Your Guide to Managing and Organizing Customer Data

How to manage and organize your customer data

Customer data is a vital aspect of any sales and marketing strategy. That’s because it can teach you about your audience and help you figure out more effective ways of engaging with them, driving up your company’s revenue.

But odds are, your customer data comes in through lots of different channels. That can make it hard to keep track of, which is why managing and organizing customer data is such an important part of an effective data strategy.

The question is, what does effective customer data management look like? If you’re wondering that question, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading for more info.

7 tips for managing and organizing customer data

Customer data organization is important, and equally important is ensuring you manage your data effectively. Here are seven ways of keeping your data organized.

7 top customer data management and organization tips

• Use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform
• Clean and validate your data
• Set up data governance policies
• Segment your customer data
• Use some data visualization tools
• Make data accessible and searchable
• Managing data privacy and security

1. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform

Maybe the most essential step toward customer data management is to get a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. CRMs exist to gather customer data, centralize it in one location, and help you manage, analyze, and leverage it.

CRMs are fantastic for managing data across multiple channels. Instead of having to jump between lots of different platforms to access your data, you can just gather all that data and centralize it in your CRM.

CRMs can even help you automate certain elements of your sales and marketing processes, using the insights you gain from your data to reoptimize those campaigns to be more effective. That makes a CRM a much more actionable tool than a mere spreadsheet, especially since your whole team can easily access it.

Download our Sales Manager’s Survival Guide!

Ready to become the best sales manager for your team? Get 70+ leading tips and strategies from the experts for sales management success with our Sales Manager’s Survival Guide.

DOWNLOAD IT FREE

2. Clean and validate your data

No matter how much data you gather, it won’t be of any benefit to you if it’s poor quality. That’s why data cleaning and validation is important. Let’s briefly define each of those terms:

• Data cleaning is the process of removing any inaccuracies, redundancies, or inconsistencies from your customer data.
• Data validation is the process of verifying that data has been cleaned before importing it into your CRM or using it in your analytics.

You should perform both of these tasks regularly to ensure that you don’t get led astray by inaccurate data. Your CRM may be able to perform a certain amount of data validation automatically. But what it can’t handle, you should do manually.

3. Set up data governance policies

Another way to manage customer data is by setting up data governance policies. Data governance is a system of rules you lay out for how your team will manage your data. It determines information like:

• Who is responsible for managing your data
• Which tasks each person should perform
• How each task should be handled

Those are just a few of the things you can include in your data governance guidelines. Overall, data governance exists to ensure that there’s a set policy for handling your data. By following the policies you lay out, your team can manage your data more consistently and efficiently, as there won’t be any confusion about how things are done.

Let’s Talk

Have a question? Need a volume discount? Send us a message or book a meeting with a Sales rep to start the conversation.

Contact Sales

4. Segment your customer data

Not all of your customers are exactly alike. They likely live in different areas, occupy different careers, and hold different interests. Knowing that, why would you send them all the exact same marketing?

Segmenting your customers is a great way to improve the relevancy of your marketing. Within your CRM, you can divide customers into different groups based on factors like location, website behavior, and more.

Then you can create separate marketing campaigns to send to each of those different groups, allowing you to use more personalization and drive better results. The more specific your marketing is to your audience, the more likely they will respond positively.

5. Use some data visualization tools

At the end of the day, the point of gathering customer data is so that you can analyze it and draw valuable insights from it about your audience. So, if your customer data organization strategy doesn’t include data visualization, it’s missing its most critical component.

Data visualization is where you lay out your data in organized, visual formats like charts or graphs. The benefit of this tactic is that it allows you to easily identify patterns or trends in your data, helping you learn more about your customers.

Based on the trends you find in your data, you can improve your sales and marketing processes. For example, if you find that most customers are interested in one particular feature of your product, you can identify that feature as an important one to include in your marketing and highlight in your sales calls.

6. Make data accessible and searchable

However you organize your data, you want it to be easy to find specific information in your database. Your data should be searchable and easy to access. Often, you can achieve this by choosing a CRM that meets those needs.

However, you can also apply some of the steps we’ve already mentioned—like data cleaning and validation—to further organize your data and make it easier to navigate within the CRM or database.

7. Managing data privacy and security

The last vital factor to consider when managing your data is security and privacy. After all, we’re talking about customer data—it contains information pertaining to specific individuals, and you have a responsibility to keep that information secure.

To that end, implement data security audits and risk assessments regularly to ensure your data is secure within your CRM. Also, be sure to train your employees on the correct practices for securely migrating and managing data.

Nutshell is the perfect tool for managing and organizing customer data

If you follow the steps on this list, you’ll have the key to a top-tier customer data organization strategy for your business. And as we mentioned earlier, that all starts with getting a CRM. But which CRM?

Enter Nutshell. Nutshell is one of the best CRMs out there since it can handle data management and sales automation and comes with the help of a stellar customer service team. That team can help you through any questions or issues you may have.

Wondering how effective Nutshell will be for your company? Just check out our 14-day free trial today!

start your free trial