Cleaning a client list before it goes into a CRM
How a travel agency can clean up its client list and move it into a CRM and its books without carrying duplicates and gaps across with it.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Travel businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Most travel agencies do not have one client list. They have several: a spreadsheet started years ago, the contacts in each consultant's phone, the address book in the shared mailbox, traveller profiles in the booking system, and a WhatsApp group for the regular corporate travellers. The same client appears in four of them, spelt three ways, with two different e-mail addresses and a phone number that changed last year.
Moving to a CRM is a chance to fix that, or to make it permanent. Import everything as it stands and the new system starts life with the old mess inside it. This article explains what a CRM should hold for an agency, why duplicates and gaps matter, how to decide what to keep, and how to bring the clean list into Achekam's CRM and books.
What a CRM is meant to hold
Investopedia defines customer relationship management as the principles, practices and technology that companies use to manage their interactions with customers. It explains that CRM software gathers customer information, such as contact details, purchase history and previous contact with customer service, in one place, and that because interactions, complaints included, are stored, customers do not have to keep repeating themselves. Investopedia's guide to CRM covers the main elements and how businesses choose a system.
For an agency, that last point is the prize. A traveller who phones about a delayed refund should not have to explain to a second consultant what they told the first. That only works if there is one record for that traveller, and everyone uses it.
Why duplicates and gaps mislead
Investopedia warns that for a CRM to succeed, companies must weed out duplicate and incomplete records that may give employees inaccurate information about customers. In an agency, that inaccurate information has a cost:
- Two records for one client split the booking history, so nobody sees that this "new" enquiry comes from someone who travels every quarter.
- An old e-mail address sends a quote or an invoice to an inbox nobody reads.
- A missing company link hides that six travellers all book through the same corporate account.
- Two consultants each believe the client is theirs, and both follow up.
Deciding what to keep
Before importing anything, agree the rules for the clean list.
One record per person or company
Decide what a record is. Usually each individual traveller is a person record, and each corporate client is a company record with its travellers linked to it. A family who always travels together may still need separate records if each adult books and pays on their own.
A named owner for each record
Give every client a named consultant who is responsible for the relationship. That person answers for follow-ups and enquiries, whichever system holds the record.
The fields that matter
Keep what you will use: full name as on the passport, e-mail, mobile number, company, owner, and the date of the last booking. Leave out what you do not need, especially sensitive personal data. Passport numbers and copies call for their own care, covered in storing passport copies safely.
A clean-up routine
- Export each list into one spreadsheet, with a column for where each row came from.
- Standardise phone numbers to one format, with the country code, and e-mail addresses to lower case.
- Sort by e-mail, then by phone, and mark rows that share either.
- For each group of matches, decide which details are current, and merge them into one row.
- Fill in the owner and company for every row, and flag rows with no way of contacting the client.
- Ask each consultant to check their own clients before the list is final.
Bringing customers into the books
Clients who are invoiced belong in the books as customers as well as in the CRM. In Achekam, a business can bring in its accounts, customers, suppliers and an opening-balance journal from CSV or Excel. The move reconciles to the cent before a second person approves the cut-over, so if you also bring across balances owed by clients, the totals are checked before the books go live.
Import the cleaned customer list, not the raw one. Once the customers are in the books, invoices pick them from the list, and a duplicate customer in the books means a client's history is split across two accounts.
Leads, duplicate checks and merging
Enquiries that are not yet clients go in as leads. In a business's Achekam workspace, each new lead gets a code that is never reused, and leads can be imported from CSV, up to 5,000 rows at a time. Clean that file the same way before importing it.
The CRM then helps keep the list clean after the move. When staff enter a lead whose e-mail or phone matches one already held, Achekam names the existing lead and asks before creating a second. And when two leads for the same person slip through anyway, staff can merge them, choosing which value to keep for each field. The merged lead is never deleted, and the merge is recorded with who did it, so a mistaken merge can be traced.
If you are still choosing a system, Investopedia advises setting a budget around the business's goals, selecting only the features you need, and then reading other customers' reviews. A clean list is worth having whichever system you choose. Moving the rest of the books off spreadsheets follows the same discipline, set out in moving the books off spreadsheets.
After the move
Retire the old lists, or make them read-only, on the day the CRM goes live. Two places to look up a client's details is how duplicates start again.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
