A quick 'How to' guide on improving your CRM data to get better customer insight. Get to know your customer's data journey through your business. Use KPIs to maintain data quality and improve the security and efficacy of your data storage and reporting. Start with small data sets that your team already knows and understands really well. Don't get overwhelmed by taking on the task of data quality across the whole business. Once you understand your data you will be able to segment your marketing campaigns to target your high value customers.
1. Quick guide to
better CRM data
How to turn your CRM into a clean and effective
tool that adds value to your sales pipeline
2. Quick guide to better
CRM data
1
“It is often difficult to
perceive the work
pressures of
colleagues from
different areas of the
business. Therefore it
is a good idea to start
the CRM data audit
work within one
business team to
highlight bottlenecks
that the team can
resolve itself.
CRM data issues that we come across
Marketing finds it frustrating that they are not
always able to accurately track which events
have led to the most qualified leads. Lots of client
details on the CRM are incomplete so there is a
significant waste of time and effort going back to
the original event data to try to correct entries.
Marketing have lost faith in the CRM and for
important events they create separate
spreadsheets to circumvent the system.
Data entry is often completed by the sales teams.
Sales teams want to get potential customer
details into the system as quickly as possible to
get them into their sales funnel and do not always
accurately capture where the lead came from this
frustrates the marketing team who need this
information to measure the success of their work.
How can you integrate diverse data
requirements whilst giving each department
incentives to co-operate with data entry that is
meaningful across the organisation?
Sales teams are measured on the
numbers of new accounts made.
Marketing teams are measured on the
quantity of new data acquired. Customer
service teams are measured on how cost
effectively they deal with requests and
complaints. No one is measured on data
quality.
Customer service
feedback can be in
unstructured notes
fields and yet that
data could provide
extremely valuable
product or service
feedback to the sales
team.
“
”
”
3. Quick guide to better
CRM data
2
Bad data isn’t like
dirty washing - to us
it is perfectly normal
and anyway we enjoy
washing it! Don’t be
embarrassed by it and
let us help you to
address the issues
and make it better.
“
No silver bullet to data quality
It does take work to keep data sources clean,
current and useful. Data quality is a concern for
most companies.
The good news is that once you know where
the ‘dirty’ data is entering your systems you
can start to plan the clean-up.
It is always difficult to tackle a problem that at first
appears overwhelming. Data cleansing does not
have to be done in one ‘big bang’ approach. We
advise clients to tackle data issues in an
incremental way at first and learn from each
project and take that learning on to each new
stage of the cleansing process.
Here is our 6 step plan to improve CRM data
STEP 1: Bad data is perfectly normal
Identify your customer’s data journey.
Document the key data elements of your
customer journey. Map your current customer
data to check that entries are correct and at
which point on the journey those details were
added to the customer record. Play detective
and find out where useful data is missing and
then create a KPI (key performance indicator) to
keep your teams aligned in addressing that
particular issue. The KPI will also help you to
identify often simple improvements in CRM data
capture.
”
4. Quick guide to better
CRM data
3
STEP 2: Hidden cost of bad data
The longer it takes you to process your data
the more likely it is to impact on the customer
journey resulting in delays in response times.
Data cleaning tools can highlight incomplete data
prior to data being entered on to the CRM at
source. This can save time and money further
down the data journey.
Create data quality targets and regularly run
reports to score the quality of your data. This
will start to highlight any patterns that are
developing. By committing long term to CRM
data quality you will develop more sophisticated
targets and better training for your data entry
teams.
STEP 3: Don’t do everything at once
Start with key areas of your CRM data and focus
on making small improvements within one team.
The team is more likely to invest energy in making
the improvements and implementing the KPIs if
they can see a direct benefit to themselves. Each
team member can write a list of top 10 data
issues and this will help the team manager to
prioritise which issues to tackle in what order.
Often it helps to work backwards from a customer
complaint to help identify what should be
included in your top 10.
“Now we make sure
that each time an
order is made it
automatically
triggers a sales
follow up call on the
order system.
”
5. Quick guide to better
CRM data
4
STEP 4: Finding problems is a good thing
By carrying out a data profiling report on a
particular data set in one team you can see what
you are dealing with. Once you have identified the
major issues you can start to develop some rules
to solve those data entry issues and to assign
KPIs to monitor the effectiveness of those
solutions. It is important for this process to be
done in non-blame culture.
STEP 5: Is the data relevant
CRM data needs to be accurate and up to date
otherwise your business teams will lose faith in its
relevancy and start to use workarounds. Try not
to rely on multiple spreadsheets alongside
your CRM and risk data being kept in isolated
silos with poor sharing of customer intelligence.
There is no point spending time and money
collecting data if you do not then go on to use it in
a meaningful way. Invest in a data storage
architecture that will allow you to access the
data easily and integrate with reporting and
analytics systems.
STEP 6: Now you can start to predict
Faith in data quality within your CRM means you
can generate reports to consider the ROI of
your marketing activity. Use analytics to look for
developing patterns and then integrate your own
data with external sources, such as weather
forecasting or socio-economic indicators, to
inform your planning.
“Once we looked
carefully at our data
we were able to
understand where our
most valuable clients
were coming from and
it changed the way we
invest in our
campaigns.
”
6. Quick guide to better
CRM data
5
Case study
A medium sized events company based in the
South East of England providing event
packages to business clients. The company uses
a variety of different types of marketing
campaigns to drive engagement and to generate
email addresses for their prospect CRM.
More and more frequently it is the sales teams
who are responsible for the data entry into the
CRM, they tend to focus on the entry fields that
are most relevant to sales and do not prioritise
the fields designed into the systems by other
departments, such as Marketing.
The company know that their customer journey
from prospect through to sales, then onto
customer service, is a bit clunky and there is
duplication within the systems so one client
can have multiple entries within each system.
Customer service is handled over the phone but
increasing volumes of contact are being dealt
with via social media using Twitter and Facebook.
The company has grown steadily but is now
finding the increase in sales has seen a
disproportional rise in bad data quality. There is
limited information flow between customer
service and the sales team; the executive team
suspect this is starting to have an impact on
referrals and repeat sales.
No one team takes
responsibility for
maintaining data
quality and managing
the processing of the
data journey through
the different systems
throughout our
organisation.
“
”
7. Quick guide to better
CRM data
6
Implementing an action plan
Data quality analysis; by doing a data quality
analysis of the customer journey the data quality
team were able to consider ways to improve the
current processes. The company started by
implementing a full data cleaning and profiling of
its existing data storage systems. The profiling
reports identified a number of issues.
Data cleaning; a simple data cleaning tool was
used to update and clean the data. KPIs were
assigned to the data quality (known as ’scoring
the data’) so that the teams have an incentive to
ensure that data cleaning and update routines are
performed regularly.
Design of the data entry fields; once the team
identified ‘bad’ data entering the CRM system
they were then able to improve the existing data
and then, with appropriate design, it was possible
to prevent bad data entry in the first place. For
example, one of the solutions was to use a third
party address look-up to validate the information
at point of entry.
The process of cleaning
and profiling the CRM
data highlighted
particular data entry
sources that were
consistently poor. This
helped managers to
identify staff training
needs within their
teams. The data
cleansing report also
enabled the team
manager to assign
scores to bought data
lists in terms of their
quality and then rank
the list suppliers for
value for money.
“
”
8. Quick guide to better
CRM data
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Identify issues in the client data journey
The team organised the data investigation under
these four headings:
1 Descriptive (what happened?)
2 Diagnostic (why did it happen?)
3 Predictive (what could happen?)
4 Prescriptive (how to make change happen)
By using this analytics process the company
discovered a number of potential sticking points in
the data journey.
Discrete reporting; the company found that it
was a good idea to limit the reporting, to a
departmental level at first, to give everyone time to
catch up and understand what was required of
them. This meant that team managers were able
to identify training needs in a constructive way
rather than a punitive one.
Data quality scores became a regular part of the
business reporting to the CEO so it remains a key
priority. Once the data quality levels were raised
then the management team became more
confident in relying on the reporting from that data
to start influencing strategic decision making.
“The customer service
team did not ever
receive the full
customer agreement
contract details from
the sales teams that
meant they weren’t
able to deal effectively
with business
customers querying
what was and wasn’t
included in their events
package. This issue,
first highlighted in the
data quality analysis,
is now a KPI and
compliance is
measured in monthly
management reports.
”
9. Quick guide to better
CRM data
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“As the data improves
the business will
become more
confident in
measuring both the
successes and the
processes that need
improving. The
business will start to
spot trends and begin
to see a direct return
on its investment in
the data quality
programme
implementation.
At KETL we suggest…
We find that helping clients to implement a quick
data audit always helps them to highlight big
gaps in their data entry. Then we develop reports
specific and relevant to each department head to
assist them in improving their team’s performance at
data entry. This process is usually iterative as you fix
one problem you will highlight others.
Clients often find that as they improve one area of
their business reporting and gain a better
understanding of the data flow they begin to see
other areas for improvement. The business will see
how improving the data quality and data capture
results in a better understanding of their
customers, improved targeting in marketing and
more cost effective service delivery. For example,
simply removing customer duplicates gives you a
true picture of sales volumes per customer, or
improving consistency in naming categories from
referral sources, gives you a true picture of campaign
cost effectiveness.
Once the CRM data is consistently good quality the
organisation can then introduce dashboard reporting
systems accessible across departments.
”
10. Quick guide to better
CRM data
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Get in touch
For further information or help with your
CRM data project speak to Helen to see
how we can help >
Helen Woodcock
helen@ketl.co.uk
Illustration www.thirteen.co.uk