Businesses today automate the procedures in order to save on time and encourage employees to work to the maximum potential. A CRM is something that almost all businesses depend on today and the results that are CRM system can deliver are definitely effective as long as the data that is fed into the CRM is good quality data.
If you want to make sure that your CRM works effectively and does not have any duplicate content then you need to make sure you use data deduplication on a regular basis to clean your data.
While some business owners believe that cleaning data that is fed into the CRM system does not make sense because it simply means that your employees will be contacting the same person over and over again Till they finally get convinced, the truth is that the more often you get in touch with a person the less likely it is that the person will show any interest in your business.
If you have generated a lead and the person is interested in your business they will respond positively the first time around. Harassing them over and over again will put a bad impression on your business as well as in the employees. It also puts a lot of pressure on your CRM and it slows the system down completely.
If you want to make sure that your CRM works as smoothly as possible then cleaning your CRM and ensuring that you run data deduplication on a regular basis is something you might want to pay special attention to.
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Detect, Correct Data Duplicates Takes Time
If you want to run data duplication on your CRM system you need to be prepared that it will take a lot of time. With any kind of data pollution or data deduplication there is always a lot of time that will be involved and this is only going to be beneficial for your business.
You may want to consider running this data deduplication on a holiday or on a day with less work for your employees to do. While you can always run data deduplication with the CRM system in play, it always better to let your CRM rest while the data deduplication is taking place because this will not create any complications and it will help you to clean the data completely without any duplicates whatsoever. The process is slow, but this is for the benefit of your business and the best way to do it is to keep the system completely free.
Deduplicating High Risk Data
One of the biggest problems with most CRM systems is it works with a parent account concept. What this means is that there is one list of main data and the other systems or references point to this data. This means that most of the work that the CRM does at the backend is dependent on this main list. If you start deduping the main list you will end up having various orphaned references. This means that the CRM system at the back end will fail and you will end up having to redo all the data from scratch.
One of the main concepts about deduplication of data is being able to delete duplicate records. In a CRM system there will be various duplicate entries. You just need to make sure that you know which entries should be deleted and which should not. If you have an automated deduplication system, you may not even have a say in choosing which entries need to be deleted. What this does is you will suddenly end up having high risk data missing from the system. The best thing to do is being in control of your deduplication solution. All you need to do is program the deduplication system in such a way that it does not touch the master list and your main entries or your high risk entries will be safe.
CRM deduplication system needs a Systematic Approach
Any CRM deduplication system needs to have a very systematic approach. What this means is that there are certain steps that need to be followed in order for the deduplication solution to be successful with a CRM database. Here are a few steps that need to be done without fail in order for your deduplication solution to integrate seamlessly.
Full System Backup
A full system backup needs to happen almost on a daily basis. The reason this needs to be done is because your deduplication system can wipe off the master list at anytime. If this happens, your work will be stuck for a few days and your production will get hampered. A full system backup on a daily basis will ensure that you have a master list to fall back on.
Test On A Smaller Batch
Before incorporating a deduplication solution with your master data, you need to make sure that you validate the approach with a smaller data. Once the process has been validated and the results are successful you can run the cycle with live production.
Log All The Steps
When something is successful, you need to make sure that you go ahead and repeat it in the same way possible. This means that you need to log the exact time that you ran deduplication and how many entries were handled. When you start logging each and every step, you will be able to repeat it without any mistakes.
Normalising Data
Most data is usually available in different formats. A classic example is the format of pin codes as well as dates. You need to make sure that you normalize all your data and you go ahead and you deduplicate it once this happens. Once you are able to normalize your data in a specific format, you will be able to make sure that you deduplicate it in no time at all. This will not only help you complete your processes faster, it will also ensure that your organization is working in a streamlined manner.
