Customer data has grown increasingly sophisticated. Customers communicate across various platforms and have new expectations for speed and customization, such as the tailored experience provided by Amazon.

Many current CRM platforms offer the types of solutions that businesses require, but these platforms are only as good as the data they include. The CRM database is essential for creating a successful CRM application and maximizing customer data for new business insights.

What is CRM Data?

CRM (customer relationship management) data is a resource that contains all client information that a business collects, governs, transforms, and shares. It contains marketing and sales reporting capabilities for managing sales and marketing initiatives and enhancing customer involvement. CRM systems differ in their ability to route data from other applications and their functionality, performance, and usability.

Why Collect CRM Data?

CRM data assists sales teams in remaining organized, optimizing selling, utilizing marketing automation features and customer care activities, and becoming excellent relationship managers. The following are the primary reasons for collecting and utilizing CRM data:

• Quick access to consumer data such as interaction history and previous purchases can help customer care representatives provide better and faster service
• Menial yet necessary sales funnel, and customer service tasks can be automated
• Customer access and data collection can help businesses find insights and patterns about their customers through reporting and visualization tools

What Data Should You Store in Your CRM?

4 Types of CRM Data

Identity data

When you ask individuals what they think of as “client data,” they frequently give instances that fall under the area of identification data. This category includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, and other personal information that can assist a company in identifying a consumer.

When a person subscribes to an email newsletter or signs up for a free trial, they almost always provide you with their identifying data. A potential client grants your company permission to deliver updates and marketing information via email or other channels by providing their identifying data.

Descriptive data

As the name implies, descriptive data characterizes a lead, contact, customer, or opportunity using contextual information, features, or attributes. Instead of identifying a single record, you can use descriptive data to search or filter numerous records at the same time since it’s relevant to multiple leads or customers. Typical descriptive data examples include job titles, industry, lead or deal stage, geographic location, organizational site, etc.

Descriptive data offers personal insights into particular records, allowing sales, customer support, or marketing teams to connect, assist, or communicate with prospects and customers more effectively. During sales activities, for example, knowing someone’s name helps you begin a conversation with a lead, but knowing their title, industry, and company size help you identify and personalize a solution to their unique needs.

Qualitative data

You can save qualitative data in your CRM to provide information about your contacts’ attitudes, intentions, and actions relating to purchasing decisions. This data is often acquired through direct feedback and surveys conducted by your company. Questions that can help your firm collect qualitative data include:

• What is your level of satisfaction with your purchase?
• What motivated you to make this purchase?
• What is your opinion of our company’s customer service?

Quantitative data

The number of times a customer or lead clicks on an email message, the potential revenue size of a current deal, and the total number of service tickets filed by a customer are all examples of quantitative data that show how a record acts, thinks, or feels.

Quantitative data can be about individual customers, leads, records of deals, or information about a group of customers or leads. For example, the total lead-to-deal conversion rate would look at the status of all leads in the pipeline and determine what percentage of them turned into won deals. In the same way, the total potential deal revenue is the sum of the potential deal sizes of each lead in the pipeline.

How to collect CRM data?

You should investigate every ethical way to obtain customer information. You can persuade a customer to willingly provide a large amount of data by combining incentives and improved personalization of preferences.

• Sign up forms
• Messages from communications channels such as email are the essential source of client data in B2B
• Facebook Connect and other social network connections are available via dedicated apps
• Surveys
• Competitions – Create a competition on social media and collect some personal information for it
• Web analytics will assist you in tracking the user browser environment, location, and time spent on the site
• Calls to the assistance line
• Transactions for purchasing

Conclusion

Businesses must maintain a high-quality and high-performance CRM database to keep up with their customers. A CRM database should excel in gathering, managing, transforming, and sharing customer data. Its strength rests in delivering the appropriate information from a reliable source to the right customer at the right time.

Vendors have achieved this goal by incorporating different data sources and systems into the CRM database. This simplifies sales and marketing operations, analysis, and cooperation since all data is reliable and available in near-real-time. The key to an efficient CRM database is successful data migration, followed by strong data governance and good data quality.