Data Quality - and How to Improve It

I'v been wrestling recently with data quality issues in several client CRM systems. It's always a challenge and only gets worse as time goes on. So how do we as marketeers stay on top of this issue?

When using Salesforce in past lives, I've spend the long darks nights of between Christmas and New Year working on data cleanup issues. My only tool aid during those times was RingLead.

I've just been introduced to an option that woks well for my HubSpot -based projects - Insycle Data Management - and my first experience of how it can help ease the pain or CRM maintenance is very positive,

I've always felt that HubSpot's insistence on a unique email address for each contact was a distinct advance on the management process I'd encountered in previous roles. But this still doesn't eliminate the duplicate issue - it just rears its head in different places! Things like subdomains and alternate top level domains, as well as company mergers and rebrands start to undermine your database integrity. And the native tools often just report, but don't really help solve a problem of any size. Issues multiply rapidly when HubSpot is used in a configuration with another CRM such as Salesforce.

If your issues are big enough, then you’re probably considering an 3rd party tool to help batch up the fixes and run automated processes in the background. While you need to think about the specific needs of your CRMs and your data organization, maintaining a single customer view is critical for delivering good experiences to customers and prospects. That single viewpoint gives your teams — marketing, sales, and support — a single source of truth for engaging with customers.

Insycle definitely seems to attack this problem - and the broader issue of managing data integrity with an intelligent and incremental set of configurable tools, My experience is that, give a very negative initial data grading by the tool, I was able to drill down to the key issues and start a fix process pretty rapidly. Progress was mapped on a daily basis to give a sense of achievement.

Does deduplication work seem like too much of a drag?  Yes, it causes you to scratch your head quite a bit. But with good tools on your side, all is not lost and you can regain your Christmas holiday for something more like fun!