Why CRM data goes bad, and the four fixes that hold
Fields nobody owns, lists typed as free text and too many ways in: fix those first, then clean up.
Bad CRM data is not a discipline problem. It is what a system produces when nobody owns a field, a list is a text box and there are four doors in. Four fixes.
Every CRM we have been asked to look at has a data-quality problem, and every one has been described to us the same way: the team does not keep it up to date. The fix proposed is usually a cleanup project and a reminder about discipline.
The cleanup works for a quarter. Then the data is bad again, because the thing that made it bad was never the team. It was the system, and a system that produces bad data will keep producing it after any cleanup.
Here is where the bad data comes from, and the four fixes we have seen hold.
Where it comes from
Fields nobody owns. A field with no owner has no definition, so three people fill it three ways and a fourth leaves it blank. “Industry” is the classic: one person’s “Financial services” is another’s “Banking” and a third’s “FS”.
Text boxes where a list should be. Any value that will ever be reported on, filtered by or used to route work must be a controlled list. A free-text “Region” field will have forty regions within a year, including three spellings of the same city.
More than one way in. Records arrive from the web form, from an import, from an integration and from a person typing. Each path has its own rules, or none, and the duplicates that result are not carelessness — they are four doors and one room.
Reports nobody uses. Data that no report depends on is data nobody has a reason to keep right. If the “Next step” field feeds nothing, it will drift; if it feeds the Monday pipeline review, it will be current by Monday.
Fix one: every reported field has an owner
Not the CRM administrator — a person on the business side whose job depends on the field being right. The owner writes the one-line definition that appears as the field’s help text, decides what the allowed values are, and is the person the report goes to when the field is blank. A field nobody will own is a field the business does not need, and the right fix is to remove it.
Fix two: validate at the door
The point of entry is the only place data quality is cheap. A required field enforced on save costs the person entering it five seconds; the same field backfilled six months later costs a project. Controlled lists instead of text. Formats enforced where formats exist — phone numbers, postal codes, email. A duplicate check that runs as the record is created, not as a monthly report.
The resistance to this is always the same: it slows people down. It does, by seconds, and it stops the hours that follow.
Fix three: one path in, or the same rules on every path
Where the doors cannot be reduced to one, they get the same rules. The web form, the import template and the integration all run through the same validation the manual entry does. In practice this means the rules live in the CRM as workflows and validation, not in the form builder or the import script, so there is one place they are defined and one place they change.
Fix four: put the field in a report someone needs
This is the one that keeps the other three working. Every field the business claims to care about is on a report that a named person reads on a schedule, and that report shows blanks as blanks rather than silently excluding them. A field that is visibly empty on the sales director’s Monday view gets filled by Tuesday. A field that is quietly missing from a chart stays missing.
What a cleanup is for
A cleanup has a place — once, at the start, after the four fixes are in. It brings the existing records up to the standard the system will now hold them to. Done before the fixes, it is a quarter’s grace. Done after, it is the last one.
The honest version of “the team doesn’t keep it up to date”
People keep up to date the data that their own work depends on and that somebody looks at. The rest they do not, and no reminder changes that. Design the system so the fields that matter are owned, validated, single-sourced and looked at, and the discipline problem turns out to have been a design problem all along.
The four fixes are design work, and they belong in a data migration and integration engagement rather than in a cleanup budget.
Want this applied to your business?
Thirty minutes with a principal turns the general case into your specific list: which workflows, what they’re worth, and in what order. The article can only tell you what we would look at; the call tells you what we found.