CRM

Problem

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a strategic business tool for many companies. Efficient and thorough management of customer data is the starting point for competitive advantages. However, many organisations are not satisfied with the results of their CRM- activities. There are many different CRM systems, but marketing, sales and service success can only be achieved if your data entry and your data management are up to speed. Poor data quality in CRM systems will complicate understanding customers, anticipating their needs and launching initiatives to meet those needs. This will lead to not reaping the competitive advantages a CRM system promises.

Solution

The success of all CRM initiatives lies in the integration of data quality solutions, allowing organisations to define and manage high quality customer data throughout the entire CRM system. After profiling (establishing the “data situation” in your system: consistency, validity, completeness, accuracy, etc.) and setting the goals (availability, desired quality level, process requirements, etc.) the first major step will be the automated cleansing of the data. Some typical examples of data “contamination” are: Misspelled names, incorrect gender indications, inconsistency in the use of date formats, unclear abbreviations and acronyms, incomplete or incorrect postal and e-mail addresses or phone numbers and a high percentage of duplicate entries.

Using high quality cleansing and matching methods, errors are detected and corrected. Once you have reached a specific data quality standard, you need to maintain this standard. Data must be continually monitored and checked before being stored in the operational and analytical CRM systems. An intelligent application instantly identifies duplicate entries, for example, and performs a syntactic check for phone numbers and e-mail addresses. You can also validate fields in the input screen and perform an instant check of address details and automatically correct any errors.

Value

Using Human Inference data quality solutions any company can take full advantage of the potential of their CRM system. It will help you

• recognise all the names in the world,
• always register the correct address,
• send email without bounces,
• record the correct phone number,
• make sure that data entry is done right the first time,
• facilitate a single customer view.

Eventually, the commercial potential of the CRM system can be fully harvested.