality and reliability of your CRM.

This fuels positive customer experience and gives marketing, sales and other teams the tools they need to drive results and success.