In addition to improving the work of your marketing and sales teams, CRM data hygiene streamlines your internal processes. Improve communication and data sharing between departments, minimize human error, and allow your internal experts to focus on revenue-generating tasks.
Customer relationship management or CRM is a strategy for managing all of a company's relationships and interactions with its potential and existing customers. A CRM system helps companies stay in touch with customers, streamline processes and improve profitability.
When we talk about CRM, we usually mean a CRM system, a tool used for contact management, sales management, productivity, and much more. The goal of a CRM system is simple: to improve all the interactions that support your business. In fact, CRM solutions help you deliver a great customer experience throughout their entire lifecycle, at every interaction from marketing, sales, e-commerce, and customer service.
CRM software records customer contact information such as email, phone, website, social media profile, etc. You can also enter other information, such as recent news about company activity, as well as store details such as a customer's personal preferences regarding communications.
The CRM system organizes this information to provide you with a complete record of individuals and companies so that you can better understand their relationship over time.
CRM software improves customer relationship management by creating a holistic view of the customer by capturing their interactions with the business and displaying the information needed to have better customer conversations.
CRM allows a company to deepen its relationships with customers, customer service users, colleagues, partners, and suppliers.
Building good relationships and following up with leads and customers is crucial to customer acquisition and retention – this is the concept behind CRM. You can see it all in one place: a simple customizable dashboard that can show you a customer's past history with you, the status of their orders, outstanding customer service issues, and much more.
Today, many companies spend too much time manually entering data into their CRM. This, of course, generates errors and prevents your teams from spending valuable time developing their activities. Imagine your sales team, for example, spending a considerable number of hours per month manually entering data into your tools. It doesn't sound very encouraging, especially when at least 30% of sales-related activities could be automated.
Teams in any organization—marketing, sales, service, or revenue management—shouldn't accumulate manually updated spreadsheets, create decentralized reports, or collect data in disparate ways. This represents a waste of time. On the contrary, they should dedicate their efforts in making decisions based on reliable reports to support the growth of the company.
In this context, a CRM platform that does not serve as a single source of reference represents a risk for any organization. In the same way, half-automated processes, reports with inaccurate data and data silos do not contribute to the correct operation of the company, since decisions are made based on inaccurate data.
As businesses transform, systems that worked great for a small organization start to fail. In rare cases it is a total or catastrophic failure. However, each team develops its own, more complex processes, the data is isolated and the efficiency decreases to a certain point, in such a way that what worked very well before, today is the cause of problems.
To grow with the business, operations teams need solutions that engage them in that growth from the start. That solution is a CRM, of course.
Whether you're part of a core revenue management team or operating for a single department, you need unified processes and tools that connect applications, organize customer data, and automate business processes. This will allow you to have an effective, aligned and flexible organization. And, consequently, a first-class experience for the customer.
Consider revenue management teams, for example: With a unified system, the revenue management team can align around reliable numbers and more effectively predict revenue. The implementation of an operations strategy and the dismantling of information silos can generate results that are more consistent with the business objective.
But how do you know which solution is the right one? Or where to start? One of the critical components that any operations and revenue management solution must have is, without a doubt, the ability to eliminate friction in the processes.
One of the easiest ways is through data synchronization, which is one of the axes that simplifies the joint operation of different systems.
Most companies store data in several tools, and if these do not communicate with each other, the data remains isolated, forming silos or closed compartments to which only a few people in strategic positions in the company have access. In terms of security, this may sound very good, but it is detrimental to the operation of a company, due to the friction that it produces between processes and areas when looking for the circulation of said data.
With two-way synchronization strategies and in real time, data can always be in sync in your CRM, ensuring you have continuous access to accurate and up-to-date information.
With data integration solutions, it is very easy to completely eliminate friction in your business processes by allowing the connection between applications thanks to its technological ecosystem; it also allows the databases to be synchronized all the time; and, as if that were not enough, the synchronization options are completely customizable.
So, so that the data of your business can go from one place to another without any type of friction caused by a process, it is important that you develop automation strategies that allow you to consult the data in real time. In this way, your decisions will no longer depend on potentially obsolete data.
To guarantee that your data is updated automatically in your single source of reference (your CRM), it is best to change the way you treat the data.
Data quality is not only related to technology: to a large extent, the cleanliness or hygiene of the databases guarantees said quality. This consists of the cleaning, maintenance and continuous review measures of the databases, which are the computer heritage of your company.
1- Guarantees the company's investment in technology: by having accurate and updated data you have a wider margin for an optimal return on investment. Keep in mind that it will cost you $1 to clean a record when it has just been entered into your CRM; $10 to clean it up afterwards and $100 to do nothing (since you will have lost revenue).
2- Optimize the resources of each department: give your marketing, sales, service and other operations teams all the information they need to give the best experience and achieve the highest productivity.
3- Reduce business process times: for example, your agents won't have to verify data repeatedly, which will allow them to resolve for more customers, help them close a deal, or give them a more personalized service.
Strengthen the decision processes in the company: your directors, managers and other decision makers will have the base of the precise information to guide the course of the business.
If a company cannot guarantee the quality of the data, the teams cannot have visibility or access to the statistics of the activity carried out by the collaborators for subsequent decision-making, risk analysis and improvement measures.
1- Bad sales data means reps can't focus on creating good experiences for prospects.
2- Sales need to be able to clearly see each step of a prospect's journey. If they can't see it, how else can they deliver a good experience? That's why it's important for all departments in an organization to consider the buyer's journey.
3- Bad sales data discourages reps from continuing to maintain good CRM data hygiene.
4- The lack of trust in CRM is a prophecy: when reps know they won't get value from it, they won't continue to add value by updating CRM.
5- Bad sales data wastes reps' valuable sales time.
6- Bad news: Sales reps don't spend a lot of time selling — just 28 percent, according to Salesforce.
And a quarter of reps say frequent CRM updates take time away from selling. It's not just because they're busy updating the platform, but they're also answering questions from other stakeholders who want up-to-date information.
While the importance of CRM has traditionally been linked to being a sales and marketing tool, some of the biggest gains can be made in other areas, such as customer service, HR, and more. HH., supply chain and partner management.
Here's how different functions of a business can benefit from using CRM:
1- Sales teams can use CRM to better understand the sales process.
2- Sales managers can access reliable information about the progress of each team member in meeting their sales goals, for example, and view the performance of sales teams, products, and campaigns at a glance. individual level.
3- Sales reps benefit from reduced administrative work, a deeper understanding of their customers, and the opportunity to spend more time selling and less time entering data.
4- Marketing teams can use the CRM to make forecasting easier and more accurate.
5- They can gain clear visibility into each opportunity or lead, and map out the entire customer experience from inquiry to sale, giving them a better understanding of the ongoing sales process or potential future jobs.
6- It is also possible to include information about customers' social media activity: what they like and dislike, as well as their feelings about certain brands and companies.
7- Customer service teams can effectively control conversations across different channels.
8- A customer might raise an issue on a channel, say Twitter or Facebook, but then switch to email, phone, or live chat to resolve it privately.
9- Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can get lost in the volume of information, resulting in an unsatisfactory response to a valued customer.
10- Supply chain, procurement, and partner management teams can better manage relationships.
11- They can keep track of meetings with vendors and partners, record requests made, add helpful notes, schedule follow-ups, and stay on top of planned next steps.
12- Reporting allows companies to compare supplier efficiencies and manage the entire supply chain more effectively.
13- The HR team H H. You can use CRM to speed up the hiring process and track employee performance.
14- CRM can help you improve HR functions. H H. by accelerating the onboarding process, automating the candidate management process, analyzing resource needs and identifying skills gaps, as well as supporting the achievement of staff retention goals.
15- Consolidating all data streams from sales teams, customer service staff, vendors, and social media, and translating it into actionable business insights, would be ideal for an organization. A CRM platform allows you to manage these information flows through the different channels without losing track, while providing the sales team, customer service, marketing and more with an integrated vision.
16- The implementation of a CRM in a company is a critical moment, because it is when the current processes must be modified and adapted to the new philosophy of CRM, which is not just a program, but a way of guiding all processes towards the future. customer.
In summary, it is not enough to invest in the appropriate technology for your company with a view to creating a single source of reference that allows the connectivity of data from each operational area of your company. After this, the most important thing is to take care of the hygiene of your data as a business priority.
Automation and two-way data synchronization eliminates manual data entry by your team members, giving them more time to do their jobs and allowing you, as a business leader, to reduce operating costs and the risks of having inaccurate reports or information silos. For this, it is vital to be certain about the way in which the CRM integrates with the other tools.
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