One day, you requested for a product or service with an organization. The other day, you started receiving calls from multiple executives of that organization to sell those services or product to you. Did you enjoy those calls? Absolutely not. You will feel irritated and end up withdrawing that request.
So, what happened here? The organization for which you’ve had trust for their products or services, did not manage your contact details appropriately and thus, there were numerous customer executives calling you again and again. So, that organization lost you, lost its business.
Is your organization doing the same thing? Stop it right there.
Let’s figure out how to ensure that your customer data is accurate before you proceed with sales procedures:
1. Gather Customer Data in Detail
Sales strategies work great if you have the accurate and detailed customer data. Thus, it becomes a really great practice to prepare a list of customer data that you think your sales guys would need. You can create a checklist before preparing the template to gather customer data in detail. Your checklist may look like:
- Full name
- Business Name
- Personal/business email address
- Phone number
- Links to Social Media Profiles
- And, many based on your business & sales requirements
This checklist may vary from industry to industry. Say for example the Insurance company may need family, residence details, etc. as well along with their proof.
2. Ensure Forms are filled Completely
Once you have decided on the details that you want in your customer data fields, it is paramount to make necessary fields mandatory. The fields like links to social media profiles can be made optional as there might be people who don’t want to disclose their social media profiles. But, you need to ensure that the customer has fed each data required in the forms. If you are handling walk-in inquiries, your front-desk executives need to be on-their-feet to ensure this long process. I understand that is time and energy consuming. But, based on the required form fields, your sales & customer support processes will take place.
3. Beware of Unwanted Customer Details
Imagine you have a long list of fields that you want your customer to fill in the form. But, there are fields, they don’t want to disclose. If you feel those details are optional and don’t require them either, don’t fed incorrect customer details into the database. Those unwanted incorrect customer data will lead to misunderstandings or maybe, further going, you lose the customer. So, beware of filling the unwanted customer data into the database.
4. Crosscheck for Valid Customer Details
It is quite imperative to check whether the customer details that you have, are correct. It is possible that the person who visited your office to generate inquiry, might be fake. Fake in the sense that the inquired person is from your competitor and has come to understand your processes. Also, the person has no genuine inquiry for your products or services or had some criminal records. This is the reason why sometimes it is useful to link social media profiles.
5. Create a Standardized Template
Gathering and maintaining data are extremely important to ensure the customer data is accurate. To maintain the customer data accuracy, it is a mandatory practice to create a common template. Your executives should be following a common template to manage and maintain the customer data. If there are multiple templates in which the data is maintained, your sales and customer support team will get confused with following a particular process.
6. Clean the Unnecessary Data
Accuracy also depends on having the right data and cleaning the unwanted data at regular intervals. There are various possibilities that the customer’s existing phone number or job is changed. Then it comes under your responsibility to take those details and update the database. This is time consuming and boring. But, what you can do is hire an experienced and affordable data processing company with which your customer database is clean within your budget.
7. Ensure Data Security
Data security is must when it comes to having customer data. Customers will only trust the companies that don’t leak their personal as well as professional data to any other organization. Thus, it is vital to impose security to the customer data access. So, ensure only limited people have access to the database to modify the customer data.
8. Leverage Technology
Technology is something that comes into place in each process and each industry. It is up to you how to leverage the technology in various processes. Here are the multiple ways with which you can leverage your business processes as well:
- Utilize devices like Tablets to fill customer forms
- Use automation in the processes where necessary
- This will help the customers to share its details easily. This will reduce your valuable time and efforts which you can utilize in other important tasks.
9. Choose the Trustworthy CRM
Customer relationship management plays a very important role here. Inappropriate features of a CRM can duplicate the fields, may lose some data, and sometimes, there is a lack of security of the data. Thus, to ensure you don’t lose the trust of your customers and morale of the sales team, a trustworthy CRM is required the most.
10. Choose the Right Data Processing Services Provider
The most important thing is to have an expertise that can keep your customer data up-to-date. From filling the data to the database, updating them and processing needs hell lot of time. Neither you or your sales team can focus completely on fulfilling the data requirements along with their routine pitching, follow-up emails and calling. So, keep your stress level at zero and hire a perfect data processing service provider to help you process all your data before your team starts working.
What are the steps that you follow to keep your customer data accurate? Do share in the comment section below.