5 Tips That Prevent Your Brokers from Dreading CRM Data Entry

CRM data entry involves inputting customer details into a dedicated system. This leads to enhanced relationship management, lead monitoring, and improved effectiveness in sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

However, managing and updating data is a tedious task that brokers mostly dislike. According to Statista, manual data entry was among the top challenges in utilizing existing CRM systems worldwide several years ago. Manual data entry, cited by 23% of users, remains even nowadays a significant barrier to effective CRM usage.

Source: statista.com

The best way to overcome this challenge is to automate CRM data entry. In this article, we’ll explore common challenges faced by your team and provide vital tips to eliminate CRM data entry fatigue.

5 Common CRM Data Entry Challenges for Real Estate and Capital Markets

Challenge #1. Manual Data Still Wins Over Automated CRM Data Entry

One of the significant challenges in the realm of CRM adoption is still the reliance on manual data entry. While automation technologies have advanced, manual data entry remains prevalent in data-heavy industries like real estate, CRE, and capital markets. This dependency persists due to cost constraints, lack of technological adoption across these industries, and the need for human judgment in certain contexts.

Manual data entry is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. According to various reports, human error rates in manual data entry can be as high as 4%, leading to inaccuracies that can significantly impact business operations. As a result, manual data entry continues to play a crucial role, even though it is less efficient and more error-prone compared to automated CRM data entry.

Challenge #2. Employees are Reluctant to CRM Data Entry

CRM data entry can be monotonous activity and most employees may be reluctant to perform it. Data-heavy industries – real estate and capital markets – consist of many transactions, client communications, and property listings, contracts, invoices, offering memos that generate significant amounts of data, making it challenging to keep the CRM updated accurately and in real-time.

Challenge #3. Huge Relying on Excel as a Core CRM Solution

Even though Excel is a commonly accepted tool across real estate, CRE, and capital markets industries, one of the biggest headaches for data entry operators is data deduplication and visibility in Excel tables.

Without stringent controls and data cleansing tools, duplicate entries can proliferate, impacting data visibility and accessibility. For instance, a client’s contact information might be entered multiple times with slight variations resulting in duplicated records that will be difficult to find and allocate within thousands of records in the database.

Data deduplication is hard to control, and without proper automation, it may cause money loss.

Challenge #4. Stereotype That Automated CRM Data Entry is Less Secure Than Manual

For many brokerages and mortgage companies, automated CRM data entry presents significant security challenges compared to manual data entry. Key concerns among real estate brokers and capital markets investors with automated CRM data entry include:

• Increased vulnerability to cyber attacks
• Data encryption and storage
• Compliance and privacy risks
• Internal threats
• Regular updates and vulnerability management.

Challenge #5. Lack of Standardization

Lack of standardization causes inconsistency across the team. It leads to CRM data duplication entries, missing fields, and inaccurate data overall. Whether your team enters data into CRM from property valuation details, property listings, sales and commission information, legal files, invoices, contracts, or other documents, the process should be based on specific rules.

In the following passage, we’ll try to ruin the mentioned-above prejudices concerning automated data entry in CRM by providing 5 practical tips for data-heavy companies in the real estate and capital markets industries.

5 Tips to Automate CRM Data Entry Smoothly and Effectively

Addressing the common CRM data entry challenges in real estate and capital markets requires a multi-faceted approach. Here’s a comprehensive guide to tackle these challenges:

Tip #1. Integrate Advanced Technologies

As a software development company with 27+ years in the software development market, we believe in the power of the latest technology. Therefore, overcoming the preference for manual data entry in favor of automated CRM data entry in the real estate and capital markets industry is possible by implementing advanced and secure technologies like AI, RPA, and NLP.

• AI and machine learning helps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of automated CRM data entry. These technologies can learn from patterns and reduce errors over time.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows to automate repetitive tasks with high precision.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) automatically captures data from emails, documents, and other unstructured sources.

Tip #2. Implement AI Document Abstraction Tools to Reduce Employees’ Reluctancy Towards CRM Data Entry

AI document abstraction tools are used for summarizing various documents and getting key information fast. It means that your employees won’t be reluctant to CRM data entry because AI document abstraction tools will save the time, they spend on data entry and make the process less monotonous.

Some CRM solutions have been already integrated with such AI abstraction functionality. For example, AscendixRE CRM supports integration with AI lease abstraction functionality that allows CRE and capital markets brokers upload heavy documents into the CRM system and get their summary in a few minutes. For sure the results are stored in CRM and can be further used for various business tasks.

Tip #3. Highlight the Limitations of Excel in Advanced Data Management

Highlighting Excel’s limitations in managing complex client relationships (real estate and capital markets usually deal with), scalability issues, and data security concerns helps overcome the industries’ reliance on it as a core CRM system.

Excel, while versatile, lacks the specialized functionalities of modern CRM systems, such as automated data entry, real-time data synchronization, and advanced reporting tools. The best way to deal with relying on Excel is to integrate existing Excel data into the new CRM system using import tools and establish clear usage protocols. This strategic shift will improve CRM data management, enhanced client interactions, and increased operational efficiency.

Tip #4. Educate Your Team About the Security of Automated CRM Data Entry

Educate brokers on the advanced security features built into modern automated CRM systems, such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails.

It means that automated systems utilize encryption protocols to safeguard data both in transit and at rest, ensuring that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access. These systems also provide detailed audit trails, which can track every change and access point.

Moreover, automated CRM solutions frequently receive updates and patches that address emerging security vulnerabilities. It ensures that the system remains resilient against new threats, a level of vigilance that manual processes cannot match due to their static nature.

Tip #5. Maintain Uniformity for CRM Data Entry

This strategy should start with establishing clear data entry protocols and standardized formats for all information fields, ensuring consistency across the organization. Utilizing dropdown menus, predefined templates, and mandatory fields within the CRM system can enforce these standards, reducing variance and errors.

Additionally, integrating middleware or APIs that standardize data from various sources before it enters the CRM system can help maintain uniformity.

By combining technology, clear protocols, and ongoing education, organizations can overcome the challenge of data entry standardization in CRM systems.

How Can Ascendix Help in Automating CRM Data Entry?

For real estate, CRE, and capital markets businesses who want to empower their teams (brokers, property managers, mortgage brokers, capital markets experts, legal specialists) – we can:

• audit current CRM solution and suggest data entry best practices;
• build a new lease abstraction software from scratch and integrate with current CRM
• consult about existing AI technologies for processing big data available for real estate and capital markets and suggest the best integration options.

Contact us directly or book a FREE CRM consulting call to learn how you can leverage our CRM consulting expertise to empower your business.