A helpful recent study by David Tabor in CIO kicks off with “CRM systems are where the richest data about customer relationships is supposed to live, and most CRM systems provide a report-writing system as well as dozens of canned reports.”

Reports, he notes, “immediately expose data quality problems and some of them can provide dangerous misinformation... reports really do make a difference in managing your business. But first, let's look at the foundation: meaningful data.”

Ay, there’s the rub. Data hygiene. As Tabor correctly observers, “nobody achieves 100 percent data quality. Perfectionism in data is prohibitively expensive, and those last few percent yield asymptotically less real business value. “

In other words, “in the real world, we can live with 5 to 10 percent data impurity, particularly if we know which parts of the data have lower quality than others.” But as Tabor points out, there are three areas where central IT can add real value to CRM systems:

1. Controlling the data definitions and system object model to achieve the most consistent semantics.

2. Purifying the data on a regular basis to remove pollution and troubleshoot systemic sources, whether caused by flaky business processes or buggy integrations.

3. Writing reports so that users don't get tripped up by misunderstandings and logical fallacies.

One particularly valuable area of reports, he says, is customer service. “When an inbound call comes in, your automatic call director, interactive voice responder or even soft-PBX (News - Alert) system can start sending customer and call info into the CRM... Integrate the CRM with your e-mail system and Web portal, and you'll effortlessly get tons of information about the specifics of the problem, how many touches were required to resolve it, what documents are the most useful to problem resolution, and what the ultimate time to resolve was.”

And admitting that yes, “some of the metrics may be somewhat arbitrary (e.g., number of calls handled per hour),” Tabor gives here are some very meaningful reports and dashboards that can be created from the CS data:

What is our most error-prone product (the product isn't broken, but you get lots of calls from first-time users)? What product has the highest service costs, and what are its top 3 problems? What is our most profitable service offering? Which products yield the highest and lowest customer satisfaction?

That should get you started.