CIO — CRM systems are where the richest data about customer relationships is supposed to live, and most CRM systems provide a report-writing system as well as dozens of canned reports. As I wrote last week, reports immediately expose data quality problems and some of them can provide dangerous misinformation.

This week we're looking at the reports that really do make a difference in managing your business. But first, let's look at the foundation: meaningful data.

Let's Assume Data Hygiene

I'm sure it's safe to assume that nobody reading this article has any problem with dupes, phantoms, inaccurate field values, or systemic problems with data quality. So I'll go ahead and assume that.

But seriously, nobody achieves 100% data quality. As I wrote here, perfectionism in data is prohibitively expensive, and those last few percent yield asymptotically less real business value. In the real world, we can live with 5 to 10 percent data impurity, particularly if we know which parts of the data have lower quality than others. (Hint: calculate a data confidence index for each record, and include it with the records to help temper analytical conclusions).

The Meaning Police

Three areas where central IT can add real value to CRM systems are:

1. Controlling the data definitions and system object model to achieve the most consistent semantics.
2. Purifying the data on a regular basis to remove pollution and troubleshoot systemic sources, whether caused by flaky business processes or buggy integrations.
3. Writing reports so that users don't get tripped up by misunderstandings and logical fallacies.

The marketing and sales folks — those pesky right-brained CRM users — are not going to get this right themselves. Trust me, they'll thank you for this as long as your team is halfway responsive.

Valuable Report Area #1: Customer Service

If you've got your order expediting, help desk, or tech support function using CRM, a terrific amount of information can be fairly easily and accurately measured. When an inbound call comes in, your automatic call director (ACD), interactive voice responder (IVR), or even soft-PBX system can start sending customer and call info into the CRM. If your system is equipped with "screen pops" and other features that make the support peoples' job easier, they'll naturally enter in information about what the customer's problem was and what the path to resolution is. Integrate the CRM with your e-mail system and Web portal, and you'll effortlessly get tons of information about the specifics of the problem, how many touches were required to resolve it, what documents are the most useful to problem resolution, and what the ultimate time to resolve was. Add a survey system to the end of your support process, and you get immediate feedback from the customer about the service quality, general satisfaction, and willingness to recommend.

Since almost all your service interactions will be with customers, you'll have good data for cross-referencing and segmentation. You'll instantly be able to approximate the cost of escalated bugs and service-level agreement (SLA) violations, even if the CSRs aren't logging timecards in the system.

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