Garbage in - garbage out

By Doc Pratt

A few years ago, actually it is measured in decades, when I was in college learning to be a computer programmer, there was a popular phrase: “Garbage in, Garbage out.”  It is a very simple philosophy: the quality of the data you get from a program correlates directly to the quality of the data that is input into the system.  On the surface it seems straight forward, and back then data was either garbage or not. There is an old saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”  So with the vast changes in technology, and the massive amount of data accumulated these days, when does data become garbage?

According to Webster.com Garbage is “discarded or useless material, or inaccurate or useless data.”  What is garbage to one business is treasure to another; consequently, if a business does not have all of the data they need, then what little they have can in essence be garbage. If a business sells to teenage girls, then data fields for “age” and “gender” make the contact information much more valuable while contact information alone is of little value. A few years ago that basic information had value since you could send an email to 100,000 people hoping someone was either a teenage girl or had teenage daughters, but now that is considered Spam.

 Another example is a business we worked with recently to design a sales tracking application. They are a cable network that sells miscellaneous collectables. They came to us late in the initial planning stages after being referred by another client. The data requirements they thought they needed would have been garbage for them. They were looking at a basic Contact Management application that was recommended by someone else. What they thought they wanted wouldn’t work since they wanted to follow-up with customers via email after they had made a purchase.  If they sell an antique Japanese lamp to John Doe, they archive at least that much information, which is more than just basic contact information.

Garbage (for the example)                    Valuable                                               Most Valuable 

Basic Contact Info                                Lamps                                                 Antiques
Name and valid email                            Furniture                                              Japanese
And address                                         Accessories                                         Oriental items

In this case, Contact Information + Valuable + Most Valuable = Treasure. For some businesses just the Contact Information is the treasure, while with others the Contact with the Valuable is the treasure.   

When you are evaluating a CRM application here are some things to consider in the initial phases. What kind of information do you need to capture that can become a treasure for your business? Start with the basic contact information and then look at what other details you need in order to effectively market to this customer. Now, balance that with the Level of Effort that will be needed to get that information in the system. If it is too cumbersome to enter the data, people are going to take shortcuts and you will end up with garbage anyway.  

Determine what data you need and make sure the CRM application can not only capture the data but also make it easy to access for marketing. If you do this then the CRM application you select will start generating a treasure-trove of valuable data.

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