How messy is your CRM Database?
One of the most challenging tasks in running a CRM system is ensuring the accuracy and validity of data in it. A poorly maintained set of data can cost a company in more ways than one - your activities are slowed down, you will have inaccurate reports and it's annoying to have to manually verify details of each record when you have more important activities to deal with.
For example, say you make a follow-up call to a customer, only to find out that another member of your team had already contacted them. That would be a little embarrassing but where was the confusion? After cross-checking it becomes evident that there was no previous record of a call being made to the contact. On further investigation, you discover that there was a duplicate copy of the same contact, assigned to another sales rep! Inaccurate or incomplete CRM data will hamper sales and marketing performances. Many of your contacts might have changed their phone number, email address or even their company, leading to an accumulation of outdated and incomplete data in your CRM.
Not just duplicates, you may have challenges with consistently managing the validity of data. For example, you allow only 20% discount on your products as per your organization's policy. But some of your sales reps are not aware of this policy or they get careless with it and enter a higher discount for some of their deals. If this happens, you have to manually attend to these exceptions and set things right. This is surely time-consuming and completely unnecessary. Besides, you don't want it to be too late before you catch these errors. If these errors are overlooked, then your sales reports may be flawed, leading to much bigger problems. So there is definitely a need to maintain a clean, organized and valid data set in your sales database that also gets updated regularly. So read on in this eBook
to learn some effective ways by which you can do this in Zoho CRM.