SIDEBAR: Down and Dirty with Customers
Dirty data is the dirty little secret that can jeopardise your CRM effort
According to Rick Klau, vice president of vertical markets at Interface Software, the issues associated with data quality and customer relationship management that can impact an organisation's entire strategic business development initiative are: sharing, control, categorisation and workflow.
Sharing The concept of sharing is fundamental to the success of CRM implementation, and the overall quality of data. By contributing contacts to the centralised knowledge base, users can ultimately gain a 360-degree view of all firm relationships, which can then be leveraged for business development, cross-selling and client retention initiatives.
However, the reality is that organisational attitudes about sharing relationship data vary, as do individual professional attitudes. For instance, some professionals will willingly share all of their contacts with the centralised knowledge base and, in return, will gain all the benefits of an open system. Others are more guarded with contact information and will only share selectively.
Moreover, there are gradations as to exactly what specific information about clients professionals may want to share with the centralised database. The question then is how to protect the client's sensitive data in the CRM system while sharing information that should be disseminated.
Sharing is not an all-or-nothing proposition but instead involves various degrees of participation with the CRM knowledge base. CRM systems incapable of accommodating degrees of sharing are at a distinct disadvantage. Klau says without the ability to accommodate different sharing behaviour, professionals will opt out of the CRM system, severely impacting the quantity and quality of the information being fed to the system.
Control Another issue impacting CRM data quality is the notion of control. Historically, professionals kept their contacts in paper files, in documents or on miscellaneous slips of paper. They had ultimate control regarding to whom they provided information and what updates they would accept. Unfortunately they likely also had a significant amount of outdated contact information.
The introduction of a centralised CRM knowledge base means it is now much easier for professionals to keep their contacts up to date without extra manual effort.
However, what happens when another user makes an incorrect change causing a critical fax to be sent to the wrong location? Or an administrative assistant incorrectly changes contact information on the firm's top client? To address this issue, the system should allow professionals to control their contacts by preventing these mistakes from occurring.
"Despite the trust that professionals have for their fellow co-workers, there are some contacts that they feel no one should touch," Klau says. "For instance, the clients of many professionals are individuals with whom the professionals have cultivated close personal relationships over a long period of time and with whom they keep in regular contact.
"It therefore makes those professionals feel uncomfortable knowing that anyone in the firm, regardless of their relationship with a client, can edit and potentially corrupt client information within the CRM system. Indeed, from the professional's perspective, any changes to contact information made by others are suspect, as the professional with the close client ties would likely be the first to learn of any change in the client's information. Accordingly, professionals need some sense that they are still in control over their clients' data regardless of whether it resides in a firm-wide CRM database."
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