Don’t wait until the spring to do your digital cleaning. Cleaning up your customer relationship management software can get your year off on the right step and not bogged down with irrelevant and useless customer data that can impact your franchise’s bottom line.

A franchise’s CRM is a vital component of its sales and marketing programs. A CRM houses vital data and manages your franchise’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. For it to be effective, it must deliver the right message to the customer at the right time.

But if the data you are using is outdated or corrupt, which is a common occurrence and to be expected, you’re in trouble. Bad data will eventually impact your sales team’s ability to find new customers and follow up with existing ones to retarget them.

An estimated 30% of data becomes outdated each year. That happens as customers change email addresses, phone numbers and other personal information during the course of their life. Now is the time to make the change to clean up your databases and establish a process moving forward that will ensure your CRM stays up to date for your sales and marketing teams who rely on the information.

Inaccurate Data

Inaccurate data translates to information in your CRM that has errors, whether that entails outdated information, misspelled names or incorrect contact information. Whatever the case, this bad information needs to be flagged and cleaned up before it begins to impact the customer experience.

IBM estimates inaccurate data costs the U.S. economy about $3.1 trillion each year and Experian reports bad data has a direct impact on 88% of companies.

So now that you know what makes the data inaccurate, how do you move forward to clean it up and make sure it doesn’t get there again?

CRM data cleaning is an ongoing process that needs to happen on a regular basis, not a one-time project. By breaking down the process into several steps, you and your team can better manage what tasks need completing.

Fix Formatting and Remove Duplicates

The delete button can be your friend as you find unnecessary and redundant information lurking within your franchise’s CRM database. Incomplete names, email addresses and other important customer information can really throw a stick in your marketing spokes. They are tricky to find, especially when manual entry is involved. But make no mistake, these small errors can cost companies money.

Consolidate Information Fields

Review the information you are collecting from your customers. Are there redundant fields that you can eliminate or consolidate with other areas? Are the right contacts being made? Are follow-ups necessary? Does a customer need retargeting? Streamlining your data will help you achieve your goals in the long run and make maintaining your data a lot simpler. By doing this, your customers will be targeted with the right information for your various campaigns.

Conduct an Audit of Information

As you complete your data cleanup, run an audit of your information to see what patterns may emerge and if you need to add additional fields that can better help your marketing and sales decisions.

Set Up Ground Rules

The heavy use of CRM data means it needs to be managed like any other marketing technology tool. A process should be established that verifies the data being loaded into it and removes the old data in the process. Finding inconsistencies, errors and duplicated information weakens your CRM’s effectiveness and should be maintained accordingly. A CRM’s metrics drive decisions in a data-centric organization and maintenance of that needs to have a priority placed on it that reflects that importance. Take this time at the beginning of 2023 to assess what your company’s goals should be going forward in maintaining this important piece of your marketing and sales tool.