Real World Data Quality Issues – #12 in This Series
Companies that grow through mergers and acquisitions often face a significant data quality challenge: duplicate customer records spread across multiple CRM systems.
One rapidly growing software company in the financial services sector expanded its market presence by acquiring organizations that offered complementary products. Rather than purchasing direct competitors to gain market share, the company focused on broadening its product portfolio and increasing customer value through strategic acquisitions.
Over time, the acquired businesses continued to operate independently. Each organization maintained its own CRM platform, customer support applications, business processes, and call centers. While this approach minimized disruption during the acquisitions, it didn’t benefit from economies of scale.
The Challenge: CRM Consolidation and Duplicate Records
As part of a larger digital transformation initiative, the company decided to consolidate three separate CRM systems into a single enterprise platform.
The benefits were clear:
- A unified customer view
- Improved customer service
- Reduced software and operational costs
- Better reporting and analytics
- More effective sales and marketing operations
However, the company faced a major obstacle.
Many customers appeared in two or more CRM systems because they purchased products from multiple brands. Combining millions of customer records from three large databases would create a substantial volume of duplicate records, inconsistent customer information, and conflicting account hierarchies.
Without a comprehensive data quality strategy, the CRM migration could have resulted in:
- Duplicate customer and account records
- Inaccurate reporting and forecasting
- Reduced sales productivity
- Poor customer experiences
- Increased operational costs
- Compliance and governance risks
How Acme Data Solved the Problem
The company engaged Acme Data to provide the enterprise data quality expertise and technology required to support the consolidation effort.
Using Data Studio, our enterprise data quality platform, we helped the organization execute a large-scale CRM data migration while simultaneously identifying, matching, and merging duplicate customer records across multiple source systems.
The solution included:
- Enterprise-scale data profiling
- Customer and account deduplication
- Advanced identity resolution and record matching
- Automated match and merge processing
- Complex survivorship rule management
- Parent-child account hierarchy reconciliation
- Data standardization and cleansing
- Ongoing data quality monitoring
By creating a trusted, consolidated customer database, the company was able to establish a reliable foundation for its new CRM environment while preserving critical customer relationships and historical information.
Why Data Quality Is Critical During CRM Consolidation
Organizations with multiple CRM systems often underestimate the complexity of customer data integration. Mergers, acquisitions, and business expansion frequently introduce duplicate records, inconsistent data standards, and fragmented customer views.
A successful CRM consolidation requires more than data migration. It requires a comprehensive data quality strategy that ensures customer records are accurate, complete, standardized, and deduplicated before they are loaded into the target system.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do mergers and acquisitions create duplicate customer records?
When organizations acquire companies, each business brings separate CRM systems and customer databases with it. Customers that interact with multiple brands often exist in multiple systems, creating duplicate records that must be identified and merged.
What is CRM deduplication?
CRM deduplication is the process of identifying, matching, and consolidating duplicate customer, account, contact, or prospect records to create a single, trusted version of the data.
What is survivorship in data quality?
Done properly, survivorship determines which record should be retained after two records are merged and which data values from the merged records will be retained. For example, one record may contain the most current address while another contains the most complete contact information.
Why is data quality important for CRM migrations?
Poor-quality data can significantly reduce the success of a CRM migration by introducing duplicate records, inaccurate reporting, operational inefficiencies, and poor customer experiences.
What We Do
Acme Data specializes in solving large-scale enterprise data quality, customer data integration, master data management (MDM), and CRM consolidation challenges.
While our primary focus is implementing Data Studio, our enterprise data quality platform, we have helped Global 2000 organizations address complex data migration, data cleansing, deduplication, identity resolution, and customer master data challenges involving millions of records across multiple systems.
If your organization is planning a CRM consolidation, merger integration, customer data migration, or master data management initiative, Data Studio can help you create a trusted, unified view of your customer data.
If you could use some help with complex data quality problems, contact us. We’re easy.