CRM data quality audit

Why run this

What this checklist is for

Institutions make relationship-level decisions on account-level data and fill the gap with an account manager's memory. That works until the account manager leaves.

This audit is about whether the data supports the decisions actually being taken from it, which is a higher bar than whether it is tidy.

Run it with

Head of Retail or Commercial Banking

And with

CRM administrator and data owner

And with

Compliance, for the relationship definitions

The checklist

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.

Section 1

Identity and structure

Whether you know who you are dealing with.

Duplicate customer records are measured and below an agreed thresholdThree records for the same person is three partial histories and no complete one.
Household or relationship group is defined in writing with compliance inputAddress-based, declared-relationship-based or a combination. Each produces different aggregations and different regulatory implications.
The account hierarchy is used for ownership, not for householdsIt breaks the first time a person belongs to two households, which happens immediately in real data.
Beneficial ownership and control relationships are recordedRequired for regulatory purposes and useful commercially. Rarely captured well.
Records link to the core system on a stable key, not on name and addressName-and-address matching produces both false merges and missed relationships, and both are damaging.

Section 2

Completeness and currency

Whether the data reflects the present.

Contact details are verified and datedAn unverified phone number from 2019 is worse than a blank field, because somebody will rely on it.
Consent and marketing preferences are captured per channel and currentThis is a compliance requirement before it is a marketing convenience.
Relationship manager assignment is current and covers every accountUnassigned accounts are unmanaged accounts, and they are usually discovered during an attrition review.
Products held are complete, including those sold through other channelsA cross-sell campaign offering a product the customer already holds damages the relationship it was meant to build.
Dormant and closed relationships are flagged rather than deletedThey matter for retention analysis and for regulatory history.

Section 3

Usability

Whether the people entering data get anything back.

Fewer than eight fields are mandatory at record creationEvery mandatory field is a tax on accuracy, paid in placeholder values.
A relationship manager can see the complete relationship on one screenIf it takes three screens, the complete picture exists in theory and not in practice.
Activity is captured automatically from Outlook and TeamsRetyping what somebody already did produces selective recording.
Data entry happens at the point of interaction, not afterwardsBatch entry at the end of the week is reconstruction, and reconstruction is approximate.
Frontline staff can correct data they know is wrongA correction process requiring a ticket produces staff who stop reporting errors.

Section 4

Governance

Whether quality is maintained rather than periodically restored.

A named owner is accountable for customer data qualityDistinct from whoever administers the system.
Duplicate detection rules run and matches are reviewedConfigured is not the same as reviewed. Check whether anybody works the queue.
Data quality is measured and reported as a standing metricCompleteness, duplication rate and currency. Without measurement, quality degrades invisibly.
Rollup and aggregate fields state their latency explicitlyAn hourly rollup used for a concentration decision is a decision made on stale data.
Access to customer data is role-based and reviewedRelationship managers seeing the whole book is a common and rarely examined finding.

What your score means

Read this against the number above

These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.

0–59%Significant gaps

Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.

60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps

Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.

85–100%Ready

The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.

Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.

Closing the gaps

If you could not tick these, start here

The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.

Households modelled in the account hierarchy

Restructure using connections. The hierarchy breaks on the first person belonging to two households and produces silently wrong aggregation.

Matching on name and address

Establish a stable key from the core system. If none exists, scope the matching exercise honestly as a project rather than an assumption.

Too many mandatory fields

Reduce them. Placeholder values entered to satisfy validation are worse than blanks because they look like data.

No quality measurement

Start with completeness and duplication rate. Unmeasured quality degrades, and the degradation is only noticed when a decision goes wrong.

Want a second opinion on your score?

We will audit one segment of your book against these checks and show relationship managers the complete picture, which is usually the fastest way to establish what is genuinely missing.

Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.

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What this checklist is for

Run it with

And with

And with

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Identity and structure

Completeness and currency

Usability

Governance

Read this against the number above

If you could not tick these, start here

Households modelled in the account hierarchy

Matching on name and address

Too many mandatory fields

No quality measurement

Want a second opinion on your score?

Related checklists

Data governance readiness checklist

Communication supervision readiness

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