Businesses can ensure they have access to high-quality data and increase the value of their CRM system by adhering to the best practices for CRM data management.

Let us look at some of these key practices that you can follow:

1. Valuable Data Identification

Identify the data that is valuable for your business – it largely depends on your organization’s business goals. In addition, it is equally critical to collaborate with business departments directly on 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. It should also havenecessary business rules and validations to ensure consistency and data quality.

3. Relevant Data Selection

More often, we do not pay much attention to the number of data columns and their significance.

E.G., capturing the social media LinkedIn profile detail may still be more relevant for a professional services based organization than Ecommerce.

Make sure it is relevant and easy to enter for the system user.

Quality should take precedence over quantity – software applications are designed to cater to diverse industry needs thus it becomes a neccessity to critically analyze 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 an upcomingsoftware implementation rollout. Cleaning data at the import level becomes a highly significant exercise otherwise you carry forward the same challenges to the new system.

5. User Training and Data Entry

In order to improve user adoption, software training should be prioritized, as well as a focus on correct data entry by users of the system. This needs to be a periodic activity within the organization as new joiners or existing employees could transition to different roles.

6. Periodic Data Monitoring

Periodic monitoring of data to check for inconsistencies, as well as keeping an audit trail enabled for key data columns only in a table will help a lot in ensuring reliable data quality in the long run.

D365 Customer Engagement provides a very effective data management framework tha allows for easy data migration and handling of data afterwards.

There are many standard approaches and tools available to manage data migrations such as:

• D365 Data Import utility,
• Power Platform dataflows,
• Power Apps Excel add-in,
• Power Automate,
• Azure Logic Apps,
• Custom API migrations, etc.

But the selection of the right approach depends on many factors like data volume, solution complexity, and required data transformations.

Our Microsoft D365 experts at Duco Consultancy recommend carefully evaluating the value of data weighed against the volume of data. This is done by evaluating skillset availability, the time and money required to perform the data migration, and, of course, the cost of storage.

Microsoft offers many alternatives where you can replace data that you choose not to migrate with virtual entities, embedded canvas apps in the source connectors, or go with embedded Power BI reports. Thus, it is advised to consult professionals to finalize the most suitable option for you.

1. Failure to properly communicate the six W’s (What, Why, When, Who, Where, and How), leading to fear of the unknown.
2. It’s easier (and less work) to hang on to the old ways of doing things
3. It makes people unhappy to know that things will change
4. Lack of ongoing support for the change leads people to revert back to the old ways of doing things
5. Lack of trust in the people behind the change
6. Potential loss of status within the organization

A skilled Change Management team will not only identify the key reasons for resistance to change in their organization, but they will also devise multiple strategies for dealing with each of those reasons.