Case Study: Improving How the CRM Manages Person Data

Background and challenges:

At a company using a CRM system, a serious problem emerged around managing individual people’s data. The same person, over the course of their career, would often work with several companies at once or change jobs. Creating multiple records for the same person caused a loss of continuity and confusion in the available data, leading to:

• Duplicated or fragmented contact records.
• Difficulty tracking the history of working with a single person.
• Reduced sales effectiveness and service quality due to incomplete or inaccurate information.

Project goal:

Enable effective management of individual people’s data in the CRM system, ensuring data integrity, continuous customer history, and easier management of the different roles tied to the same person.

Solution:

1. Creating a unique record for each individual:

1. Built a dedicated „individual” record in the CRM containing unique data such as tax ID, personal phone number, email address, and place of residence.
2. This let the company store complete, current information about a given person in one place, making the data easier to access.
3. Creating a separate table for functions linked to an individual:

2. Introduced a separate table in the CRM that stores the various roles a given person can hold across multiple organizations at the same time.
3. This made it possible to assign different roles, giving better management and full visibility into the history of working with that person.
4. Linking objects to the individual:

3. Actively linked various system objects, such as leads, offers, orders and contracts, to a person’s specific roles.
4. This gathered all information relevant to that individual in one place, making it easier to process and analyze.
5. Automatically linking new people to existing records:

4. Implemented defined algorithms that automatically link new person records to existing ones, removing the need for manual data entry.
5. Where the data isn’t conclusive, the system allows an operator to make the match manually, to keep the data accurate.

Results and benefits:

• Higher data integrity: The new system eliminated duplicate records, improving data quality and consistency.
• Better customer history: The ability to store complete information about an individual made it easier to analyze and track the history of the relationship.
• Operational efficiency: Employees gained better visibility into the data, enabling faster decisions and more effective sales activity.
• Fewer errors: Automating the record-linking process reduced the risk of errors from manual data entry and management.
• Better customer service: Access to complete, up-to-date customer information led to more personalized, effective service.

Summary:

A single record per individual in the CRM eliminated duplicate entries and gave the company full visibility into its history with that person, regardless of how many companies or roles they’d been involved in.