CRM Success by the Numbers - Part 4: How Many Licks Does It Take?

At Valentine's Day, it's hard to resist a few candy references. So, as the rollout progresses, you may think you have this CRM project licked. In fact, you may even start to think that sweet success is so close you can taste it. You’ve gotten the hard parts out of the way: The end users are on board. The installation is done. The invoice is paid. Now you think it’s all downhill from here, right?

Not always. What you may not have considered is that as more and more users are rolled out, all the new information pouring into the system can actually gum things up. During this phase, you if you don't get on the stick and really focus on data quality, things can quickly get out of hand.

So how many numbers does it take to achieve CRM data quality? Plenty. Start by gauging the ongoing data cleanup. Good metrics here include:

• Number of contact records cleaned
• Number of duplicates merged
• Number of records with complete contact information
• Number of bad e-mail addresses fixed

All these numbers can help you to stay on top of the data quality which can keep the whole CRM project from going sour.