CRM Data Cleaning Strategies for Accurate Customer Records

This can cause issues with searches and reports.

No clear guidelines

Sometimes there will be no clear guideline on how to enter customer data, which means employees will enter profiles in any way which will lead to inconsistencies.

5. 8 Effective CRM Data Cleaning Strategies

Although it can feel overwhelming, you don’t have to clean all of your data at once.

By having a strategy in place here are some ways to clean your CRM data:

1. Audit Existing CRM Data

Before you begin any data cleaning you should assess what data you already have in your CRM. By doing a proper audit you can see how much data needs to be cleaned and what issues are the most common.

Look at key information including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, company names and lead status.

See if there are any incomplete profiles, duplicates, outdated information and incorrect information.

For example, if you have 5,000 customer records you might find that some lack email information and others have duplicate company names.

Rather than randomly trying to clean up data, create a simple list of issues you found.

Such as:

• Duplicate customer information
• Incorrect email addresses
• Missing phone numbers
• Outdated company information
• Incorrect customer names
• Incomplete customer profiles

This will give you an idea of where to start. You should also consider what information is most important to you. If your sales team rely heavily on customer names, email addresses, company information and lead status then you should start by looking at this information.

Having a CRM audit will give your team clarity on what data they have and help you create a realistic data cleaning strategy.

2. Create Consistent Data Formats

Sometimes different staff members will enter the same information in different ways meaning it will be difficult to search for and organise.

For example, company names could be entered as:

• ABC Solutions Private Limited
• ABC Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
• ABC solutions pvt ltd

Whilst all may be the same company, it can cause confusion due to the different formats.

This can happen with phone numbers and addresses too.

To help with this you can set rules for how your staff should enter data into key fields.

For example, if you ensure that phone numbers are entered in the same way, customer names, dates and company names should also be entered in a consistent way.