How much customer information would you like to lose? In the information age companies are storing, processing and acting on the information that is entered into their systems by users. Almost all of this information is entered manually--that is, it is entered by users in the course of their work. For CRM in particular, it is critical that information is entered as soon as possible. This is because users forget information very quickly--the so-called “forgetting curve”. I have recently heard a business leader talk about the discounting that they do to the information that they are given from their teams. ‘We discount the sales teams information by 40%,’ was said at one conference I recently attended. I asked, “what discount do you apply to the reports from accounting?” and the response was a shocked look, “we rely 100% on the accounting team, their data is not wrong”. One of the major reasons that Sales information is unreliable is that it is not entered in a timely fashion.

Enabling Great Customer Service

Have you ever called customer service and even after the representative has pulled your information, they couldn’t view your past orders or calls? Great customer service staff simply cannot be great if the information they have is out of date. According to a rant from Dave Kurlan, a top-rated keynote speaker and bestselling author, “The CRM application of choice is completely useless to management unless the entire sales force is using it as intended.” (source)

Enabling Effective Marketing

Many companies are implementing marketing automation systems such as ParDot, Marketo, HubSpot, and several others. These are efforts that connect company information (blog posts, white papers, case studies, etc…) to customer information that resides within your Salesforce CRM. It is more important now than ever before to make sure that the information within your CRM is accurate and up to date.

Drip campaigns are one example. A drip campaign’s goal is to engage the consumer with relevant information and keep your brand and value proposition top of mind for the consumer. Typically a drip campaign will have six to as many as ten items that will be sent to a consumer at strategic points in the sales process. For example, a properly deployed drip campaign will send a case study on service excellence shortly after an engagement with the consumer on service contracts. Shortly after that a video might be sent that highlights other customers that are happy with the performance of their service contracts. The entire effort is designed to convert prospective clients into active clients.

Understand your current process… then improve it!

If the information that is entered is out of date then the effectiveness of your efforts will suffer. The forgetting curve is not new, it dates back to 1885: “The forgetting curve supports one of the seven kinds of memory failures: transience, which is the process of forgetting that occurs with the passage of time.” (source)

Given that as humans we have this issue that we forget more and more information as time passes, what can we do about it?

Driving adoption means making sure everyone is updating their data frequently. Monitoring activities on CRM applications is the best way to make sure users are compliant with corporate expectations. Our recommendation is using applango to look at your current process and understand what your time lag is. Once you have that information you can develop a plan to address it.

Data Sources