Gaining a timely and accurate view of the customer has been an elusive goal for organisations for many years, despite investments in CRM, MDM and Marketing Automation solutions designed to provide those very same insights. One of the key challenges is that customer contact information is often held in different systems, updated and enhanced at various times with varying levels of completeness and accuracy. In multinational organisations, achieving a collective view is challenged by multiple languages, as well as cultural differences that add more complexity to the mix.
As a result, CRM administrators often struggle to ensure consistency following the consolidation of sources of information that originate from multiple sources whose definitions of entities can be quite different. These struggles impact daily operations, as well the ability to understand buying behaviours and customer interaction channel preferences. Without such understanding, customer acquisition and loyalty efforts are impaired.
Organisations that recognise the potential of customer relationship management (CRM) software to drive more customer-centric strategies have also come to recognise that the quality of customer data is critical to the actual success and adoption of any CRM initiative. This is particularly true for organisations that have made CRM the focal point of their customer-facing strategies, since every interaction is grounded in data that drives that interaction.
A November 2014 Forrester Research report noted that “high quality data, when used effectively, can provide that elusive single view of a customer – a fundamental element to enable companies to deliver good customer experiences and realise revenue gains from doing so. This goal is increasingly urgent to tame the rising tide of customer data generated via the explosion of communication channels and touch points.” The analyst firm further noted that data quality is essential to that view and that “improving and sustaining customer data quality needs a two-pronged approach that leverages the strengths of a CRM application with the strengths of data quality solutions.”
Unfortunately during the roll-out and operation of most CRM systems, most organisations struggle to agree on the simplest of terms, such as the definition of a customer and who owns the relations, let alone all the myaried contact information points that are now available in the digital spectrum of marketing. The good news is that this issue could be addressed by adopting data quality solutions, which “allow organisations to centrally define and manage automated data quality services.”
Sales, marketing and customer service professionals depend on accurate data, and quite frankly don’t care if it was collected in real-time or not. Their use of data to make decisions is based on the information that is available in the here and now. Most importantly, they want actionable trustworthy information in which to make strategic business decisions, thus Better Data, Better Decisions. Despite its importance to organisations that want to maximise the ROI of their commitment to a CRM strategy, data quality tends to go unaddressed. This error in foresight adds to the fact that poor data quality is responsible for 50% of all CRM failures. Good data quality on the other hands not only enables staff to carry out their roles more effectively, but also reduces errors, duplications and the number of unresolved customer issues that result from poor customer data. According to an Aberdeen study, 70% of the companies listed as “Best in Class" as measured by revenue growth and Income had fully deployed data quality solutions and programs initiated within their company.
With the aid of technology enterprises seeking to empower their CRM programmes are able to validate and verify records, ensuing that fields are accurate and that customer data is complete. And the bane of many CRM operations, duplicate client records, can also be avoided. With more sophisticated solution, customer data can also be enriched with additional insights from third-party sources.
Embedding data quality processes into CRM systems in this way helps to support that proverbial goal of a “Single Customer View”. If you don’t really know your customers, it will prove quite difficult to fulfill the promise of a “relationship.” And, after all, that is the “R” of CRM.
By Leonard Dubois, Senior Vice President & CMO at Trillium Software
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