Salesforce.com on Wednesday showed off the fruits of its Jigsaw acquisition with the integration of business data and customer relationship management tools.
Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM combines takes Jigsaw’s crowdsourced data and weaves it into Salesforce CRM as well as Chatter. The general theme is that Jigsaw will enable Salesforce customers to improve the accuracy of contact information. Let’s face it, data goes stale as soon as it enters an enterprise information system.
This screenshot highlights the promise.
With Jigsaw data a CRM user can compare his information with Jigsaw’s information and then correct it.
In an interview, Kyle Christensen, senior director of marketing Salesforce.com, said the power of Jigsaw is that you have 1.4 million members updating the database and 22 million contacts. Salesforce.com is hoping that you’ll pay $29 per month per user to access Jigsaw’s data.
How much better is the data quality? Salesforce.com’s argues that Jigsaw’s data is more accurate due to the crowdsourcing. However, that claim is based on internal data. “There are 10s of millions of people updating Jigsaw,” said Christensen.
That argument makes some sense, but I also noticed that Jigsaw had stale information for my own company, CBS Interactive. That sample is hardly scientific, but without an independent third party verifying Jigsaw’s database accuracy you have to take Salesforce.com’s word for it. A Sales and Marketing Institute white paper finds that contact information decays at a 70.8 percent rate in 12 months so you do need to throw bodies at data cleansing.
Salesforce.com is aiming for what it calls proactive data cleansing. The idea is that between Jigsaw and Chatter you can correct contact information quickly and reconcile records.
Here’s a look at a few screenshots of the Jigsaw integration.
