Every year when autumn comes the assistants of the sales department get a little nervous. They know what will happen in short term. It’s almost Christmas and the selections of contacts to receive a Christmas card have to be made.

Every year it’s the same. First the selections for every account manager are made and they will have to check manually if these are correct. This year will be the same as ever, which means that:

• relevant companies and contacts are missing
• new companies and contact persons will be added
• contact persons will be deleted
• contact persons will be transferred to their new company
• addresses appear to be not up-to-date

This is one of the best audits to validate the quality of your data. The number of additions, modifications and deletions indicates how accurate your employees have maintained the data in the CRM system. I think that most of us recognize the problem and maybe are part of the cycle themselves. Moreover, it clearly shows where your data management procedures fail. Most likely the account managers are expected to maintain the data themselves, which they don’t see as their primary task. If not account managers have to maintain the data the sales support team usually has to do so. But who will give them the required input? Only accurate data entry, actively monitoring and periodically checking against external sources will help to keep your CRM system up-to-date.

In general the Christmas card has little value for your relation with your contact persons, but such an intense mass mailing is very profitable for your data quality. Until your procedures are in place, keep sending Christmas cards to optimize your data quality.

ING is looking to make more use of its customer data for behavioural targeting. The financial services company has seen a five-fold in customer contacts in the past few years (think of Internet banking). They also have a lot of information on each customer through they payment transactions they do. If the customer would allow ING to use this information the bank could analyst the energy, phone and other bill and deliver specific offers together with other companies.

The ING PR department rushed to tone-down the debate by saying that this is only a possible scenario. A flood of data privacy concerns would be connected to initiatives like these.

The ING idea is thought provoking. How much does you bank know about your and the companies you do business with? How would they be able to use this and could it be of benefit to you?

Ideally you want to know more then the data points your organisation is able to collect like address, order history and phone number (and please let those be accurate). What would really help effective marketing is to know your customer’s contact preferences, social demographics, financial health, social network, employment, daily commute, etc. etc.

Keeping your data accurate with people moving, dying and changing jobs all the time is difficult enough as it is. Keeping abreast of your customers social data seems virually impossible. Has anyone experimented with collecting social network data to do this?