Why CRM Data Quality Declines Over Time

Imagine a typical day for a sales rep — not even a Monday or Friday. They open their inbox and find an email:

“Thank you for your email. As of XX/XX, I am no longer with the company.
For any business-related matters, please contact Emily Carter at e.carter@company.com.”

The sales rep forwards the email to Emily, writes “update the details” on a sticky note, and goes back to an urgent call with another customer.

Later, it turns out that the old contact is still marked as “active” in the CRM, while the new contact — Emily — is either missing entirely or lacks important information. This is how incomplete CRM data can develop from something as ordinary as a missed email update.

Why does this happen? Maybe simply because we’re human.

When an automatic reply like this arrives, the sales rep is focused on one thing: keeping the conversation with the customer going. It is both important and urgent. Updating the CRM is important too, but not urgent — which makes it easy to postpone. Research by Zhu, Yang & Hsee (2018), published in the Journal of Consumer Research as “The Mere Urgency Effect,” describes this pattern: people tend to prioritize urgent tasks even when other tasks are more important but less urgent. In our case, communicating with the customer is both urgent and important, while updating CRM data is important, but not urgent.

So that may explain why the update gets postponed. But why does it so often never happen at all?

A partial answer comes from Haas & Martarelli (2026) in their study “From delay to forgetting: how boredom and procrastination disrupt prospective memory,” published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Their findings suggest that boring, routine tasks rarely simply “slip our minds” — forgetting itself accounts for only 10–14% of uncompleted intentions.

Instead, these tasks tend to be postponed again and again: the decision to “do it later” is made repeatedly until the right moment has passed. Updating CRM data is a typical example of the routine work involved in CRM data management — easy to put off when more urgent matters demand attention, and sales reps rarely run short of those.

If this happens regularly when contacts tell us they have changed jobs — and these are hardly isolated cases — it is reasonable to assume that, together with similar situations, CRM contact data quietly and continuously “deteriorates.”

We are not aware of a study demonstrating that the routine nature of CRM data maintenance itself causes CRM data quality to decline. This is our assumption based on observation, not a measured fact. It is a question we would like to explore together with you.

We would like to collect real-world stories — without names or company details. If you have experienced a situation where an important change got “lost” in an email or another message and affected a deal, a customer relationship, reporting, or your work in some other way, share it in the comments or send us a few sentences about what happened.

We plan to collect these cases — anonymized with respect to individuals and companies — to better understand the scale of the problem, its impact on CRM data accuracy, and the most illustrative examples.