Without good data any CRM system is worthless!
An obvious statement I know, but as I have just posted over on our company blog, I have lost count of the times clients, past and present, have told me that their data quality prevents them from doing what they want. Data has been imported from spreadsheet to system to system without any rigour being applied.
So if you are planning an upgrade to your CRM syste
m then you really should be looking at not just the quality of your data but also the breadth of the data. There are a number of companies that have services that will take your data, clean it and add additional data to it.
Another important thing to consider is how you are going to keep your data clean going forward. Having got your information in a clean state is this the time to implement some system enforced rigor to your data entry. Again there are a number of solutions out there that provide add-ins for Dynamics CRM that will allow users to look up addresses and populate the system with not just the address but also the additional information that comes with it.
So, lets make 2011 the year of clean data.
