How to Clean Your CRM Data

Healthy CRM data is essential for the efficiency of your teams. However, it can become outdated as data grows, resulting in a higher number of duplicate data entries.

That’s where data cleaning tools can significantly help with your database cleanup process.

It’s the single best way to ensure that your CRM data is correct and still usable by your employees.

Keep reading to see how to clean up customer data and prevent it from happening in the first place.

Analyze Current Data

As multiple teams consistently work on your CRM database, it often happens that some data can end up there twice. Keeping your CRM data clean is essential for business efficiency. Therefore, the first step in performing database cleanup is detecting duplicate data.

After doing that, you’ve got two options:

• Delete duplicate data
• Merge duplicate data

Different data cleaning tools will help you perform each of these processes quickly.

Deletion is a better data cleaning technique if you detect that your data is duplicated and outdated. In this case, it’s best to delete the obsolete information as it’s no longer relevant to your business.

However, if your duplicate data is up to date and usable, it’s better to merge it.

Before you start working, create a CRM data cleansing plan containing all the procedures for CRM data. You can then safely begin your database cleanup procedure.

Set Up a Step-by-Step Data Input Procedure

Overcoming any issue requires placing prevention strategies from the start. In this case, that means that the best way to avoid a database full of duplicate entries is by creating a step-by-step data entry guide.

Why is this important? Creating rules is essential when you’re working with data. Every data entry needs to comply with the preset regulations to grow the quality of data in your CRM.

Here are a few examples:

• Client job titles – Create guidelines on how your employees will write job titles. Are you going to write down their working positions? Without such a rule, writing Dr. for one entry and Doctor for the other can quickly duplicate an entry.

• Client name – How do you write client’s names? Do you include full names and capitalize them?
• Client address – What if two entries share the same address? Do you merge those contacts?
• Additional information – What do you enter in the notes section?

Determining procedures for data fields will help you streamline your data entry process, significantly reducing the chance of duplicates appearing.

Limit the Number of Users with Data Entry Access

Your CRM is a precious business asset. In order to protect it, you should have limitations on which roles within your organization have access to view,  add, or remove it. One of the ways to control data entry procedures is to limit the number of administrators with data changing rights.

No matter how big your company is, there’s always a way to create rules about who has access to your CRM.

For example, the marketing team could create their spreadsheet with data they collect, and one person from the team could have access to the CRM to add the collected data.

Also, when you’re performing database cleaning, the responsible administrators should be the ones who know how to clean up customer data from your CRM. With this approach, you’re conducting damage control from the moment you start using a CRM tool.

Go Over Data Every Quarter

One of the best practices in data cleaning is setting a CRM data cleansing schedule. As every company is different, you’ll have to create a CRM data cleansing plan according to your needs.

However, revisiting your CRM data every quarter will prevent the duplicate data from piling up.

Besides setting a schedule for detailed data cleanup, create a practice of ongoing cleaning procedures. A healthy ongoing data cleaning practice will make the quarterly checks quick. More importantly, it’ll keep your CRM data up to date, helping your team remain efficient.

Keep Your CRM Data Clean

If you need any data cleansing services, please reach out to us. We’ll use our expertise to ensure your CRM database cleanup goes smoothly.

Let us help you keep your CRM data up to date and working for you at all times.