How Does Client Sense Enrich Your Contact Data

In this article:

• Short answer
• Why it matters
• What this looks like in practice
• How to do it in Client Sense
• Turning the output into action
• Common pitfalls
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Short answer

Data enrichment means the contact and company detail that arrives without anyone typing it. Client Sense builds it from two sources: email signature blocks, which supply names, job titles and addresses for individuals, and the Company Insights service, which supplies industry, company size and social profiles for the organizations your firm communicates with. Both maintain themselves.

Why it matters

Every marketing task downstream depends on this. You cannot segment by industry without knowing the industry, target an event by job title without knowing the title, or address a mailing properly without a reliable name. Firms that lack enriched data end up doing the work by hand, which is slow, or not at all, which shows.

The traditional answer is to ask fee earners to maintain records, and it fails reliably. Information entered by busy people is more subjective and less complete than information captured automatically, and it decays the moment attention moves elsewhere. The alternative answer, buying a third-party enrichment subscription, adds cost and raises questions about where personal data came from.

Automatic capture avoids both. The detail is collected as a by-product of communication that was happening anyway.

What this looks like in practice

Mullins Lawyers, a Brisbane commercial practice, put the problem in terms most firms will recognize. Their partners simply did not have time to update systems after every client interaction, so the record of who knew who was never reliable. Because correspondence is captured automatically, they were able to see the health of each relationship immediately, including when a client or referrer was last contacted, how often and by whom, with no manual input at all.

Their conclusion is the one worth quoting to a skeptical partner. It would in theory be possible to record the same detail by hand in a CRM, but it would be close to impossible to achieve the same accuracy, because information entered by busy individuals is more subjective and less reliable. Read the full account in the Mullins Lawyers case study.

A worked example: export your contacts at a single client and look at how many have a job title against them. In a firm relying on manual entry, expect a minority. Where signature analysis is running, expect most, because the title came from the footer of an email somebody sent last month.

How to do it in Client Sense

Enrichment is a service rather than a report. There is nothing to run, but it is worth knowing what arrives from where.

What comes from email signatures

Client Sense signature analysis reads the signature block on correspondence and populates fields on the individual: prefix such as Dr or Ms, the name they go by where it differs from their formal name, first, middle and last name, suffix, job title, and the address split into street lines, city, state, postcode and country. 

Address data is more useful than it first appears. City and state support regional segmentation, travel planning and, at some firms, decisions about where an office or a recruitment effort might go.

What comes from Company Insights

Company Insights adds firmographic detail about the organizations your firm communicates with, populating industry, company size by employee count, company name and company social media profiles for LinkedIn, Facebook and X. The data is maintained and updated automatically. Full detail is in What is the Company Insights service?.

Where the enriched data appears

Enrichment is not a separate screen. It surfaces in contact cards, search results, reports, dynamic and Favorite (Favourite) Lists, so the context is available wherever you are already working. Because the data is stored locally in your Client Sense environment, it can also be passed to a connected CRM or email marketing system, which means one enrichment source rather than several subscriptions.

Turning it on

Company Insights is enabled from the integrations settings inside Client Sense, where the terms of service are also available. It is offered at no extra cost. The step-by-step setup guide requires knowledge base registration, so ask your Client Sense contact if you cannot reach it. Full detail is in What is the Company Insights service?.

Turning the output into action

Enrichment is only worth having if something uses it.

• Check what you actually have. Export a sample of contacts with all fields and count how many carry a title, a city and an industry. That tells you which segments are currently possible.
• Fix the segment you need first. If industry is the field your campaigns turn on, confirm Company Insights is enabled before building anything that depends on it.
• Push it outward. Where a CRM or email marketing system is connected, enriched fields can travel to it, which usually improves the quality of lists held there too.
• Treat gaps as information. A contact with no signature data has probably never sent your firm an email, which tells you something about the relationship.
• Re-check periodically. Titles change. Because the data refreshes from recent correspondence, a list built two years ago is less accurate than the same list rebuilt today.

Common pitfalls

• Assuming enrichment covers individuals. Company Insights is company-level only. Person-level detail comes from signature analysis.
• Expecting verified data. Company Insights is gathered from public sources and maintained automatically, not manually checked. It is a reliable baseline rather than a guarantee.
• Building a segment on a sparse field. Check coverage before you design a campaign around a field only a third of your contacts have.
• Paying twice. Firms sometimes run a separate enrichment subscription alongside this without realizing the overlap. Compare what each provides before renewing.
• Treating a job title as current forever. The title reflects the most recent signature captured. Someone who has not emailed for three years may well have been promoted.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Where does the contact detail come from?

Two places. Individual detail such as name, job title and address is read from email signature blocks. Company detail such as industry and size comes from the Company Insights service, which draws on publicly available firmographic sources.

Does Company Insights collect personal information?

No. It collects company-level firmographic data only, all of it publicly available, and no third-party enrichment service is used for people data. Requests are domain-based and encrypted end to end.

What does Company Insights cost?

Nothing extra. It is available to Client Sense customers at no additional cost and is enabled from the integrations settings inside your environment.

How accurate is the data?

It is gathered from public sources and maintained automatically rather than manually verified, so treat it as a reliable baseline rather than a certainty. It provides insight that would otherwise be difficult and resource-intensive for a firm to compile.

Can we push this data into our CRM?

Yes. Because the enriched data is stored locally in your Client Sense environment, it can be shared with connected systems such as a CRM or email marketing platform, giving consistent data across platforms without separate enrichment subscriptions.

Does enrichment work for contacts we have not emailed recently?

Partially. Company-level data is maintained regardless. Person-level data reflects the most recent signature block captured, so a contact your firm has not corresponded with for years will carry older detail.