Sales Team - Data Integrity Fail

Data integrity should be a huge concern with any organization, particularly if you'd like to utilize that data in future marketing efforts. This is something I see often, and it's a huge pet peeve of mine because it causes major issues in ensuring data is usable within future marketing campaigns. Obviously bad emails will contribute to poor delivery, and text in a phone number will cause a dialer to choke on that file rendering it useless. What about embarrassing personalization issues when you insert a client name in an email or direct mail piece? (see image below).

Your systems are flawed if the only place for a sales person to add notes on an account is within a data field. If your sales team thinks modifying contact info to include reminders is a good idea, please recommend a job digging ditches. :)

The most common problems I've seen regularly include:

phone: 555-987-6543**BestNumber
phone: 555-987-1234**WifesNameisBeverly
email: please@onlymakephonecalls.com

This is a common problem in organizations that either don't have a CRM, or they do, but they're using it incorrectly. If you have a good marketing database analyst / administrator you can catch alot of these issues using data cleansing rules, but I've found even the best cleansing rules can't catch some of these issues.

Consider these options when setting up your CRM, or sales interface.

- Numeric only field values for phone numbers

- Should edits made by sales over-ride existing data?

- Include a "preferred contact method" field within your database scheme

- Include spouse information as a separate field value on the same record

With the proper setup in the beginning, and some good training you can avoid these common issues. Remember, the best systems still won't catch alot of these issues, without thorough training with the sales team on data integrity and proper training on what data should be captured, or disregarded.

I laugh every time I see these types of issues, because I can just picture one of the sales guys putting the info into a client record. Do you have any funny data integrity stories? I'd love to hear them...