CIO — CRM systems are where the data about customer relationships are supposed to live, and they typically provide a report-writing system as well as dozens of canned reports. But reports are incredibly vulnerable to GIGO, and they immediately expose data quality problems. Let's look at issues that limit the validity and credibility of any reports in your CRM system.

Danger Zone #1

Guess (GES) what: CRM systems can have serious data quality issues with duplicate records, phantoms, incomplete records, and inaccurate fields. While there are plenty of tools, services, and methods to clean up the data, the default assumption needs to be that the records are wrong...until proven otherwise. This issue only gets hairier when the CRM system receives data from outside feeds or is integrated with your other systems.

The solutions here are policies and real-time processes that preclude (or at least flag) bad records from being imported or hand-entered into the CRM system. This may seem costly, but it's way cheaper than the inevitable wild-goose chases due to bad data.

Danger Zone #2

So you have clean records, great. But what about the semantics of the entries: does "qualified lead" mean the same thing in the U.S. as it does in your European operations? Are some divisions using a named account model and others a lead generation model for pipeline development? Unless someone has analyzed your sales and marketing processes, the CRM system will probably have important semantic discrepancies that make cross-divisional comparisons meaningless.

The solutions here are policies, semantic standards, and a data steward function that control the creation of data fields and manage the evolution of their meaning and usage over time. While both low-level people and impatient executives will balk at this data governance, it's essential for meaningful reports (and SOX compliance!).

Danger Zone #3

It's all too easy to construct reports that run and look right if you spot-check using only records that you entered, but produce incomplete and silly results if used across the organization. The most obvious symptoms in this Zone are reports with summaries that don't "foot" due to double-counting, omitted records, or both. These issues typically come from a misunderstanding of the system object model, not anticipating consequences of the security system, and inappropriate use of filters and time windows. These problems become highly visible when VPs in different departments present their team's reports, with results that contradict each other.

The solution? Have a trained data analyst produce accurate, meaningful reports that are used by all organizations. Despite the ease of use of CRM report wizards, in large organizations most users and VPs should not be allowed to create formal reports themselves.

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