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Poor data quality is an issue that continues to plague CRM systems. However, with the ever-increasing value placed on quality data, especially with the advent of AI, ensuring your Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) system is free of duplicates and contains quality data is essential to the success of your business.
Establishing a strategic Data Governance Program will ensure high-quality data is maintained and help maintain compliance with industry and government regulations.
Let's look at the Data Governance benefits in more detail.
Maintaining proper internal and external data security is paramount to maintaining the health of your data and should be part of any Data Governance Program to be implemented.
From an internal security point of view, you must ensure that users have the right roles and security. If you are onboarding new employees, you should determine what rights they receive to the data and how they receive access.
Externally, you need to ensure you are compliant with any government regulations in your region and you are properly prepared in case of a data breach.
Do you have a plan in place in case of a ransomware attack? Have you defined steps to ensure compliance with government regulations in your region for topics like how you should notify your customers in the case of a data breach, or comply with their “right to be forgotten”? The fines on some of these regulations are very high. For example, Europe’s GDPR has tiers of fines, the first one is 2% of your annual revenue or 10 million Euros, whichever is higher!
The bottom line is you need to be prepared and compliant with any governing regulations in case of a security breach.
To ensure high data quality, it’s very important to avoid inconsistent data silos. For example, if you are in a sales meeting and your CEO asks you what your sales figures are, you don’t want to be in the position of reporting $1 million but the finance team is reporting $750,000 because your data is not integrated consistently.
Other things which may be contributing to inconsistent data silos include standards not being consistent when sales and marketing users are entering data into the system. For example, marketing could have a different definition of what a customer is versus what Sales defines as a customer and these records could be tagged differently as a result.
Also, consider if data is being constantly imported into one of your systems, the data might be synced with existing systems and rules should be in place to ensure duplicates are not created.
Having a Data Governance Program to set the rules for such instances is invaluable.
Implementing a Data Governance Program will help improve and maintain data quality by establishing policies and guidelines for:
Having a more efficient CRM system will lead to more efficient users across all departments. Imagine all the time saved by your IT department if your data is clean. They will no longer have to keep running dedupe sessions, updating and verifying data, or fixing security issues with the data. With a good data governance program in place, users are going to have a lot more time available to do other important tasks, instead of navigating through duplicate contacts to find the right information.
Assuming you have removed and maintained a duplicate-free system, you will have a Single Customer View (SCV) instead of disparate data across multiple records. By maintaining a SCV, your system will have a single source of truth, allowing users to find records more easily and reducing data entry. All of this leads to consistency and trust in your CRM system with a single version of the truth when you are looking at orders, products, contacts, or accounts, and of course, across all your systems, both front-end and back-end.
Find out more about these Data Governance Best Practices and the Roles and Responsibilities involved in a Data Governance Program in the next section of this series.
DATA GOVERNANCE ROLESOr get the full QWARE Data Governance Best Practices White Paper here:
DATA GOVERNANCE WHITE PAPER