Effective customer management makes good business sense. Retaining existing customers is cheaper than finding new ones. Customer name and address details are a vital component of any CRM system; maintaining good customer data can: • Reduce the costs of data entry and data integrity • Reduce mailing cost • Maximise return of customer communications • Improve the perception of your organisation • Enable you to understand who your customers are Successful customer management helps grow your business, but the financial implications of poor customer management are high in terms of lost revenue, negative brand image, customer dissatisfaction and return on investment.

Why is this? Numerous factors contribute to this, including not orienting the business to be customer centric, not correcting broken business processes before costly automation within the CRM system, or perhaps not getting executive or employee buy in, but the most commonly overlooked reason still remains data quality which is rarely considered before, during or perhaps even after the CRM roll out No matter how sophisticated the CRM system, it will fail when populated with poor quality data. Conversely, even a simple system can produce excellent re-sults with good data. Healthy data lies at the heart of customer management; a database which con-tains duplicate or inaccurate data does your organisation no favours when it comes to marketing. Duplicate mailings to the same person, mailing to people who have gone away, who have asked not to be mailed or are deceased simply sends the message that you don’t care about your customers. In today’s economy, it is imperative to put the customer at the heart of the busi-ness; treating each customer as an individual to maximise lifetime value, coupled with the ability to personalise mailings or to send lifestyle information to the right person at the right time is vital to business success. CRM initiatives are designed to do just that, thus allowing organisations to better understand and manage current and potential customers, retain and penetrate existing customers and of course win new ones.

Putting the customer at the heart of your business

But the underlying truth is that 42% of CRM solutions are doomed to failure

Data cleansing for CRM

Well, unless you’ve got copious amounts of time and money, think 80:20 - break the problem down into its critical parts and sequentially fix the 20% of problems which have 80% of the financial impact.

1. Identify and correct Account and Contact duplicates in the CRM system 2. Prevent duplicates being introduced at point of data entry 3. Consider address verification and correction 4. Suppress deceased, out of business or gone away records 5. Comply with the DMA’s Preference services 6. Populate records with missing data for accurate segmentation and

targeting DQ Global’s powerful data quality improvement solutions for CRM cleansing for SalesLogix, Pivotal, Siebel and Goldmine ensure that your data is accurate and up to date, matching and linking disparate databases to deliver a single customer view, while also preserving the integrity of relational databases.

DQ Global Urban House, E2 Fareham Heights, Fareham, Hampshire, UK PO16 8XT Telephone +44 2392 988303, facsimile +44 2392 988302 e-mail sales@dqglobal.com, www.dqlobal.com

So what can be done?

Which data defects can be attacked?