Customer relationship management (CRM) software as we know it has evolved because businesses are handling more transactions with customers – and producing more data – than ever before. Yet, according to Ringlead’s analysis of U.S. Department of Labor Statistics,customer data erodes at 5 to 5.5 percent per month. The impact of this deterioration is inefficiency.
You can see this inefficiency firsthand in sales behavior, through end-user frustration, and in declining daily usage of your CRM solution. As a result, the initial promise of relationship management goes unfulfilled – teams still struggle to track transactions, and businesses continue to operate without valuable data to help guide their decision-making.
The problem of keeping customer data up to date is not new:
- In 2001, analysts found that 71 percentof CRM entries experienced one or more changes in the prior 12-month period
- Another study performed six years earlier (in 1995) also pointed to the expanding nature of the problem. At that time, 62 percentof contacts had one or more changes.
- 91 percentof Millennials (born between 1977-1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years. At that rate, they can be assumed to have 15 to 20 jobs over the course of their careers, and these frequent shifts will make maintaining accurate customer data a full-time job.
- Studies have found that 76 percentof records are damaged by poor data entry. Common issues include mistyping, misspellingand inconsistent data formatting, all of which impacts overall efficiency and productivity.
Solving the data decay problem manually is a Herculean effort at best. At worst, manual data entry actually hurts the team with sloppy data that sends them on a wild goose chase.
Here are three things your company needs to know to help with the data decay problem and ensure for future success:
Minimize the number of data entry points to improve the relevancy and accuracy of customer data.The fact of the matter is that computers are just better at data capture than human beings are. Even the most conscientious knowledge worker has been known to make mistakes entering data, and one wrong keystroke in a phone number or email address can cause a ripple effect of lost time and productivity as your team wastes time tracking down accurate information. so anything you canautomate you should automate.
Eliminate busy work with software you actually enjoy using– and that gives something back.If your database is just a system of record, what’s the incentive for your team to make sure the data is complete and accurate? Filling in rows in a spreadsheet is the textbook definition of busywork. But if taking the same action also generates reminders to follow up with the leads in those rows, a sales rep might find a little more inspiration for daily data entry. When your team gets something valuable back from the software they use, they both enjoy the process much more and are much more likely to capture accurate data in a timely manner—benefitting the entire team.
Leverage the power of your team to help make sure your organization's data is clean and up to date.Is your team empowered to fix data issues they find in your system? How can they share new information with their teammates? Collaborative software has a leg up on individual solutions by crowdsourcing accurate data. If I have an email address for a prospect and my colleague has her phone number, we need to be able to combine that data to improve our chances of getting ahold of her to make our pitch.
Armando Mann is the vice president of sales and customer success at RelateIQ, a CRM company that was acquired this year by Salesforce.com.
