Clean and accurate CRM data is the lifeblood of successful businesses. Companies rely on their CRM systems to gain a complete picture of their leads, prospects, and existing customers. This data fuels the insights that drive marketing campaigns, sales efforts, customer service interactions, and business intelligence initiatives.
However, maintaining high-quality data within a CRM can be a daunting challenge. Thousands of records and hundreds of data fields add up to an unending number of potential data issues throughout CRM databases.
Common CRM data quality issues include duplicate records, inconsistent data formats, incomplete or missing information, missing associations between related records, and the presence of outdated or erroneous data. These problems can lead to inefficiencies, lost opportunities, and damage to relationships when customers have a poor experience with your company.
But many popular CRM platforms lack robust data management tools capable of comprehensively addressing the myriad data quality issues that businesses face. While these platforms may offer some features for addressing specific problems, those features are built for the most widespread use cases. Companies with unique data problems are left scrambling to find a solution to their niche issues.
Ultimately, many CRM data problems can only be solved manually, and this is true both for common problems and those unique to your organization. As a result, companies spend hours of manual effort and huge amounts of mental energy, impacting morale and driving up labor costs, without getting closer to a reliable solution that can scale with them.
But there is a better way. Companies should look to CRM-integrated data management apps to help them address these problems in bulk and allow their teams to focus on more strategic issues, rather than defaulting to slow, manual, culture-killing data maintenance tasks.
The gulf between one-by-one manual data updates and the bulk-updating capability of Insycle is immense.
Let’s compare some of the common outcomes of the two approaches.
|
One-by-One Updates |
Bulk Data Updates With Insycle |
|
Consume hundreds of working hours |
✅ Take just a few hours |
|
Lower morale |
✅ Help maintain high morale |
|
Are prone to errors |
✅ Are consistent and accurate |
|
Incur high operational costs |
✅ Keep operational costs low |
|
Allow issues to linger for weeks |
✅ Resolve issues quickly |
|
Don’t scale |
✅ Are scalable |
As you can see, bulk fixes are a better choice in every situation where they are applicable. Let’s dig a bit deeper into both approaches and examine why exactly they result in these outcomes for companies.
Traditionally, companies have relied on manual methods to address data quality issues within their CRM systems. This typically involves identifying and fixing each error, duplicate record, missing association, or inconsistency one at a time— a painstaking and time-consuming process. Often, the many options for formatting a single field in your CRM, such as the state field, can present errors in many different and often unexpected ways.
This means that employees across your organization may spend hundreds or even thousands of hours fixing data issues, resulting in higher operating costs and lower morale due to the negative impacts of data quality issues and the monotony of fixing them by hand.
And because it may take weeks for an error to be manually fixed in your CRM, you are left dealing with all of the issues it causes while you wait for it to be fixed.
Manual data cleaning where errors are tackled one-by-one is not only tedious and wasteful, but also prone to human error and inconsistencies. Some studies have found error rates as high as 6.5% for manual data entry.
With larger CRM databases, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a standardized approach across your organization. Enforcing standards for manually entered data is very difficult, and requires quality training and constant reminders for all employees who are responsible for entering data. Ultimately, trying to enforce manual standards is often more trouble than it’s worth.
Manual data cleaning is not scalable. So as data volumes continue to grow, manual efforts become increasingly untenable. What may have been a manageable task with a smaller dataset quickly becomes an insurmountable challenge as the size and complexity of the data increase.
Relying solely on one-by-one manual fixes to maintain data quality consumes valuable time and resources and leaves businesses vulnerable to the negative impacts of inaccurate or inconsistent data, including missed opportunities, inefficient processes, and potential damage to customer relationships.
Insycle’s powerful bulk data-fixing capabilities make it a game-changing solution to the challenges of CRM data management. Rather than manually addressing issues one by one, you can use Insycle’s predefined template (or set custom rules) for fixing all of your pesky data issues in bulk.
Then, once you come up with a working solution, you can schedule it for automation. This takes your most critical data cleansing tasks off of your plate, saving valuable time and resources while giving you the accurate, reliable data you need to provide a better customer experience.
With Insycle, you can effortlessly tackle tasks such as deduplication, association of related records, data standardization, fixing data errors, purging of outdated or low-quality records, and more—all through automated, bulk processes. Tasks that would traditionally take hours or days of manual effort can now be completed in minutes, freeing up resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
No more one-by-one record updates by hand. No more long, arduous data maintenance processes that sap morale. No more data issues gumming up your processes while you wait for your teams to get around to fixing them.
Insycle's user-friendly interface allows you to define the desired parameters and let the system do the heavy lifting. And Insycle’s customization options allow you to address really specific data problems within your company’s CRM, rather than just the most surface-level CRM data problems. You can quickly build custom, no-code solutions for your most unique data issues.
Moreover, Insycle's collaboration features streamline teamwork around data management, eliminating the need to pass spreadsheets back and forth. With complete visibility and the ability to invite anyone relevant within your organization without additional cost, teams can work together more effectively, ensuring consistent data quality standards across the organization.
Perhaps most importantly, Insycle's automated bulk-update processes minimize the risk of human error, ensuring a level of consistency and accuracy that is impossible to achieve through manual methods alone.
Let’s look at some examples of what you can do with Insycle’s bulk update features.
With Insycle, you can format, standardize, and fix fields in bulk.
Let’s start by looking at formatting and standardization. Insycle can help you to standardize any text field in your CRM using custom rules that you set.
For example, using Insycle, you can standardize U.S. states easily, formatting the field for full state names or for abbreviations, depending on your needs. This is useful for segmentation and reporting, but can be helpful in more advanced situations as well, such as fixing state and country fields that break the HubSpot and Salesforce sync.
Here’s how they would look using the U,S, state formatting template:
|
Before |
After |
|
Washington State |
Washington |
|
Cali |
California |
|
new york |
New York |
With Insycle, once you have standardized the state field—or any other field—you can then convert it from free-text to picklist so that there is no possibility of introducing non-standardized data.
Another great example is formatting phone numbers. When you rely on manual data entry for phone numbers, there are many different formats that the same phone number could take:
Between country codes, area codes, separators, parentheses, and typos, there are more than a dozen different phone number formats. This causes problems with the readability and usability of the field, and creates potential issues with phone integrations and sales dialer systems inside of your CRM, which often require the E. 164 phone formatting standard.
But with Insycle, you have many predefined formatting functions at your disposal, including E. 164, U.S. standard format, and the ability to customize your own format.
Here’s a bulk-update template to reformat U.S.-based phone numbers into the standard U.S. format.
This template first filters your records, checking to ensure that the phone number exists, has the right number of digits, and contains the U.S.-based country code. And here are the bulk changes you would see to phone numbers:
|
Before |
After |
|
14259310199 |
+1 (425) 931-0199 |
|
+1.(425).931.0199 |
+1 (425) 931-0199 |
|
1-425-931-0199 |
+1 (425) 931-0199 |
With a template like this scheduled to run consistently, you can ensure that phone numbers in your database are properly rewritten in the format that makes the most sense for your company.
Duplicates in your CRM are a headache that causes many growth-slowing issues throughout an organization.
In many CRM systems, you are severely limited in how you can identify and merge duplicates. Often, CRM systems will have a very defined way to identify duplicates, using only a few basic fields to match them, with no real options for customization. This leaves many duplicate records in the system undetected because you can’t identify them in more advanced ways.
Additionally, many CRM systems are only able to match two duplicate records at a time, though a single record may have many more duplicates in the system. Then, you’ll often have to compare the records manually before merging the duplicates, one at a time. Post-merge, you usually have little-to-no control over how data is retained during the merge, instead being forced to rely on the CRM’s default merging rules. These rules may or may not retain the data that you need to retain, potentially resulting in data loss.
With Insycle, you can merge duplicates in bulk, flexibly, using any field in your database as a duplicate matching field.
You also have advanced controls over how the data in the matching field is evaluated. You can choose exact match or similar match. You can instruct Insycle to ignore things like symbols, numbers, or top-level domains (like .com). You can also instruct Insycle to match using only a portion of the field, such as the first few characters. This ensures that you can build templates that catch many more duplicates in your system than you would using standard CRM deduplication.
You also have complete control over how data is retained when merging. You can set advanced rules for determining the master record after the merge.
Or you can go deeper and set rules for retaining data during the merge on a field-by-field level.
This allows you to ensure that you retain all relevant data, even in advanced situations. For instance, with Insycle for HubSpot, you can retain all values in multi-select fields from all detected duplicates. Usually, using HubSpot’s default rules, you are only able to retain the multiple checkbox selection from the most recently created record involved in the merge.
Insycle also automatically employs some best practices to fill in gaps in HubSpot’s default behavior that may create problems for companies.
For example, when merging duplicate companies directly in HubSpot, the owner of the most recently created company record in the database is retained as the owner post-merge. While this may be ideal for many companies, sometimes they will want to retain the owner from an older record, as that owner is more likely to have an established relationship with the account. With Insycle, you can configure the merge to pick the company owner from the record that was created first if that works best for you.
Insycle makes powerful deduplication simple.
Connecting related records in your CRM is critical for developing a complete picture of every account that you engage with. Understanding how the web of stakeholders, parent companies, child companies, and deals is critical in complex sales process.
With Insycle, you can create associations flexibly in bulk. You can match fields in advanced ways, using any field in your CRM as a potential matching field, so that you can catch more records with missing associations.
For example, you can match contact records to company records using the contact’s email domain and the company’s website domain.
You can also bulk-associate records using multiple similar fields as matching fields. For example, you might want to match associations using both the phone number field and the mobile phone number field.
Additionally, Insycle is able to evaluate existing associations to identify and create other missing associations. For example, if a contact is associated with a deal and that deal is associated with a company but the contact isn’t, Insycle can detect that and create the missing associations in bulk.
With bulk associations, you can ensure that your sales and marketing teams have a full understanding of all records pertaining to a specific account or deal. As a result, their customer engagement will be more effective, and they will deliver a better customer experience.
Maintaining high-quality CRM data is crucial for successful businesses, but the process can be daunting and time-consuming when relying on manual methods.
The limitations and inefficiencies of manual data cleansing become increasingly apparent as CRM data volumes grow, leading to missed opportunities and potential damage to customer relationships.
Insycle offers a game-changing solution by providing powerful bulk data-fixing capabilities, enabling organizations to tackle data quality issues efficiently and effectively.
By leveraging Insycle's automated processes, businesses can save valuable time and resources, minimize the risk of human error, and ensure consistent data quality standards across the organization, driving success in an increasingly data-driven business landscape.