Chapter 20. Managing Quality Information As a Company Asset

For information to be useful in building relationships and making good business decisions, it must be accurate. Otherwise, CRM just helps us make bad decisions faster. These bad decisions often have a very negative impact on our relationships with our customers; they make our company look inept, if not plain stupid. In Chapter 11, we learned that information is data in context and focused on creating the context for our CRM information needs. At the time, we defined the containers where we could store our information so we could get at it easily and use it effectively. Now we are going to take a look at another aspect of information that impacts its usability: the content of the database and its level of quality.

Why bother with information quality? A senior marketing manager I once worked with said, “It cost (hundreds of) thousands of dollars to build this database, and now you want me to keep paying to maintain quality? That's ridiculous! It's just names and addresses after all. How hard can that be?”