You shouldn’t allow yourself to be intimidated by clinical terminologies such as ‘CRM data hygiene’. Ultimately, it is merely an elaborate expression used to state that the customer information has to be kept pure and correct.
Nonetheless, a properly utilized CRM system can boost your business – and its absence or mismanagement can destroy it.
In other words, how do you make sure the records in your CRM system are kept up to date? We have some recommendations for that.45 Why Is CRM Data Hygiene Important?
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Why Is CRM Data Hygiene Important?
Why is accurate CRM data crucial for your business?
Well, as your company scales, your customer-facing staff will find themselves communicating with more and more consumers.
Imagine making a sale after getting basic facts wrong – like the customer’s name. It’s almost impossible because everyone values a personal touch – and misremembering basic information is the exact opposite of that.
In order for your sales reps, account managers, and customer care professionals to reach your target audience, they need to have precise information. That’s why accurate data is crucial for every stage of the CRM value chain. It guarantees that each link, from customer acquisition to retention, works and functions properly.
You can’t have duplicate records or out-of-use phone numbers to achieve this. You need a clean list with up-to-date prospects and client information.
Bad Data – Causes & Consequences
Before you can address the inefficiencies of your current CRM data hygiene, you need to understand them. Some errors are bound to happen, but you must optimize your overall approach to CRM data to minimize them.
Incorrect data is especially common when you and your colleagues manually enter data into your CRM system instead of scraping it automatically. Even with the best of intentions and maximum concentration, you’ll end up doing something wrong.
Once that happens, you won’t just miss out on sales and other opportunities. When you realize some of your information is outdated or wrong, you’ll have the urge to double-check everything. As a result, your workflow will grind to a halt.
Ultimately, a string of negative experiences will lead to customer frustration – reducing the value of your brand in the long run. Before that, you’ll likely see a revenue loss if the problem becomes systemic.
How do you solve this? Luckily, there are plenty of great practices for maintaining accurate records.
Run Audits Regularly
Ultimately, you can’t improve your CRM data health without running periodic audits. If there’s a data accuracy issue, you need to know precisely how large it is before implementing improvements or changing your CRM system.
For starters, you need to set clear KPIs for your data accuracy audit. Different levels of accuracy may be acceptable depending on your industry and niche. So, set a specific benchmark you want your team to meet.
After that, you can find third-party apps that deduplicate your CRM dataset – or, if they’re available, use the CRM built-in tools.
However you decide to approach data audits, you need to run them consistently and regularly. The only way to achieve a decent level of CRM data hygiene is to be proactive.
Remember, customer data is never static. People change phone numbers, their emails get hacked, they switch jobs, or even move cities – everything is constantly in flux.
Search and Eliminate Duplicate Information
Duplicate customer entries are inevitable from time to time – but they shouldn’t be the norm at your company. For proper CRM data hygiene, you need to know each lead or client has only one entry in your system.
This may be nothing but a simple instance of misunderstanding; however, should such instances recurrently, then it is a problem. There may be an ongoing issue in how you handle your data fetching.
The moment a client ends up with a couple of customer relations management records, one portrays himself at risk of them mismanaging him or her in the future. Two different team members could reach out to the client, or different information could be recorded in the different databases.
Don’t Silo CRM Data
Siloed data is a term for isolated information. In other words, it’s customer data that only a particular colleague or team can access.
Unless there’s a compliance-related reason for doing so, you should always ensure everyone has access to CRM data. When everyone is compartmentalized in their teams, they never have a broad view of company processes – and, more importantly, the whole customer experience.
It’s also how bad data happens. Once different departments start running their own client databases, disparities are inevitable. When they have to share information, you run into all kinds of inconsistencies and duplicate data.
To counter this, every customer-facing team member must have access to one CRM system. It should be the focal point for all your customer data, and everyone should access information through it.
In practice, sometimes this isn’t possible – for a variety of technical or organizational reasons. If everyone can’t use the same CRM platform, then try integrating your CRM software with other tools the different teams use. The whole point is that everyone is working from the same data set, regardless of how you achieve it.
Raise Organizational Awareness Of Data Hygiene
At the end of the day, your CRM data will only be as accurate as your team wants to make it. Human error has always been the number one cause of inaccurate data. With that in mind, the folks in your team need to know that data accuracy is crucial – and why it’s so important in the first place.
Try to find the time to educate CRM users in your company on data hygiene. If the current system isn’t intuitive enough or errors keep happening, see if there’s an alternative solution. Every company needs a CRM system, but there are plenty of options. These days, there are specific CRM tools for every industry.
Wrapping Up
There’s no way to scale your company properly without decent CRM data hygiene. Sooner or later, inaccurate data will come back to bite you – so make sure everyone is on point from the start. Employ optimal techniques for precision in data gathering and retention in CRM systems and make sure they are known to your employees promptly.
This way, you will avoid creating bad customer experiences, and the audience targeted will always feel you want to go all the way for them.
