10 rules for cleaner customer data.

• Position: Marketing News

Has your bank ever sent out a cross-sell letter addressed to "The Perpetual Trust Family"? Or with the recipient's Social Security number printed on an address line?

If so, you understand the importance of clean data to the effective functioning of a CRM initiative, according to Jacques Murphy, product manager for the Sedona Corp., King of Prussia, Pa. He suggests the following 10 guidelines to kick-start the data cleanup efforts at your financial institution.

1. We don't need another hero. The IT department cannot be solely responsible for data cleanup, because it didn't create the dirty data in the first place. It's the result of typos and inconsistencies entered on many systems by many people over many years. To be a success, your data cleanup project has to involve people, departments, and job functions across the institution.

2. What's the use? Speaking of success, you can't succeed at everything. There's a whole lot of messy and missing data out there, and while it would be nice to get it all neat and clean, you don't want to take on the world. First, think about what you want to accomplish that requires cleaner data. Do you want cleaner addresses fur direct mail? Do you want dates of birth for personalized notes or voicemails? Do you want the same individual to have the correct Social Security number on all accounts?

   This gives you your priorities. Tackle these important goals first.

3. Consider the source. If you want to fix the problem, look to where it started, not just to where it shows up. Dirty data is the result of how it is entered on the core system and your other applications like trust and investments. If you clean the data after the fact, you have won the battle but not the war. More dirty data will continue to feed into the system until you clean up the processes that resulted in the bad data in the first place.

4. All together now. Break up daunting cleanup efforts into small chunks of work distributed to all the branches and all the staff. A CRM system, by consolidating information, brings data problems to light It lets you print out lists of records with conflicting Social Security numbers, inconsistent or misspelled addresses and names, and other problems. Get the branches to allocate a feasible amount of time--say, two hours a month--to work down the lists and correct information in the core system.

5. The answer was right in front of you the whole time. Data such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth may be...