Data quality lifts sales efforts

BMC Software achieves real-time data quality to meet customer demands

Like many fast-growing tech companies, BMC Software accumulates vast amounts of customer data in its CRM system. Data quality was an issue – many different employees added data to the system, often creating nonstandard or duplicate records.

The impact of inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data was a drag on sales efforts. With poor-quality data in the CRM system, the sales team struggled to communicate effectively with customers. Additionally, bad data resulted in inaccurate sales forecasts and affected other aspects of business development.

"Put simply, data quality dramatically affects our customer-facing initiatives," says Kelly Williams, Data Analyst for BMC. "We needed a solution capable of codifying our business rules for data quality and enforcing them in both batch and real-time environments.

A unified customer view

To meet the growing need for high-quality data, BMC began a data quality and integration program designed to identify and resolve duplicate records, in batch and real time. The initiative also concentrated on validating addresses – both primary and secondary – to help build a more unified customer view.

BMC selected SAS^® Data Management to address its data quality issues. With SAS, BMC can visually design workflows for data quality and integration rules.

Additionally, SAS provides a real-time environment to use those rules via a service-oriented architecture, allowing the company to find and resolve issues before the data reaches the application. 

No more duplicates

As BMC expands its sales efforts, SAS ensures high-quality data to fuel better customer outreach. Now, as new data enters the CRM system, SAS real-time data quality and integration rules ensure new customers and accounts aren’t duplicates of existing records. If a duplicate is found, the user has the option to append the existing customer record.

"With SAS, we have the power to look at more than the primary address for matching accounts," Williams adds. "SAS was the only vendor that allowed us to use secondary addresses and other details to match duplicates."

SAS also gives managers and executives more confidence in sales forecasts and pipeline projections. Now, the list of prospects is more consistent and reliable, leading to a more accurate view of the sales cycle.

"In that way, adding SAS to our CRM efforts has enhanced our ability to meet customer demands and find ways to grow into new markets," says Williams.