Any customer relationship management (CRM) effort, whether it’s a major software and process overhaul or marketing campaign, will fail to work effectively if a customer data platform – Epsilon you have is disorganized, weak, or hardly reliable. There are steps you can take to ensure high-quality CRM data, including using an address validation tool that can be integrated with any Web-enabled platform to validate and standardize addresses in real time.
Here are four key steps to “clean up” your CRM data and be left with only the best and most useful for your company or business.
1. Minimize multiple master records, because the ultimate culprit in cluttered data is redundant records, which obscures important information about a particular customer. For instance, how do you sift through hundreds of various master records for each customer? How do you go about with the cleanup?
You should analyze customer records for connections and similarities, taking advantage of everything from as simple as postal standards. This way you can eliminated site-duplication rate and start over with cleaner, more organized records. Don’t hesitate to explore an address checker and other validation tools, because these can do wonders in getting you through this crucial step.
2. Trust your human judgment, even amid automation. Automation can play an integral role in any data cleanup process, but your eye for things still work in improving CRM. You, not automation, can make an association between an affiliated brand or a corporate sector. You can also help your company treat clients and partners much better than an automated tool can, if at all. Additionally, you can find ways to explore opportunities with all clients, even those that are prone to be underestimated.
3. Reduce overlaps. Minimize or eliminate redundant communication with clients, for instance multiple brochures or several sales people sent to the same client or site on the same day or period of time. You can perform this optimally when you get a better hold of the true identity, nature, and needs of your clients. Your customer database is the best place to start doing this.
4. Implement cleaning regularly. One-time data cleanup simply wouldn’t cut it. This is why your company or organization should take proactive steps to ensure that errors, redundant records, and inefficient practices in CRM do not creep back into your processes.
Stop problems before they start. Perform validity checks on records as they are entered, preventing duplication. An address validation service (also known as address standardization), for example, verifies that an address is valid and has a mailbox with delivery point validation (DPV) data. It also corrects bad street names, cities, states, ZIP codes, and other address elements.
An address checker can increase returns on sales and marketing efforts, and even improve shipping process and reduce costs.
Find out how address validation web-services can improve and update your CRM data.
