Why you Should Make Solving Duplicate Data Issues Top of your Agenda

The issue of duplicate data may not be high on your agenda, especially when it is seen by senior management as a timely and idle investment. However, from our experience of working with data and helping our customers to avoid duplicates, we would strongly disagree. Clean data is and should be foremost in every business process.

In this article we have outlined how having duplicate records for the same customer or company can have a significant impact on the efficiency and performance of your business, the people within it and your customers. This can be at the contact or company level, with the same or similar named record.

1. Missing Sales Opportunities not in your view

When put into monetary terms, the cost of duplicate data is alarming. Imagine the wasted costs of "duplicating messages", communications, advertising and more. In addition, the potential negative effect on response rates and the overall ROI of your marketing activity will be exasperated by the reputation effect on your business.

To help reduce wasted costs, users need to be able to identify duplicates and prevent additional duplicate records being entered into CRM This will put you in the best position possible to maintain a healthy database and save your company costs and stopgap data cleansing solutions.

2.  Lack of Single Customer View

With two or more records for the same person, it is difficult to view an accurate picture of your customers and their behavior. With each customer interaction being recorded against different records it makes it challenging to view what communication has taken place and if there are any outstanding actions. This also leads the potential of different efforts with a person, which can be counterproductive absent the knowledge of other previous communications.

From a sales and marketing perspective, it is tricky to evaluate what marketing effort has been successful and at what stage of the sales funnel the customer is if the same customer is in the database more than once.

3. Negative Impact on Brand Reputation

By neglecting the health of your customer contact data, you are neglecting the health of your business.  Customers are sources of existing business, new business and referrals.  By improving the state of their data, you are maximizing the effectiveness of your communications with them and building the perception of your brand, be it a product or service.

Imagine the impact on your company’s reputation if you are bombarding the same customer with multiple communications or telephone calls. Take for example, if you were to mail three versions of your marketing materials to Richard, Rich, Rick Andrews. Do you think Richard Andrews would view your company as a competent and professional one? If judged by email, the same person may have two or three email addresses, and records that may also contain no email. Despite this, efforts to single click merge would be essential.

4. Better Communications

Duplicated and inaccurate data affects every customer touch point from customer service teams’ conversations with your customers to marketing and sales messaging with new prospects.

From a customer service perspective, it is much harder and time consuming trying to get to the bottom of a customer issue if there are multiple records and differing notes and actions against them.

Gartner quantified the impact of bad data management, identifying that annoying customers in this way can result in a 25% reduction in potential revenue gains.

5. Avoid Losing or Decreased User Adoption

Data confidence plays a key role in how employees use business systems like CRM.  Poor quality data is one of the most common causes of low user adoption.  Your CRM and other data management systems could be the best around with user-friendly and intuitive functionality, but if the system is filled with duplicate data then users will see that very quickly.

Employees need to be using systems correctly and taking care to prevent mistakes for your business systems to be reliable at producing insights and tracking the state of your business.

6. Inaccurate Data Produces Inaccurate Reporting

Pipelines, interactions and deal management will all be adversely affected if the source data is corrupt with duplicates. Customer or client portals will leave greater opportunity for confusion if the client/customer is present with partial or incomplete information.

7. Missed Sales Opportunities

Poor quality data filled with inaccurate and duplicate records can be costly in terms of missed sales opportunities. Think of the lost time that could have been spent touching the right prospect rather than trying to reach contacts that are no longer in that position or at their respective companies.

8. Poor Business Processes

Prior to accurate consolidated data sets, your business may have lived in inaccurate data, using traditional methods to record customer data, such as Excel and Post-It notes. Using such business processes limit the view of your customer and inadvertently limit the growth of your business.

If this is true for your business and you are aware that employees are sharing customer information internally via emails, spreadsheets or shared drives, think again! As your business and customer base grows, so does the number of customer records, making the data unmanageable and increasing the potential to lose or access. Therefore, the solution is still a properly formatted CRM.

SO, THE SOLUTION IS?

Cool Life CRM, unlike the bigger names in CRM, we by default work and offer process to avoid duplicate records. Systems such as Salesforce and other create duplicates by design.

Cool Life CRM offers a one to many, and many to many data structures that allows the relationships of records rather than reentry or auto duplication of records.  With our rich in features CRM, valued processes and intuitive understanding, adoption by users is assured. Let us show you a demo of our CRM and show the value proposition of our teams’ knowledge.