Data can be overwhelming to process for any company, so you need to have tools that makes sense of it all. Clean data in your CRM can bring immediate insights into things you've perhaps ignored for too long. Or, you're aware of them, but just don't have the proper data services tools needed to find the business intelligence insights to make the best decisions for goals and for customer communications.
The quality of your CRM data directly affects reporting, and therefore strategy and planning affected. Business dashboard reporting assures that all within the enterprise can easily read data and use it to help better understand the data as it applies to their goals for planning, forecasting, and budgeting as well as acheiving the overall goals for the company.
Trying to correlate between good and bad data quality becomes a huge problem, though, if you don't measure it all tangibly. Without doing so, employees could end up looking at measuring data as a rote practice rather than using it to hone in on specific business numbers and identifying specifics to maintain a pathway to success.
Let's look at the reasons that high quality CRM data is a top priority for BI dashboard reporting, and company BI strategy.
Timeliness and Availability
Quality metrics matter in how you perceive data, and having it in real-time factors into how successfully you take competitive action. You want data in your dashboard that's readily available to use for a specific purpose your business has in mind.
Rather than wait for data, your dashboard needs to present data within the time frame your company expects to complete analysis. The faster you can get this data, the better, since it helps gain immediate advantage against competitors. Access to thorough data brings a fuller picture of your business reality so you don't do any second-guessing.
Eliminating Data Duplication
It's important any data duplication stays at a low percentage across your platforms. Data cleansing helps with this and becomes an essential element to avoid dealing with issues. You may also have duplicate information on customers in your CRM that needs weeding out to prevent extra time fixing errors.
With clean data, you assure your sales department doesn't make mistakes due to too much duplication. The more streamlined your customer information, the better you can serve them based on their targeted personas.
Properly Presenting Data for Users
How you format and present data is going to affect how well your employees use it. This doesn't pertain to how your dashboard looks but rather how you set up your CRM for data entry and extracting data. Providing the right way to enter and retrieve data matters in how it's reported.
All CRM systems need to set up appropriate fields so all entry is correct. You can accomplish this with drop-down choices so each member of your team manages consistency when they enter data.
Being consistent in CRM data makes for a better presentation overall, which only benefits everyone relying on info to find answers to business challenges.
Bringing Relevance and Trust to Data
When sharing data across numerous platforms, you want to assure it's relevant and trustworthy for every department. How your employees perceive the data in your CRM dashboard gives workers confidence it is accurate and can be used to access the current situation, thus is a resource for planning and decision making.
Providing relevant data establishes the trust for all users so they won't have to second-guess that the information is actually correct when trying to tackle complex problems, and making the right decisions to stay on track for goals.
What This Means For Your Company
Overall, high-quality CRM data needs to become a major goal for your company for successful dashboard reporting. For data cleansing, using BI software like Univerv is a valuable tool and can be utilized for CRM migration as well. Dashboard software from IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects provide the quality data dashboard design and reporting for personalized presentation for any user.
Providing accurate data and reporting tools that allow every level of user to utilize the right data in real-time means that the strategy and goals of the company can be managed at all levels for success.
Download our free resource, Acheiving High CRM Data Quality to learn more about solving your data issues and better CRM data integration.