CRM clean-up for small and medium businesses near Paris: duplicates merged, contacts up to date, rules written down

A few signs are enough: the same person appears two or three times with different spellings, your follow-up emails bounce, half the records have no source and no next action, and the origin of an enquiry is written five different ways to say the same thing. If you hesitate before sending a campaign because you no longer know who is on the list, now is the time. The one-day review counts all of that on your real account.

As few as possible, and never without you. Before anything is touched, the whole database is exported into a dated file that you keep. The only deletions are records that cannot be used at all (no name, no email, no phone number, no activity), and they come to you as a list for approval. Inactive contacts are archived, not deleted: they keep their history and they can come back.

With rules written down before we start, which you approve: two records with the same email address are the same contact, no exceptions; same phone number and same surname, merged once the first name is checked; same phone number but different names, two people to link rather than merge. The record we keep is the one with the most history, and anything missing is carried across from the other one before the merge. Those rules stay in your team guide.

It depends on the number of records, the number of sources and the state of the fields. The one-day review counts the duplicates, the incomplete records and the inactive contacts, then the quote sets the lead time and the price. During the clean-up itself we ask you to pause data entry for a few hours or a few days, so that duplicates do not come back while we are merging them.

It contributes directly: keeping only the data you need, knowing how long it has been since a contact was approached, honouring opt-out requests, documenting retention periods. We write the archiving rules and we document the processing for your register. We are not a law firm: for a sensitive line of business, have the arrangements reviewed by your solicitor or your data protection officer.

With four habits, put in place at the end of the clean-up: one single front door for new contacts (forms connected and entry done in the CRM, no more spreadsheet imports without rules), your CRM's own duplicate detection switched on at creation, an “incomplete records” filter reviewed every week by a named person, and a light clean-up every quarter in the calendar. The two-page guide that holds those rules stays in your CRM.