Data The dirtiest four-letter word in CRM

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Data: The dirtiest four-letter word in CRM

By Kerry Glance

30 Jul 2004 | SearchCRM.com

Where there is failure, there is usually blame…and the CRM market has seen its fair share of both.

A few years ago, when CRM initiatives were under scrutiny for high cost and low success rates, people blamed technology and those who sold it. CRM vendors became villains.

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Then it became apparent that lack of a CRM strategy was the biggest hindrance in most of those cases where failure was reported. The technology was working just fine. The problem was with organization, sponsorship and acceptance -- all human issues.

Yet today, even companies who have a sound CRM strategy combined with the best technology are still not 100% satisfied with their projects. Now what can we blame? Something that has been staring us in the face all along: dirty data.

Think about the number of name changes, address changes, divorces, births and deaths that occur within a company's customer base on a daily basis. Add to that number all the customer records with missing or incorrect information. That's a whole lotta bad data. Change and error are both constants in life, and they make customer data management seem like a hopeless cause.

In fact, The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) estimates that poor data quality costs U.S. businesses more than $600 billion each year. Perhaps more alarming is the rate at which TDWI claims data deteriorates: up to 3% every month! Gartner's projections are equally as discouraging – it believes that 25% of critical data within Fortune 1000 companies will continue to be inaccurate through 2007.

Part of the problem is that CRM enables and encourages access to customer information across the enterprise. While that sounds like a benefit, it can also be a hindrance. The ...

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