Increase sales, marketing impact and customer experience with good quality data.

As the global economy continues to shift, more and more business leaders are striving to gain or maintain a competitive edge. Multiple areas of their business have been restructured, transformed and optimized; but the simple task of improving existing customer data remains neglected.

We all know the statistic "80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers''. But does your organization have a clean view and model of the 20% and a plan to expand this base? Moreover, do your business plans and budgets this year include data quality?

If you have an existing CRM platform you most likely have reservations around the quality of data in the system. You probably get overwhelmed when looking for data and have no idea where to start the clean-up process. Here is a 6 step process to help you start your data quality journey.

Step 1: Make a plan

Define an organizational data quality target or plan. Define high level data related policy’s, governance measures, ownership and KPI’s to ensure you stay on track.

Step 2: Analyze your data

Analyze the key customer or prospect related attributes that are important to your organization. These typically include contact methods and details, product preferences, social interests, job roles or responsibilities etc.

Step 3: Implement tools and approach

Implement a data quality approach or tool that will sit on your platform and provide valuable insight into your data and highlight areas which need improvement. This can be the most challenging part of the process, as a result my power platform & D365 team at Adastra have developed a Microsoft D365 Data Quality Solution which plugs into your existing CRM platform. This solution includes:

Data Quality Dashboards & Reporting

 Data Quality Rule Management Console

Data Quality Reporting by CRM Record Owner

Step 4: Execute plan

Highlight, track and report the areas which need to be remediated. These should align to your new organizational data quality targets. While I appreciate that data quality and management may fall on the data “owners” (possibly sales), it’s a best practice to assign a data steward to drive the data quality and cleansing workload.

Step 5: Track your progress

Frequently measure your progress in achieving your data quality objectives. Once again consider implementing a DQ Solution similar to our Microsoft D365 Data Quality tool which will provide reporting and dashboards related to your overall data quality goal.

Step 6: Maintain momentum

Now that you have invested time, effort and money into your data quality, don’t stop there. Your team should be frequently touching base with your customers to determine their updated needs, roles, interests and focus areas. To be continued in a later article……

Considerations

• Data stewards typically reside within the marketing department
• Sales aren’t tracked or compensated on data quality, so its always an afterthought for them.
• If implementing a data quality tool is out of your reach, consider exporting your data out to an excel sheet for analysis.
• If you neglect to analyze your data and determine what’s important to your business, you won’t be able to start the journey to improve.
• Data quality naturally deteriorates over time (approximately 5% per month depending on your business). As a result your data quality approach needs to be viewed as a long term journey and not a short term objective.
• Consider improving your data quality as an investment in an existing asset. Do not consider it as an endless money pit.
• If you stand back and let your data quality decline, you will lose sales and have challenges retaining customers.
• Drive a wedge between your qualified data in CRM and the data that is entered as a dumping ground. This can be accomplished by dividing records between Leads (prospects or suspects) and Contacts (customers).

Conclusion

Client centric hyper-focused businesses, concentrate on collecting the right data at the right time. Once this data is collected it can be harvested and crafted into meaningful messages which will resonate with your audience. Maintaining this data quality is a constant battle, but it’s essential for long-term growth and success for every business.

If you are not sure how to get started on your data quality journey, reach out and let me know. I will be happy to provide you with some ideas, techniques and approaches.

Written by Richard Dennis – Digital Business Transformation & D365 CRM & ERP Implementation Specialist