We discuss how clean and accurate data will make your CRM data conversion less of a headache. Proper planning and cleansing of your customer data from the beginning will keep you from falling behind on your CRM implementation. Therefore, it is necessary to have quality data prior to any type of data conversion. This means you must scrub your data to ensure there is no “dirty” data, incomplete data, or duplicates. This step is especially crucial for successful CRM data conversion, strategy and implementation within your organization.

Planning measures of quality data should be taken before you implement your new CRM solution to ensure quality performance, sales forecasting, and maintaining customer relationships. This is because the legacy data you already possess has to be converted electronically into the new CRM. Your data needs to be reviewed, scrubbed, and filtered to ensure that bogus data is not transferred and most importantly, valuable data is not lost. There is a systematic process to creating quality data that can be seamlessly transferred, thus producing the best results for your CRM and your company.

To begin this process you will need to map your legacy data fields to the new CRM data fields. If there isn’t a particular field in the new CRM you will need to decide if the field is useful information that you need to keep. If it is, the CRM you have chosen should give you the option of creating a new user-defined field. If your CRM does not give you that option you may need software customization or consider mapping your data to an unused field in the new CRM.

Once the mapping stage is completed, take some time to manually review your customer data. It can be a lengthy process, but will ultimately provide the best results for your business. Some of the questions to ask yourself during the review process to create optimal results for your legacy data are:

• Are there customers that haven’t done business with you in a while?

• Are there customers that have legal issues with your business?

• Is your data complete and up-to-date?

• Are there any duplicate contacts?

• Have you maintained a consistent style or format for data entry?

Asking these questions and taking the necessary steps to fix any issues or errors will help the CRM data conversion and implementation process significantly. If there are data files that no longer have any relevance to your business going forward, you can archive the files rather than transfer the data to the new CRM if it’s not going to be used.

For your CRM solution to provide the best results for your company, it must be maintained. If you don’t have a regular maintenance schedule in place, it would be a good decision to create one going forward so your company can continue to maintain customer relationships and meet business goals. Your customer data is one of the most important assets your company has so your CRM solution should allow you to store this data, protect it, and benefit from it. However, as the business owner you have to care for and maintain your CRM solution by delivering information that will help you maintain and understand your customer relationships, as well as provide the service they deserve!

Article from Alderbest Solutions.