Irish Police Detain CRM Software's Public Enemy #1

Did you hear that Irish police have finally nabbed their island's worst driver? Prawo Jadzy showed up in the database over fifty times, with a different address listed under each record. As it turns out, "Prawo Jadzy" means "Driver's License" in Polish. Irish traffic cops, when stopping Polish tourists and guest workers for minor traffic infractions, simply copied the phrase as if it were a name. An honest mistake, repeated a few dozen times, gave police administrators the impression that a manic driver with a history of giving false addresses was wreaking havoc throughout the country.

How does this story relate to your CRM implementation?

Think about how your customer service agents and your sales professionals enter data for new customers into your CRM system. When confronted with incomplete data, are your users entering jibberish? More likely, are they entering placeholder text, like "none@none.com" for an e-mail address? Are they entering their own zip codes or your company's zip codes if a customer doesn't provide that information? All of these common CRM software workarounds may help your team members get past "required fields" screens, but they could be wrecking your data.

CRM software developers encourage system administrators to take two points of view when tackling the problem of bad data:

First, don't assume you won't need a certain piece of data at some point down the road. Therefore, you should make sure that team members collect accurate data now, especially if you have the opportunity to clean up data during repeat visits with a customer.

Second, assume that as much as 25% of your data may be flawed. Under that assumption, you may think differently about using systems that require unique names or e-mail addresses as identifiers. You may also consider filtering out a few "hot zips" that employees are likely to substitute.

This way, you can still leverage the power of the accurate data in your CRM system -- without wondering why Prawo Jadzy places dozens of orders per month.