Customer import best practices

Clean data beats big data

Import 500 accurate customers—not 5,000 rows with duplicates. Match on phone or email where possible.

Dedupe rules

• Merge obvious duplicates before import
• Standardize phone country codes
• Tag B2B accounts with company name separate from contact

After import

Spot-check twenty records against old system. Train staff to search by phone at POS.

Ongoing hygiene

One admin owns merges monthly. CRM value decays when everyone creates “Walk-in” variants.