In a world where data is increasingly becoming the lifeblood of businesses, it’s more important than ever to make sure that the data collected by organisations is clean and of good quality. One of the first steps in ensuring your data stays organised is to store and manage it within a CRM system. In this blog, we’ll look at key functionality in your CRM system that will ensure your data integrity remains high!
What is Clean Data?
First of all, it’s essential to understand what is clean data and why it’s so important to maintain and ensure it remains high quality in your organisation. Clean data is accurate, complete, and consistent data that has been validated and verified. This means that the data conforms to the rules and standards set by the organisation collecting it. Achieving clean data can be a challenge, especially for large organizations with multiple data sources.
Segmentation
Now let’s jump into our first tip for using your CRM to maintain your data, segmentation! Using the functionality within your CRM system you’ll be able to create categories or lists to differentiate your data into different groups. This will allow you and your team to quickly identify your key market sectors, types of customers/prospects or marketing lists. The beauty of this is categories are often highly customizable so you can tailor these to best meet your business needs. Having the ability to quickly segment data in a way that’s visible in real-time across your whole team is the first step in keeping it consistent and clean.
Compliance
A lot of CRM systems now have marketing functionality built-in or integrations with marketing providers. A common issue with using an email marketing solution that’s siloed from the rest of your database is suppression lists such as unsubscribes and hard bounces go unnoticed or missed across your data. Utilizing a CRM that has a built-in marketing function or an in-depth integration with your provider ensures that these suppressions are correctly tagged against your contacts. Not being compliant in this way can lead to fines and distrust across your network, affecting your bottom line. The same can be said when it comes to contacts in your network that are TPS registered. Thankfully, a CRM often automatically makes these updates for you and your team and keeps this information front of mind when you’re prospecting within your database, keeping you safe and compliant.
Report Creation
Our final area of functionality to hone in on within your CRM system is its reporting functionality. Whether these be dashboards or drill-down reports, ensuring you have the right reporting suite set up can be a game changer when it comes to highlighting problems in your data. Creating reports to flag unassigned prospects and customers, your suppression lists, key target accounts or out-of-date information. This gives you and your team areas to focus on without having to hunt through spreadsheets and piles of paperwork, it also can enable you to highlight at-risk customers or prospects saving you from losing money or damaging relationships across your network.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many reasons why having a CRM system is so important for data health and cleanliness and we’ve just scratched the surface! In today’s world, where data plays an increasingly important role in business decision-making, it’s essential to ensure that you have quick and effective ways to segment and report across your database as well as remain compliant.
To find out more about using KulaHub as your data health centre, book a demo or contact [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help!
