CRM Data Quality Guide: Ongoing Hygiene SLAs

One-time cleaning (dedupe before import, archive dead leads) is necessary but temporary. Ongoing quality is the SLA and ritual that keep records trustworthy after go-live. Separate the projects: finish a cleanse, then immediately turn on hygiene reviews so the cleanse does not expire.

Example: Northwind Field Services runs a heroic weekend dedupe before cutover, then skips weekly reviews. By week five estimators recreate jobs because duplicates returned and next steps are empty. Ops restarts a Tuesday quality huddle and freezes new automations until the overdue queue shrinks for two weeks.

Choose a short signal set: open items with owners, next-step fill on open work, duplicate queue age, and a small sample of stage honesty. Set targets your team can explain (for example “overdue next-step queue empty before Friday review” or “duplicates older than seven days need an owner”). Avoid presenting invented industry percentages as verified facts.

Example: Meridian Specialty Finance defines success as: every open deal has owner + next step before the Monday forecast, and the duplicate queue has a named resolver with items aged beyond the team’s seven-day threshold escalated to Ana.

Decide match keys (email, phone, account name + domain, external IDs), survivor rules, and who may merge. Publish what not to do (delete without merge, create “just for me” duplicates). Route suspected duplicates into a queue with an owner — not into Slack threads.

Example: Harborline Advisory matches households on primary email + household name. Planners cannot hard-delete; only Keisha or a trained champion merges, preserving activity history. The weekly review starts with duplicates older than the team’s aging threshold.

Required fields only help when people know why they exist and managers reject junk. Keep the required set small: ownership, stage, next-step date, and a few reporting-critical fields with named stewards. When empties spike, coach the ritual — do not only add more required checkboxes.

Example: Crestview Wealth makes next-review date required, then sees “2099-01-01” placeholders. Priya removes the fake dates, coaches partners on real next touches, and reports placeholder rates in the weekly quality review until they fall under the team’s internal threshold.

Thirty focused minutes: scan hygiene signals, work the duplicate queue, sample stage honesty, assign owners for exceptions, and decide intervene / hold / expand for related rollout work. Link outcomes to adoption gates and governance change control when fields or stages are the root cause.

Example: Blue Harbor’s Tuesday huddle finds next-step fill missing the team target for the second week. They pause a new automation request, schedule manager coaching, and reopen the issue only after two clean weeks — the intervene rule in action.