Define Your CRM Data Standards

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To standardize your data, you have to have your standards defined. These standards are defined by a set of rules for each field.

For instance, some of the different standards that are commonly set for CRM field data include:

First names should be capitalized and contain no spaces, numbers, or extra characters. You may also want to remove middle names, and titles like Mr. and Ms. so that you can use the first name in thai phone number campaigns without worrying about awkward outcomes
Phone number formatting should be specific and consistent, like 123-456-7890. As opposed to (123)-456-7890, 123.456.7890, or 1-(123)456-7890. It’s best to use an international standard like E.164 that is uniform and is supported by most software and hardware products.
States should be expressed using a consistent convention, either verbose such as “Washington” or abbreviated, such as “WA”. The key is to ensure consistency across all the systems and apps that you use.
Emails should follow the standard email form You may consider limiting free email services like Gmail and Hotmail, or at least have a way to identify and filter for free email domains so that you can treat them as a segment. Limiting data sources can help to improve quality and make data standardization easier.
Website URL should include the fand not just “sitedomain.com,” and use a separate field to store just the domain name “sitedomain.com”
Job titles standardized to popular acronyms, such as “CEO” instead of “Chief Executive Officer.” You can choose either option, the key is to maintain consistency.
These are just a few examples of the different types of standards that you can set for your CRM data. The standards that you choose will depend on how you plan on using that data. For instance, a sales team with an auto-dialing solution might need phone numbers standardized to a specific format to work with their software.

If you use multiple systems, they all need to speak the same language to communicate with each other. That way you can ensure that you have data consistency across your platforms and create and aggregate reports from different sources.

How you standardize your data will depend on your business requirements. But with the right processes in place, you can always have clean data to improve your marketing, sales, and support campaigns.