CRM Data Cleaning Strategies for Accurate Customer Records

1. Introduction

Every business will want to create a good relationship with their customers. This will mean you will collect lots of data about your customers such as name, email, phone number, company information, what they have purchased and communication history. Most will use a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).

It will be easy for your staff to find customer details. You can also keep track of potential customers, manage your sales and gain customer insight. You need to ensure your data is clean.

Over time your CRM database will become messy. There could be duplicates of the same customer, the customers phone number/email could have changed and also there could be some misspellings or missing information.

This can become an issue when your employees are trying to contact a potential customer. When searching through their CRM they could come across 2-3 different records. Each record will have different information, one will have their old email address and one will have incomplete phone number. The employees will have to search through all of this to ensure they are using the correct details.

This can cause delays and affect the customer experience.

It is important to ensure that your data is clean within your CRM. Having a process will mean you can fix any incorrect information, remove duplicates and organise your customer data.

Below we have listed 8 tips to help keep your customer data clean.

2. What Is CRM Data Cleaning?

CRM data cleaning is the process of checking and ensuring the quality of the customer data in your CRM database. It is identifying incorrect information, removing duplicate entries, updating old data, correcting formatting and adding missing data. The purpose of data cleaning is to ensure that your customer data is accurate.

However, even though the data may relate to the same customer it can be difficult to know which customer profile to use as there may be different names and emails.

By cleaning your data you will be able to identify these entries and decide if the company should merge them.

You will also be verifying contact information, correcting spelling, updating company information and removing any unhelpful data. But you may not want to remove all the old information. Some data may still be useful for keeping track of a history, reporting and business processes. Be very careful when going through your data.

Data cleansing should be done regularly. Even if you clean your information today, tomorrow new errors may appear as employees add more information about customers.

Therefore businesses should have an easy process to keep their CRM database clean.

3. Why accurate CRM Data is important

Using accurate data will help improve efficiency. If you know your data is accurate it reduces any interruption to completing tasks.

This is because:

Improved communication with customers

Customers will expect companies to communicate with them properly. If they have incorrect contact details it can cause issues.

If a sales rep sends an important update about a product to an incorrect email address then the customer will miss out and you’ll miss a chance to continue the conversation.

Keeping your customer information up to date will help avoid this.

Improved sales activities

The sales teams will be able to manage their leads more efficiently if they have accurate customer details.