Over the years, its always been a challenge getting clients’ data in and out of their CRM applications. In seems to be an impediment to fixing and cleaning data. Everyone wants good quality data, but sometimes the hassle of getting IT or the clients’ CRM supplier to extract or import data becomes a hurdle.
As negotiations take place with IT or the supplier to perform the tasks, the data continues to degrade, marketing campaigns must wait, and reports continue to use poor quality data, producing inaccurate figures.
You see this happening a lot with niche CRM applications, where the vendor hasn’t thought about the client’s need for experts to profile, cleanse, match and enrich data.
As experts in data, we’ve created our own tools to profile, cleanse, match and enrich data. Our tools use generic data formats like text files, MS Excel, relational databases or big data formats like JSON files. Integrating our tools into all the different applications isn’t a small task, so we rely, in many cases, on applications extracting and importing data efficiently.
Cloud-based applications are certainly the way ahead, but it causes more problems. Clients have less access to importing data, extracting data tends to be easy and standard exporting routines are provided.
Importing data isn’t an easy task, you need to update existing records that have changes. The way data is stored can make the process complicated and needs the knowledge of the CRM vendor to provide the routines to update data correctly.
Not all vendors give access to this function for cloud-based applications. You’re reliant on them providing the service and in some cases at a considerable cost. Some cloud-based providers have no way to import the data in a non-standard way.
As software gets more sophisticated, vendors need to think much more about the quality of the data in their systems. You can have the most wonderful application performing miraculous tasks, but if the data driving the application is poor then results will be poor.
Many companies have fallen for the trap of not paying enough attention to their data. Their CRM users become disheartened with the CRM system when really, it’s the data within the system that’s at fault.
If you’re in the process of selecting a cloud-based application then make sure it has the necessary functions or the vendor has the necessary services, so you can profile, cleanse, match and enrich your data.
