Data is undoubtedly a core asset for companies in multiple ways. The amount of data being generated daily provides valuable insights into an organization and its customers and empowers teams to take action. One of the prime business data sources is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, especially Salesforce- the most widely-utilized CRM platform.
Customers mostly interact with brands online over multiple channels, which as a result, generates a vast amount of data. You can use this data for multiple purposes, as long as you maintain and manage it effectively in your Salesforce account. However, doing so requires dedicating a resource or burdening your team with additional tasks (thus wasting time and money). Consequently, businesses often have to turn to professional Salesforce data entry services to leverage this data in the most efficient manner.
Fortunately, there are several ways to make the best use of your Salesforce CRM data with an effective data management strategy. This post highlights the significant challenges associated with Salesforce data management and the best tips to overcome those challenges.
Keep on reading!
Understanding the Importance of Salesforce Data Management
Nowadays, companies handle millions of records every day across various Salesforce apps such as Financial Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud & others. This data can be a source of valuable business insights that can improve the decision-making process significantly. But with a lot of data availability, you must ensure your Salesforce system's data is of high quality. According to a Gartner report, not having access to high-quality data can affect productivity by as much as 20%.
The more channels a business utilizes to interact with customers for collecting the data, the higher the risk of data errors in your Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) database. This includes issues like data duplication, abrupt or fragmented data, loss of valuable records, inconsistency and ambiguity of the information gathered, reporting, privacy, security, governance issues, and more.
With a proper Salesforce data management strategy, it's definitely possible to prevent the above-mentioned database errors before they negatively impact your business productivity. Implementing Salesforce data management practices in your business has some significant aspects.
Let's take a quick glimpse into it-
Backup- When you operate with large data arrays; you can protect yourself from the loss or corruption of valuable data.
Import/Export- When your data needs to be accessed from external devices, applications, or web services and converted to/from popular file formats.
Reports and dashboarding- Organizing data easily by defined criteria and representing vital information graphically to gain insights quickly.
Integrations- You can also combine Salesforce functionality with third-party solutions' features to cater to your teams' needs.
Governance. Establishing the principles of handling and using data is crucial for maintaining data privacy, quality, and consistency.
Salesforce Data Management Challenges You Can't Overlook in 2023
Having robust data management is essential to develop your business, especially for SMBs in the coming years. But, Salesforce data management comes with its own set of challenges that you must understand. Have a look-
Salesforce data storage limitations are one of the prime challenges for businesses. The organizational data stored across multiple systems, like internal storage, data warehouses, and third-party systems, needs to be easily transformed from its original format into the preferred format for analysis. But, this becomes a daunting task for enterprises due to storage limitations.
The compliance regulations are intricate, multi-jurisdictional, and updates regularly. In order to simply review their data and find anything that falls under the amended rules, firms need to be updated on the new modifications.
The massive amounts of data being produced from an expanding number and variety of sources are one of the major problems. This covers marketing initiatives, consumer contacts, and multiple other resources. This makes it tough to handle all the data and keep track of every record, where it is stored, and how it will be used in the end.
Organizations usually do not focus on utilizing their legacy data and making it in use. Collecting this type of data does not have much value if it is not getting processed quickly. Also, if it is taking a lot of time and effort to modernize the data for proper usage, then this will not lead to profitable results.
7 Tips to Follow for Seamless Salesforce Data Management
Data is the crucial aspect that Salesforce CRM acts upon. Therefore, it must be maintained and controlled for positive outcomes. Implementing these seven effective data management tips for your Salesforce database is recommended.
1- Establish a Set of Standards
It is important to develop a high-quality standard or set of rules for your Salesforce CRM database that helps analyze bad data and fix it automatically. This will ensure that data quality remains on top, no matter how frequently the database changes or the business evolves. After setting a specific set of standards, you should often revisit it to do improvements or updates.
2- Regular Data Monitoring
Sometimes, users can replace valid information or delete it by mistake, resulting in data degradation. Also, while performing CRM data entry, whether manually entered or imported, it invariably contains a certain number of different fields, despite putting in a lot of effort. That's why it's critical to constantly monitor the database to identify and correct erroneous data.
3- Apply CRED (Create, Read, Edit, Delete) Setting
CRED fully stands for Create, Read, Edit Delete which is a profile setting that allows users specific permissions for objects they have access to. It is one of the best ways to prevent data quality problems. Every profile has a specific CRED for every object based on how the user interacts with the record. You should always ensure that you do not grant, create or delete access to each and every user in your organization.
4- Cleanse the Data
Excess data availability, repetitive entries, and incorrect details- any dataset with these roadblocks will generate misdirected reports. In such a case, automated searching of data and merging should be conducted to consistently maintain high data quality. In short, always maintain a clean database. Also, to save time and effort for data cleansing, you can outsource Salesforce CRM data cleansing services.
5- Utilize Data Validation Rules
To make sure that every piece of data you collect is both accurate and organized, it is suggested to implement a few critical validation rules within your form fields. Validation rules facilitate the salesforce users to be on the right track and ensure they provide the correct input data, in the proper format, at the requested time when creating or editing records in Salesforce. This helps streamline the experience for both you and your users, ensuring that every piece of data is used
6- Make Use of the Salesforce Predefined List
Salesforce picklists work similarly to dropdown fields on forms in that they only permit users to select items from a preset list. The values that are present in the picklist fields in the backend of Salesforce are always subject to alteration by admins. Dropdown fields will dynamically load options from a picklist maintained by salesforce administration to update the data automatically.
7- Using Salesforce Accelerators
Without leaving the internal platform, Salesforce also offers several "accelerators" that streamline the data management process. The Data.com Data Quality Assessment Accelerator, the Customer Master Data Harmonization Accelerator, and the Prevent Duplicate Records are a few of the most well-known accelerators.
Wrapping Up
Data management has become a vital aspect of running a business in today's data-driven world. However, it's not an easy process. As the data volumes generated increase daily and new communication channels are emerging, maintaining the CRM data quality for Salesforce is necessary. With the above insights, you can ensure highly effective Salesforce data management.
Also, you can leverage the benefits of efficient data management by outsourcing data entry services. Salesforce data entry experts implement the best practices with adherence to accuracy and quality. This, as a result, helps in streamlining the whole salesforce data management process for your business.
