What is ‘Dirty Data’?
Dirty data is any data that contains erroneous information. It can come in many forms, but one thing is common: these data won’t be helpful and can just limit your team’s productivity and efficiency. You can consider data dirty if it is:

•  Inconsistent. Redundancy of data wherein the same field or information is stored in different places, which leads to inconsistencies.
• Inaccurate. Data is technically correct, but some parts may be inaccurate, such as customer addresses with wrong street number or customer name with misspellings.
• Incorrect. Information stored does not match the field it was entered in. For example: date of birth field containing current date.
•  Duplicate. Many companies experience having duplicate customer records which can be costly as it affects the accuracy of the count of customers in their database. The accumulation of these duplicate records also affects their storage space and can affect their inventory and procurement decisions.
• Incomplete. Incomplete data is another common problem that many businesses encounter. If any record is not complete, it can not serve its purpose. This can hamper business continuity or affect productivity, especially for organizations that use data as a normal part of their day to day operations.

With these so many types of dirty data to affect your CRM systems, it’s important to always conduct a regular CRM maintenance to cleanse your data.

Why Regular CRM Maintenance is Important
Your CRM is one of the most important tools in your business. In fact, it is the bridge that connects your business to your customers. It is what helps you maintain a healthy and harmonious relationship with them. Given this, it’s important that you get to schedule regular CRM maintenance so as to avoid any potential system problems that might affect your daily operations. A simple data error can cost a business hundreds of thousands or even millions of profits. With dirty data, your marketing campaigns and outreach programs may not work as effectively as compared to using good quality data. Through regular CRM maintenance, you can:

• Make use of more consistent data across all departments in your organization;
• Provide better customer support and increase your customer retention and acquisition rate;
• Create better products and services that your customers will want to pay for;
• Allow you to identify and categorize your leads more efficiently, helping your sales team make the most of every opportunity that is available to your business;
• Run a more focused and effective marketing campaign; and
• Improve your bottom line.

Why Data Quality Should be a Priority
Many businesses don’t seem to see the value of maintaining good data quality. Considering the value that good data can provide to organizations, many of them still struggle to put their data to good use. Good quality data can be a great tool in helping businesses achieve their goals. Here are some of the reasons why you should put data quality management at the foreground of your business operations.

1. Enhanced efficiency and resource management
According to a recent report by Experian on data quality management, 52% of the organizations they have surveyed are driven to maintain high-quality data for the purpose of increasing efficiency, while 40% of the respondents cite cost savings as the reason. With better data quality, businesses can save more time, money, manpower and other resources in handling various functions and day to day processes.
2. Improved regulatory compliance
To ensure that organizations are in compliance with business and industry regulations, it’s important to always make sure that the data being used for their operations are secured, well-maintained and updated. Ever since the implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) this year, companies are now required to give their users the option not to sell their personal data. In this light, businesses should see to it that their data is well maintained and organized to make sure that they are in compliance with this regulation, among others.
3. Better decision making
The decisions made by a business operator can make or break the organization. The ability to make strategic decisions require trustworthy data. This is why a properly maintained database is important, as the right set of data can help business managers make better, well-informed decisions. As more and more businesses nowadays rely on data for making sound decisions, the ability to maintain quality data has also become a priority for businesses.

How to Cleanse Your CRM
Now that we have established the importance of maintaining your CRM and getting rid of dirty data, it’s best that you learn more about your options for your CRM maintenance. There are three options for you to accomplish this.

• Hire an inhouse CRM and database manager
Managing customer data can be a full-time job. For an organization to make sure that your operations are not affected by dirty data, it’s important that you have a professional database manager, or perhaps a team, to handle your CRM maintenance needs. The number of people that you will assign for this maintenance task will depend on the size of your CRM system as well as your budget.
• Use a CRM maintenance tool
Most modern CRM software now offer enhanced features, tools, and integrations which can help monitor and maintain your CRM’s health. This sort of feature can help you easily identify records with issues, such as duplication, inaccuracy, or inconsistency. However, these features are only limited to flagging items and will still need frequent human intervention
• Outsource your CRM maintenance needs
If hiring a CRM and database manager is not an option, then you can consider outsourcing this service to a reliable third party provider. Considering the amount of time and manpower it will require to filter through all the records in your system, it will make better sense to outsource this work instead. With the right outsourcing team, you can assure that all the dirty data in your CRM gets filtered in the most cost efficient manner.

Conclusion
Maintaining good quality data is now a necessity. Considering the many benefits that you can reap from using clean and error-free data, having a CRM maintenance solution in place is the right way to go. Here at Assivo, we can take care of your CRM data cleansing and quality data management needs. Having worked with various businesses from all across the globe, we understand the importance of quality work, confidentiality and security. By outsourcing your CRM maintenance to us, we will make sure that your database is rid of dirty data.

Want to know if your CRM system needs a cleanse? We provide comprehensive CRM health checks, with a detailed analysis report, free of charge.