Spent 3 weeks wrangling our CRM data before a single campaign launched

I figured migrating 40k contacts from our old system would take a weekend, but duplicate records and field mapping ate up 21 days of my life. Has anyone else burned way more time than expected on data cleanup before you could actually do any marketing?

3 comments

3 Comments

blake_bell2921d ago

Walked into fixing a leaky faucet last weekend and ended up replacing half the pipes in the basement. Thats pretty much how data cleanup always goes. You think it's a small job but then you find out your old system had fields labeled "customer_notes1" through "customer_notes5" and nobody bothered to standardize anything. It's like how people buy a fixer upper house and discover the wiring is held together with electrical tape. The real work is always buried underneath the stuff you saw coming.

holly_henderson8621d ago

And then you find out "Jawn" was actually his legal name and now you're the bad guy for questioning it.

lucaslee21d ago

Figured I'd just merge some CSV files and be done with it, but nope, turns out "John Smith" was entered 12 different ways. My personal favorite was the one where someone spelled it "Jawn Smith" and I had to wonder if it was a typo or a deeply committed bit.