12 Days of CRM: Day Five – The Five Golden A’s of Data Quality

On the fifth day of CRM, Chris KringleFritsch gave to me, the 5 golden A’s of CRM!

Sitting down and cleaning your data can be a very daunting task. So where do you start? Start with the five A’s of data quality.

When starting a data cleaning project, don’t think you will get 100% clean data because if you have zero new contact records and clean everything else, in five minutes you’ll have a new record that needs cleaning. That is how quickly data can change.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because you can’t get every record perfect does not mean that you shouldn’t do it. To make cleaning your data more manageable, break it down into smaller, easier-to-handle pieces and assess each of them. You don’t need to clean all of your data. Think of which lists you send to the most, where the high-priority clients or contacts live, and start there.

You can then append missing data through a means of outsourcing the work to data quality professionals or hire in-house data stewards to manually comb through the lists.

Be respectful of your budget and prioritize which data sets need to be cleaned first so you can get the most bang for your ‘data quality buck.’

Next, think of different ways to automate the data clean-up project. There are many pieces of software that can automatically go through data sets and achieve data quality of up to 70%. While it is not 100% clean you can allocate resources to ensure that the data cleaning process is ongoing so that when new records come in, there are entered correctly and according to your firm’s data standards guide.

Watch as Chris Fritsch, of CLIENTSFirst Consulting, walks us through how to start a data cleaning project by following the five A’s of Data Quality; Assess, Analyze, Append, Automate and Allocate.

For more than a decade, the team at  CLIENTSFirst Consulting has been helping professional services firms and other organizations successfully select and implement CRM and eMarketing systems and improve Data Quality to maximize value, adoption and return on investment. If you need help achieving CRM Success, please contact us at 404-249-9914 or Info@ClientsFirstConsulting.com.