How Do You Clean Up Customer Data?

Author: Jake McCarthy

How to clean up the bulk data is precisely one the most frequently –thought- questions. The customer service has touched top notches in current times. Enhanced customer service is directly proportional to customer retention and a long directory of customer identity, status, engagement, feedback, and responses. MS Dynamics 365 and the partners have made it easy to handle the customer relationship, but what if the data you feed has malfunctioned. The greater the customer retention, the greater is the data collected. But there comes a point when you need to discard and clean up the junk and irrelevant data and material.

The Pre-cleaning procedure:

Making a strategy and plan for keeping the CRM clean is a handy tool. One, it helps you take the right actions, second, it helps you effectively deploy the bad data. Set the goals and plans to execute the cleaning process.

1- Resolve the data entry problems:

The biggest problem can lie at the data entry point, so it is recommended that you standardize and sort the data before using other cleaning tools. All the contact details of the customers must follow a specific and standard format. The standardization will help you sort the ambiguity in understanding the data. At this point remove the abstruse titles, abbreviations, and intricate words. Make a standard operating procedure(SOP), in collaboration with your team members, so that they know the standard way of entering the contact details in the future.

2- Check the validity of your data:

After some period, the data lose its validity and become outdated. While cleaning the CRM, you have to identify and remove outdated data. You can use online tools that can do the laborious task of validation, scrub, and updating the clients’ database.

Identify irrelevant data and delete

You will be able to identify the data which is no more relevant for your business, the contact details of customers who no longer engage and have moved on. These contacts are nothing but a burden on the database. Trace them and take no time to delete them.

3- Delete repeating data

The same record with a separate entry in the database wastes your efforts. It means that you will target a few of, same people by investing a double. This will, therefore, take a lot on the campaign financing, garnering fewer results in return. Duplicate data checking app can help you check the recurring and repeating data.

4- Automate for the next time:

The cleaning takes a lot of time, there are some parts that you can set for automatic cleaning. You can set a limit to words, or prohibit entry of numeric characters in titles and vice versa. The portions that you prospect of being erroneous but not all parts can be set on automation.

Which data must be cleaned?

Keeping your CRM clean means that you frequently remove the bad data. So, what is the bad data? The bad data is usually improperly formatted data, inaccurate data, incomplete data, duplicate data, and irrelevant data that can be catastrophic for your business in measuring the prospects and the indicators.