CRM Data Quality Checklist: Top 15 Issues

Keeping your customer data clean is essential.

Reliable, error-free data is a cornerstone of growth for any company. Your data impacts customers at every point in the customer journey. It affects the marketing materials they receive, how tailored their sales conversations are, their post-sale support experience, and much more.

Internally, low-quality data impedes essential business processes, slowing them down, and creating manual data maintenance tasks that eat away at morale and time. Bad data’s effects ripple up the food chain to the C-suite, making reporting less accurate, and causing decisions to be based on faulty premises.

But fixing those issues is often easier said than done. There are dozens of potential data problems inside any CRM, across all of your fields, and pinpointing them is a daunting task. Many companies just don’t know where to start.

In this article and the downloadable Data Quality Checklist Cheat Sheet below, you’ll find a list of common data quality issues that should be a part of any data cleanup effort to improve customer data quality.

Here are 15 key data issues to target when conducting a data cleanup project or designing a data management plan.

1. Format Contact Names for Personalization

The first name, last name, and full name fields inside of CRMs can be rife with errors. Many of the errors were entered into forms by customers.

Errors in names might not seem like a big deal on the surface. Calling a customer “jane” instead of “Jane” in an email might not look professional, but it isn’t the end of the world. Right? Wrong.

The data stored in the first name field is often the first thing customers see when they engage with your brand. Having “Hey jane,” show up in your preview and kicking off every email will definitely impact a customer’s perception of you over time. After all, they’ll think, capitalizing a name is a simple thing. They’ll wonder what other mistakes the company will make if they can’t even capitalize a proper noun.

And that’s just one data field. You could have issues like this in every single field in your database.

While capitalization is an important aspect of formatting contact names, there are other issues to consider as well. For example, the data in your name fields may also include numbers, symbols, and blank spaces that shouldn’t be there. You’ll have to fix these as well.

Proper formatting is useful for personalization and segmentation.

2. Standardize Job Titles for Segmentation

Job titles are an important data point for B2B companies.

Having reliable job title data helps your business identify the right stakeholders at a company. Data quality is also important because it shapes marketing materials, sales processes, and ongoing customer experience.

A CEO’s needs and concerns aren’t the same as those of a CMO, so these two roles should receive different materials and have different conversations throughout the customer lifecycle.

Being able to segment job titles is critical but challenging. Without standardization, the same job title can be presented in dozens of ways in the data:

• CEO
• C.E.O.
• Chief Executive Officer
• CEO and Founder
• Chief Executive Officer / Founder

To create a reliable segment of CEO contacts, you need consistency and standardization in this field.

Job titles are also often necessary for reporting. Understanding your customers is difficult for B2B companies without reliable job title data. Suppose you wanted to evaluate how much time your sales reps spent with each customer persona. You could not extract an accurate report without first standardizing your job title data.

Standardizing job titles is useful for segmenting contacts for campaigns.

3. Standardize Industries for Campaigns

Industry fields play a critical role in marketing campaigns for B2B companies. The materials you deliver to a company in the manufacturing industry aren’t the same as those you send to the grocery industry. They have different concerns altogether.

But segmenting your contacts based on industries is difficult if you don’t have standardization. This is made more complicated because one industry could have multiple names. For example, the following should all be in the same industry:

• software
• computer software
• technology
• tech
• software and technology
• [industry] technology

Like the standardization of job titles, careful assigning of industry names impacts who is included in your campaigns and your reporting on your customers. Without standardization, it is needlessly difficult to gain a reliable understanding of the industry your customers operate in, and executive decisions may be based on inaccurate information.

Standardizing industries is useful for segmenting contacts for campaigns.

4. Standardize State and Country for Territory Management

If your company operates in multiple regions, impacting who owns the records, ensuring that you have standardized state and country fields is critical.

For example, if your contacts or accounts are automatically assigned to an owner based on the company’s state, contacts with unstandardized states might fall through the cracks. This leads to additional manual data updates that sap time away from your teams. It also means that those prospects will receive slower, less optimized sales cadences.

A lack of standardization for state and country fields also results in inaccurate territory reporting, which can impact decision-making across the organization.

Standardizing states is useful for segmenting contacts for campaigns and reporting.

5. Format Phone Numbers for Readability and Dialer Software

Phone number fields are crucial for multiple business processes.

First, standardizing phone numbers is critical for readability. Reading that data is tiresome and time-consuming when every record uses a different format. Manually entered phone number data can take various forms:

• 425-681-1734
• (425)6811734
• (425)-681-1734
• 425.681.1734
• 1+4256811734
• 1+ (425)681-1734
• 425 681 1734
• 4256811734
• 425*681*1734

It is hard to identify that they are all the same phone number with a quick glance. Now imagine trying to pinpoint a specific phone number from a similar list. Having to do this many times would be an aggravating and time-consuming task.

Then there are also integration considerations. For instance, some sales auto-dialer solutions have phone number formatting requirements. If your phone numbers are not formatted correctly, the call will not be placed.

Standardizing your phone number formatting allows you to improve readability and reduce integration concerns.

Formatting phone numbers is useful for auto dialing integrations and readability.

6. Deduplicate Contacts and Companies for a Single Customer View

For many, duplicate contacts and companies are a painful and persistent thorn in the side. Their impacts will be felt across your organization.

Duplicate data wrecks the single customer view, splitting up context about contacts and companies between multiple records. When you have a duplicate problem, you can never be sure any record is a single source of truth for that prospect. That means that your teams will constantly be searching your CRM for additional context in duplicate records.

Adding these steps to processes will slow your teams down. But more than that, it will hurt their morale. Identifying duplicate records that are missed by standard CRM systems and checking multiple records for context, or manually merging them, is a painstaking, tedious process. When your CRM contains duplicates, you will have to confirm that the context is not split up between multiple records every time you access a record. It’s easy to see how that could affect morale over time.

Duplicates also impact the experience that customers have with your brand, which will affect your reputation. When your marketing and sales teams engage with prospects, they do so with only partial context, hurting personalization efforts.

Beyond those issues, duplicates also cause you to waste marketing budget by sending the same materials to the same person multiple times.

7. Lead to Account Mapping for Account-Based Marketing

Proper linking and associations between records are critical for account-based marketing (ABM). Your ability to track many stakeholders across an organization is critical in closing new deals.

Larger B2B deals may have dozens of stakeholders, each with their own needs and concerns. Effective ABM requires that you engage with all of these stakeholders to identify their needs, address their concerns, and properly position your product.

Make sure that your contacts are associated with the proper company, and that the company is associated with the correct deal, to give yourself a complete view of the opportunities within your organization.

8. Remove Hard-Bounced Emails for Decluttering

Bounced emails—emails that have been sent but cannot be delivered—can be a serious problem.

When you send too many emails that bounce, it impacts your domain's reputation and reduces the likelihood that future emails land in the main inbox of your subscribers. Email reputation companies view high bounce rates as an indicator that you are sending to an outdated list.

But before you remove every account with bounced emails, it’s important to understand the two categories of bounces: soft and hard. 

Soft bounces are emails that have bounced for a temporary reason, such as the sender or recipient’s server being temporarily down. Hard bounces signify that the email address won’t accept your emails anymore, either because the email itself has now been deleted, the domain is no longer registered, or for other reasons.

With this in mind, emails that have returned hard bounces should be removed from your CRM. If the records still have value, you could simply remove the email address from the email field. Maybe you still have a phone number, address, social media, or another channel through which you can reach the contact. If the record has no value without the email, it is best to delete it entirely to save on CRM costs, which are often tied to the number of records in your database.

9. Remove Spam and Invalid Emails to Improve Deliverability

Like bounced emails, spam and invalid emails can be another thorn in your side. Any time you have a publicly viewable form, you are bound to have bots fill out the form and submit all kinds of strange data.

These submissions might use email accounts like test@domain.com, dummy@domain.com, fake@domain.com, or abc@domain.com, among others. These email accounts are obviously fake and serve no purpose in your CRM.

These records should be identified and removed from your system to reduce clutter and save money.

10. Remove Unengaged Contacts for Improved Deliverability

Unengaged contacts are contacts that haven’t engaged with your marketing materials for an extended period. Depending on your sending cadences, this amount of time can differ from company to company.

For example, one company might consider a lack of engagement for three months to be an unengaged contact. Another may look for contacts that have not engaged with any of their marketing materials for several years.

With a length of time identified, you can begin to purge contacts that are unengaged and unlikely ever to engage again. These records, like spam or invalid emails, will clutter your CRM, bloat your marketing budget, and drag down your open rates, which harms your email reputation.

11. Identify Records Missing Critical Fields for Enrichment

Certain fields are likely more important to your sales process than others.

For example, a team that relies heavily on phone sales will value phone number data highly, while it might not be as important to a company that primarily communicates with prospects through email. For the first company, a contact missing the phone number field entirely is a much less valuable prospect than one that contains the phone number. This is because their sales processes are built around that data.

Identifying contacts or accounts that are missing required fields is important. Once you’ve identified them, you then have a choice. You can decide that prospects with missing data are not worth your time and purge the data, or you can mark those records for data enrichment.

Data enrichment is the process of adding additional data to existing records. For example, if you know a prospect’s name, company, and email, a data enrichment service may be able to provide you with additional information, such as the contact’s phone number or address. Or, your team can manually research to find information for data enrichment.

These critical fields may also affect lead scoring and routing processes. When a prospect or account is missing data, they may be inaccurately scored in your system and wrongly prioritized by your leads. Missing data can also complicate owner assignments, where records with missing data remain unassigned or are assigned to the wrong owner.

For many companies, the types of critical records that are often considered essential include:

• job titles
• industries
• number of employees
• associations

12. Identify Data Validation Exceptions that Break Automation

Data does not have to have easily identifiable errors that make it unsuitable for use in automation. Many data issues can cause records to be improperly categorized, cause personalization issues, or be inconsistent in ways that make it unusable without updates or enrichment. These include but are not limited to:

• Partial data like initials for names.
• Departments instead of names (like “Marketing” instead of “Jacob”).
• Human-entered data with typos and spelling errors.
• Fake and obvious SPAM records.
• Invalid phone numbers.
• Data validation issues.

Before you can confidently use data in automation, that data has to meet certain standards. It should be complete, properly formatted, and contain the data that is most relevant to your automation use case.

Identifying and fixing these issues is a necessity before launching new automated campaigns across your organization. With these issues lingering, your team will be reluctant to use automation, resulting in arduous manual processes that slow your entire organization down.

13. Identify Data Entry Errors for Cleaning

Any time a person enters data themselves, there is always the risk that the data will contain errors. The manual data entry error rate is as high as 4%.

Typos are common. For example, you might find that your CRM has many contacts with email addresses like “gmil.com” instead of “gmail.com.” Other obvious entry errors include extra spaces, symbols, numbers or letters in fields where they don’t belong.

Identifying and fixing data entry errors can greatly impact the overall data quality inside of your CRM.

Identifying and fixing errors in fields makes them usable.

14. Identify Invalid Phone Numbers and Email Addresses for Enrichment

To reach your customers, you need accurate data for your preferred communication channel. If you want your sales reps to call customers, you will need an accurate phone number for them.

Identify invalid phone numbers and email addresses in your customer data. Invalid data is data that does not meet field specifications for accurate and useful records.

For emails, this means that the data follows the standard username@domain.extension format that email addresses take. An email like “Steve@gmail” is invalid, and should be “Steve@gmail.com.”

For phone numbers, you’re looking for a set number of digits, but you must also consider potential country codes and extensions.

Identifying and fixing invalid phone numbers and email addresses allow you to send communications to contacts and make their records valuable.

15. Identify Role-Based Emails for Enrichment

For B2B companies, having contacts with role-based emails is a common issue. Emails like “info@domain.com,” “sales@domain.com,” or “support@domain.com.”

Communications sent to these emails aren’t likely to be valuable. They are group emails, often used for specific purposes. In other words, those monitoring the “sales@domain.com” email will not likely pay attention to or ever engage with your marketing or sales emails. That is not the purpose of the email account.

Once identified, you have to decide whether to purge contacts with role-based emails or enrich those records, erasing the role-based emails and replacing them with correct, accurate business emails for the appropriate individual.

Role-based emails are often useless and not viable as marketing emails.

Insycle: Complete Your Data Quality Checklist

We’ve given you a lot of information, and there are a few things you need to do to build or tweak a data management plan that will keep your CRM clean and error-free. With that in mind, we’ve created this handy data quality checklist to keep you on track.

And Insycle is the perfect tool to help you knock those checkboxes off the list. Using Insycle, you can identify and fix all 15 issues highlighted in this checklist, while tracking their prevalence on an ongoing basis.

When you start a free trial of Insycle, our Customer Data Health Assessment will analyze your database and identify common data errors in your CRM data.

You can also create custom templates and add them to the Customer Data Health Assessment to track data issues that are unique to your organization.

For every issue listed on your Health Assessment, you can click the Review button to access a template to fix the specified issue. For example, if we clicked the “Free email provider domain” template above, you’d be taken to the correct module and template to identify and enrich these records.

Then, you can automate your Insycle templates to run on a schedule so that your most pressing data cleanup tasks are handled automatically on an ongoing basis.

Make Data Quality a Priority

Insycle helps you to identify and fix all 15 of the issues discussed in this article, helping you to improve your data quality and automate solutions to consistent data problems.

But Insycle does more than just clean dirty data.

It's a comprehensive data management tool that gives you control of your customer data management and helps you implement best practices.With Insycle, you can identify and fix dirty data issues in bulk and automate your data management processes. Without Insycle, the cost of bad data is a major blind spot for marketing and sales leaders and a roadblock for execution by their teams.

Want to have more visibility into and fix more issues in your CRM? Learn more about how Insycle helps teams clean up their CRM data, collaborate with teammates, and design data management processes that fuel growth.