In todays’ business world, customers are kings. It is very important to maintain good relationship with the customers; Customers’ data play a key role in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. Data is considered as an important asset in businesses. The business data can be categorized into good data and bad data.
Good Data:
Data is considered as good when it encompasses following parameters: Consistency, Complete, Accurate, Timely, etc. Good Data results in better managed services. It gives better insight, develops trust, and makes it accountable. Overall, the data helps in serving and managing customers better.
Bad Data:
Bad data is bad for a business. Bad Data refers to duplicate, incomplete, inconsistent, and inaccurate data. Bad data misleads and results in confusion and failure.
Bad data is considered as one of the reasons for a CRM projects’ failure.
Data with Usability & Accuracy are considered as clean & of high quality.
Importance & Benefits of Data Quality:
Quality of data is important to stay connected with your customers in todays’ competitive world. Quality data brings following benefits to the organization:
- Improved Customer Relation
- Reduced cost
- Effective Marketing
This results in running business smoothly.
Case Study-1:
Consider a CRM application (Salesforce Organization) with poor quality data (Bad contact & Financial information).
Following are the issues the Organizations face:
- Leads can’t be nurtured, and they can’t be converted to Account.
- Customers (Accounts) can’t be in follow-up.
- Confusion in Financial information (Product Price/Revenue).
- Reduced focus on targeted audience.
- Reduced customer satisfaction.
This results in failure of the application.
Case Study-2:
Consider a CRM application (Salesforce Organization) with Good data (Good contact & Financial information).
The Organization gains following benefits:
- Provides better insight.
- Builds up greater trust.
- Increases accountability.
- Have great focus on targeted audience.
This results in better customer satisfaction and enhances success of the organization.
How to improve Data Quality in a Salesforce Organization?
Standardize:
Create a standard for your organization, Minimize User entry of data. Instead of text box, use Picklist values. This helps in maintaining Data integrity. Data will be consistent, and complete across the organization.
Ex: Using ‘Standard State-Country Picklist’, ‘Global Picklist’.
Cleanse:
Create a ‘Data Quality Analysis Dashboard’ and monitor data cleanliness across the organization.
This is going to be the regular process to ensure that the data entering into the systems are clean.
De-Duplicate:
Implement usage of ‘Duplicate Management’ within Data Management. This helps in preventing duplication of data.
Ex: Create a Duplication/Matching rule to prevent entry of duplicate data in the organization.
Validation Rule:
Make use of validation rules wherever necessary to ensure meaningful data in the organization.
Ex: Create validation rule to enter customer date of birth in past, which would be meaningful.
Enrich:
Make sure that the users (Agents/Representatives) are trained in the organization to deal with the data. So, that the data collected by them would be accurate and up-to date.
Long term processes that helps in maintaining Data Quality:
- Monitor Data with the help of Reports & Dashboards.
- Automate Data Collection process (Web-Lead form).
- Make data works for everyone by following a standard across the organization.
- Focus on ‘Data Security’, and Users’ level of access on data they need.
- Review and enhance the process regularly.
- Do proper ‘Data Message’ before importing the records in the organization.
Conclusion:
The discussion above highlights how data plays a critical and vital role in todays’ business world.
Reference Link: https://help.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=01530000001x37CAAQ
