Data Quality- An Insider-Guide to Improving Salesforce CRM Efficiency
The Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) platform helps companies manage, organize, automate, and synchronize their sales, marketing, and activities related to customer engagement. An effective Salesforce implementation through the automation of services significantly increases productivity and decreases the workload on a corporation’s employees. However, there are numerous ways for a corporation to further boost the efficiency of Salesforce CRM. One highly effective way of doing so is to enhance the quality of your company’s data. If you are confused about why or how you should go about this, you needn’t worry, as this article details all the important information you need about boosting your organization’s data quality.
Benefits of Quality Data:
As mentioned above, improving your company’s data quality can significantly enhance the efficiency of your Salesforce CRM. This includes the following benefits to your organization:
Relevant Campaigns:
By using accurate data, your sales team can identify customers and leads more accurately ensuring sales effectiveness, which will allow your marketing team to employ campaigns targeted towards specific types of customers.
Aggressive Marketing:
Using quality data lets your sales team come up with aggressive marketing strategies. This includes the creation of numerous cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Additionally, they can sync, track, and analyze customer behaviour with data related to premium products and value-added services.
Revenue Maximization:
Once you improve your data’s reliability, managers can evaluate leads more accurately and enforce the best strategies for revenue maximization. Moreover, by implementing predictive analysis, your company’s middle management can identify new trends early and implement steps to manage accounts more proactively.
Avoid Disaster:
According to recent studies, on average, companies that ignore data quality incur losses of up to 12% of their revenue. Additionally, if you ignore data quality, you run the risk of losing goodwill and credibility associated with your organization, which can be very costly.
Challenges in Maintaining Data Quality:
While you can increase the efficiency of Salesforce CRM by improving the quality of your company’s data, there are a few challenges associated with the same:
Severe Increase in Volume of Data:
With the advent of cloud technologies, you no longer have to remove historical data to create space for new data. Your company can now enjoy larger databases with access to important old and current information. However, larger databases make it harder for managers to clean and maintain the reliability of data.
Need for Real-Time Analysis:
Implementing principles of data mining to analyze customers’ behaviour according to geographic, demographic, and psychographic factors is highly beneficial in the present competitive landscape. This real-time analysis, however, requires managers to implement strict data quality standards within your organization.
Negative Impact of Dirty Data:
Big data analytics creates a high-risk high-return scenario for companies due to its dependence on dynamic data. If your organization relies on big data analytics, the margin for error is very little in terms of data quality maintenance, which makes the job of data managers very difficult.
Due to these challenges, manually implementing data management and quality improvement can be a difficult and complicated task. You would be better off using data management tools designed for Salesforce, such as Import Wizard and Data Loader.
Steps to Improve Data Quality:
The path to ensuring high-quality data includes the following important steps:
Implementing a Master Source:
Often, companies will have different databases and software for different aspects of the business such as sales, marketing, customer service, order fulfilment, etc. This increases the chances of misinterpretation of data and other kinds of errors. As a result, corporations can’t afford to manage customer data using different machines and spreadsheets. Instead, implement an integrated CRM that can be used by every employee.
Get Everyone on Board:
Ensuring the quality of data isn’t supposed to be handled by the IT department of a company only. Instead, all employees must work to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data, as it affects the entire organization. An organization must stress the importance of reliable, comprehensive, and accurate data to all employees of its organization. Place an emphasis on the long-term goals, key initiatives, and department objectives of the company. If all employees are working towards improving data quality, a company is bound to succeed in terms of revenue and profits.
Track ROI:
A corporation must track the return on investments made towards ensuring high-quality data. By ensuring the highest quality of data possible, your company is bound to experience returns in the form of better overall customer experience, increased credibility and reliability of your brand, more time reclaimed from sales research, reduction in hardware costs, shorted processing time, more accurate analytics, etc. By using these metrics to measure ROI, you can effectively track the benefits of increasing data quality.
Use Real-Time Data:
As mentioned earlier, more companies have made the transformation to cloud for storage of data. Along with larger storage space, cloud technologies also offer the capability to share and update data in real-time. Thus, everyone in your organization will be working and operating with the same data and information. By doing so, a corporation can ensure that the losses incurred from using inaccurate data are minimized.
In The End:
The efficiency of your Salesforce CRM can be significantly increased with improvements in data quality. Additionally, you will see improvements in productivity, targeted campaigns, aggressive campaigns, and revenue maximization. The path towards this involves the implementation of a master source of data enabled with real-time data updating. Along with this, it is important to track the benefits of improving data quality using the appropriate metrics.
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