Do you enjoy the challenge of a CRM project? Or do you, like many of your colleagues, find the prospect daunting? Then you should definitely read this article. It shows how a project can run smoothly if you approach it in the right way. DPD was about to introduce a new CRM system. Jasmine Zurbuchen and her small team used this opportunity to clean up the company’s customer data and create the optimum basis for future work. This article describes DPD’s journey to perfect customer data.
“It began in the summer of 2017,” recalls Jasmine Zurbuchen, Product Coordinator at DPD. “Our old CRM system was gradually reaching its capacity limits.” In addition, the quality of the data was no longer as good as DPD management would have liked. “We had the customer data in our CRM system,” explains Zurbuchen, “but a lot of the data was either no longer correct or was missing, plus we had a lot duplicates.” Furthermore, no mandatory fields had been defined. As a result, employees were saving new entries without filling in all fields. Gaps in the data were inevitable.
The decision was then taken to introduce a new CRM system. The old system was no longer fit for purpose and had to make way for Salesforce. “To get off to a good start with the new CRM system we needed to first clean up and enrich the data. This was the only way to provide a clean basis.” Jasmine Zurbuchen knew that the existing data wasn’t good enough for the new CRM system and that now was the perfect time to thoroughly clean up the database. For this she needed a data specialist as a partner.
Cleaning and enriching data
She found the perfect partner in Dun & Bradstreet. Dun & Bradstreet's database contains information on around 700,000 companies in Switzerland. In addition, she has access to Dun & Bradstreet’s data universe (Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud) and thus up-to-date information on over 500 million companies worldwide. DPD handed over its customer database to Dun & Bradstreet for the first step in the process, data cleaning. Dun & Bradstreet checked whether the existing information, such as postal address, e-mail addresses or phone numbers, was correct and complete and then added any current or missing information where necessary. This step also involved matching using the D&B D-U-N-S® Number, the worldwide unique identification number for companies. This made it possible to eliminate duplicates in the data.
“It all went without a hitch,” says Jasmine Zurbuchen.
Enriching data
It didn’t end there, however. The next step involved enriching the database with additional information. Every company was also given a risk indicator, which indicates the financial risks associated with the respective company. “We added a lot of information, from identification to risk,” recalls Zurbuchen. “We didn’t want to do only what was necessary; we wanted to do the job properly. It was therefore something that we were happy to invest in.”
“We recognised the importance of high-quality data, and told ourselves that if we’re going to do something new, then we’re going to do it right.”
Jasmine Zurbuchen, Product Coordinator at DPD