Every company has its own “usual suspects” when it comes to CRM data issues. Duplicate records, inconsistent data, formatting errors, and general data input errors are just a few examples.
Those data issues have an impact. They slow your teams down, causing them to double-check for duplicates or add research steps to processes. They make automated personalization difficult. They skew your reporting. Worst of all, they harm the customer experience.
This bad data costs money. IBM estimates that bad data costs U.S. companies more than $3 trillion per year. A study by Experian found that companies are losing up to 12% of their revenue due to bad data—and that was in 2014. Companies collect a lot more data now, so the effects of bad data are even more pronounced.
Bad data causes untrackable revenue loss in the form of squandered opportunities, misplaced priorities, and missing context for customer engagement:
Your customer data touches every department in your company and drives the strategies that grow your business. But without the proper oversight, your databases can quickly balloon into an outdated, tangled mess. You need a tool that can help you prune the data back to a manageable state—and keep it there.
That tool is Insycle.
Insycle is like a Swiss Army knife for your vital data. It contains all the features you need to whip your data into shape and keep it that way.
Let’s look at exactly how Insycle can help you tame your data monster and reap the benefits.
We’ve written extensively about how customer data impacts customer experiences.
It’s true. The data collected by your marketing team is used to provide context to your sales reps. Their logged interactions with those prospects will inform upsell and cross-sell opportunities down the road. As your support and success teams use that data and collect more, the customer profiles in your CRM will become sharper and more accurate.
As customers work their way through the customer lifecycle, your company gets to know them. But when that customer data is split up between multiple records, you are only able to leverage a fraction of what you know about them in your engagements.
Maintaining a single customer view is critical. It ensures that all of your teams, with their differing priorities and needs, are working from a single source of truth. But when your database is full of duplicate data, your teams don’t have a single source of the truth. In some customer databases, the duplicate contact rate can reach as high as 30%.
This is a big problem. It denies your sales reps accurate context that’s important to build relationships and close deals.
Duplicate data also harms your brand reputation. It can cause you to send mistake-ridden marketing materials, making you look unprofessional to important prospects and customers. This impacts the way they view your brand.
A significant chunk of the workforce spends a quarter of their working time or more on repetitive tasks.
This waste has a measurable, real-world cost: the amount of salary spent handling these tasks. It could account for millions of dollars in even a small or mid-size company. Here are a few examples of data-related time-and-money-wasting repetitive tasks:
The wasted time and money is measurable, but there’s a less easy-to-quantify problem that is just as impactful: slipping morale. There may be no faster way to demoralize a creative, energetic staff than by requiring them to perform the same monotonous, soul-sucking tasks day-in and day-out.
So much of what we do across an organization stems from data quality. It’s just become so ingrained in our processes that we don’t see how wasteful that is. Facilitating confidence in your data, on the other hand, can save a lot of wasted time while improving morale across your organization. Then your teams can focus on big-picture strategies that actually move the needle.
Everyone is in a race to collect more data. By 2024, it is estimated that we will collect an average of 44 zettabytes of data every day.
And collecting data is great—until it isn’t. The more data you collect, the more issues you are likely to have. This is particularly true if you don’t have a data management plan and data cleansing automation solution in place.
A database full of unusable data creates analysis paralysis. If you don’t trust the data, it’s hard to generate actionable reports and find new ways to use that data. So you can collect all of the data that you want about your customers, but if your marketing teams don’t have faith in its accuracy, it’s never going to see the light of day.
More reliable data means more personalization. You can reference fields in your marketing materials that show that you have a deeper understanding of the prospect or customer. Clean data gives your teams the confidence to use what you collect and create targeted, impactful campaigns that grow your business.
Everything flows from your customer data. Companies strive to become more data-focused so they can embrace more data-backed strategies.
This is a great approach—for companies with clean, reliable data. Accurate data means accurate reports and forecasting. On the other hand, skewed reports lead to unforced decision-making errors that could have been avoided if you had accurate data supplementing the decision.
Your ability to report plays a critical role in your organization’s priorities and agendas. For example, the deduplication of contacts, leads, and organizations means that you won’t have multiple entries for the same customers contaminating your reports. Standardization means that you gain an accurate view of the different segments in your database. Making decisions based on low-quality data puts companies in a hole that can be difficult to dig out of.
Balance is important in sales teams. You don’t want your reps to be overloaded, splitting their time between too many prospects and accounts.
Some CRM solutions allow you to balance rep workloads directly through their interface, or even make changes in bulk. Insycle complements these features by giving you the ability to aggregate and update bulk data in different buckets. For instance, with Insycle, you can create an updatable report that consists of accounts and owners.
This gives you a top-down view of the load balance among your sales reps. Then you can drill down into each rep’s assignments and balance between them, in bulk. Sales teams can spot load-balancing problems and quickly fix them with ease. Forget creating a report, exporting the data to Excel, making updates, and importing it back. Insycle’s updatable reports let you group data and bulk-update it with just a click.
You have a list of prospects that you want to input into your CRM, but you just know that importing that list as-is is going to create all sorts of data problems. We’ve all been there.
The import could produce a large number of duplicate contact records that will be hard for you to identify unless you get into complicated Excel functions and VLOOKUP. The data might contain fields that your CRM doesn’t use, which will create more clutter and redundant data. Phone numbers or other data might be formatted differently than other records in your database, causing inconsistency.
But that’s just how it goes when you import data into your CRM, right? You either live with these issues, or spend hours cleaning the data in Excel.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. Insycle makes importing new, fresh data into your CRM a breeze.
With Insycle’s advanced importing features, you can:
Often, data cleansing and management ends up being a one-person job. This isn’t because there isn’t enough work for multiple people. Rather, it’s because the headache that comes with passing .CSV files back and forth through email and ensuring you are always working from the latest version is simply just not worth it.
Data management is a time-consuming task. Even when you use Insycle’s advanced error identification and automation features, there will always be little data nuances and unexpected errors that your team will have to deal with before you can call any data 100% clean.
But Insycle makes collaboration easy, helping you make data quality a community concern.
Once you sign up for Insycle, you can invite unlimited users within your account. At any time, you can invite someone to join or create a shareable view or report for them to view and collaborate on.
With Insycle’s collaboration features, you’ll:
One of the biggest roadblocks to improved customer data health is figuring out exactly how much bad data you have in your system.
Insycle begins generating a Customer Data Health Assessment as soon as you create your account. Insycle will audit your customer data to identify more than 30 common customer data issues.
The audit separates the different types of data errors into different categories like “poorly formatted data,” “inconsistent data,” and “duplicate data.” Then, you can drill down into each of those categories to see exactly what kind of errors are present in your database.
Your Health Assessment will continue to audit and report on your data issues on a daily basis. You’ll be able to keep a top-down view of the health of your CRM data and track how it changes over time.
The Insycle Data Health Assessment keeps tabs on your data health in the long run, automatically identifying common issues and fixing them.
Insycle comes loaded with templates that can help you to solve very specific data problems.
For instance, you can identify duplicates using templates that allow you to match duplicates in a variety of ways, using both exact-match comparisons and similar (fuzzy) comparisons. You can match duplicates using:
These are just a few of the many pre-built templates for dozens of data tasks that are available in Insycle.
Beyond the pre-built templates, you can create and save your own custom templates for dealing with data issues that are unique to your organization.
Maybe imports from a different software platform cause a very specific issue in your data. Using Insycle, you can isolate those issues and resolve them automatically.
If your data is in bad shape, you need to fix it. But you also need a customer data management plan that incorporates ongoing processes to maintain a high standard of data quality long-term.
If you allow poor-quality data to collect between cleaning runs, you haven’t really solved your problem. Yes, your database is cleaner overall than it would have been had you never cleansed the data. But your marketing, sales, and support teams can’t be sure the data is accurate, consistent, and reliable unless you have a long-term data management solution in place.
That bit of doubt in the back of their minds—the doubt that makes them double-check records before engaging with prospects, and spend hours combing through your data to fix errors by hand before sending out automated marketing campaigns—is what companies are constantly fighting against.
Insycle puts your customer data management operations on autopilot.
Not only can Insycle’s Customer Data Health Assessment help you keep an eye on your ongoing CRM data quality, but you can set data cleansing processes to run at set intervals, essentially automating the heavy lifting in your customer data checklist.
Simple things—like ensuring that first names are properly capitalized, that phone numbers follow a specific format, and that job titles are standardized—can all be automated. When you don’t have to worry about those tasks, you’ll be able to focus on the more specific data management and quality issues plaguing your CRM.
This means that your team will never have to load up Excel and manually fix your most common data tasks, ever again!
Using Insycle, you can eliminate most of your manual data entry and cleansing work, freeing your team to focus on the big picture.
Insycle is a complete data management toolset that allows you to identify, fix, and automate your most pressing data issues.
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, especially given the increasing trend toward digital go-to-market.
Want to learn more about what you can do with Insycle? Check out this article on Insycle's advanced data cleaning functions, which covers dozens of different use cases of Insycle’s Transform Data module.