CRM Data Management: Best Practices to Drive Greater Business Value From Your CRM
Table of Content
CRM Data Management Tips And Best Practices
1. Valuable Data Identification
5. User Training and Data Entry
How Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Can Help Your Business
CRM data management is a critical aspect of leveraging the full potential of your CRM system. This blog post explores the importance of CRM data management and provides valuable tips and best practices to optimize your data for driving greater business value.
While most organizations do understand the importance of having a CRM Software in place and are willing to invest time and money, lot of them also complain of poor data quality which negatively impacts their data-driven decision making.
When an organization is confident about their data, it helps them to take faster and informed decisions.
In Today’s Customer Oriented business environment, CRM is a lot more than a Sales force automation and Customer service management tool. Modern CRMs like D365 Customer Engagement and, Salesforce are designed to provide you with AI and ML-based Customer Insights which brings greater business value and boost smart decision-making capabilities.
But it all depends on the quality of the data, which in turn depends on your organization's understanding of the value of effective CRM data management practises.
What Is CRM Data Management?
CRM data management involves managing the data stored in a CRM system to ensure that it is accurate, detailed, consistent, and secure. It includes practices such as data cleaning, data validation, data standardization, and data integration.
Poor data quality can produce false insights, delay decision-making, and ultimately have negative effects on the success of your business as a whole.
Therefore, it is crucial to follow best CRM data management practices to ensure your system delivers maximum value to your organization.
CRM Data Management Tips And Best Practices
Businesses can make sure they have access to high-quality data and increase the value of their CRM system by adhering to the best practises for CRM data management.
Let us have a look at some of these key practices which you can follow:
1. Valuable Data Identification
Identify the data which is valuable for your business – it largely depends on your organization’s business goals. In addition, it is equally important to collaborate with business departments directly for data identification.
2. CRM Data Design
Make sure your CRM is designed to capture the data identified in point number 1 in the right format and with necessary business rules and validations around it to ensure consistency and data quality.
3. Relevant Data Selection
More often we don’t focus greatly on the number of data columns and the significance of those.
E.G., Capturing the social media LinkedIn profile detail may still be more relevant for a Professional Services based organization than an Ecommerce.
Make sure it is relevant and quick for the system user to enter.
Quality should take precedence over quantity – software applications are designed to cater to diverse industry needs thus it becomes important to critically analyse every data field in place and filter out the non-relevant ones based on our business goals.
4. Historical Data Migration
Migration of Historical data from legacy systems plays a very crucial role in the success or failure of a new software implementation roll out. Cleansing data at the Data Imports level becomes a highly important exercise otherwise you end up carrying forward the same challenges to the new system.
5. User Training and Data Entry
Prioritising the Software Training for better user adoption as well as emphasizing the correct data entry by the system users. This needs to be a periodic activity within the organization as there could be new joiners or existing employees transitioning to new roles.
6. Periodic Data Monitoring
Periodic Monitoring of Data to check for inconsistencies, also keeping an audit trail enabled for key data columns only in a table will help a lot in ensuring good data quality in the longer run.
Here’s How Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Can Help Your Business
D365 Customer Engagement provides a very effective data management framework that allows for easy data migration and handling of data afterwards.
There are a lot of standard approaches and tools available to manage data migration such as
· D365 Data Import utility,
· Power Platform dataflows,
· Power Apps Excel add-inn,
· Power Automate,
· Azure Logic Apps,
· Custom API migrations, etc.
But the selection of the right approach depends on a lot of factors like data volume, solution complexity, required data transformations.
Our Microsoft D365 experts at Duco Consultancy recommend to carefully evaluate the value of data weighed against the volume of data, skillset availability, time and money required to perform the data migration, and, of course, cost of storage.
Microsoft offers a lot of alternatives where you can replace data that you choose not to migrate with virtual entities, embedded canvas apps to the source connectors, or go with embedded Power BI reports. Thus, it is advised to consult professionals to finalise the most suitable option for you.
CRM Data Management Best Practices: Conclusion
Effective CRM data management is essential for organizations to maximize the value derived from their CRM systems. By following best practices such as identifying valuable data, designing the CRM system appropriately, selecting relevant data fields, migrating historical data properly, emphasizing user training and data entry, and periodically monitoring data quality, businesses can ensure accurate and consistent data that supports informed decision-making.
Contact Duco Consultancy for expert data management consultation.