Having been in the support world for over ten years, I have seen and experienced businesses changing their CRM and customer support tools multiple times. The reasons for changing systems varied from lack of functionality to unsatisfactory service. But in all of these, one thing was always the same: the migration to the new tool was a long and stressful time for both the support managers and the support engineers.
This is precisely why many teams don’t look into a new system, despite struggling with their existing tools. A CRM migration is hard, time-consuming, and there is no guarantee the new system will fulfill their needs. So teams tend to stick to what they know.
What is CRM Migration?
CRM data migration is the process of transferring data from an existing CRM system to a new one, requiring meticulous planning, collaboration, and appropriate tools. Many CRM systems offer both import and export tools to simplify the migration.
Primary challenges with a CRM migration
The challenge of migration stretches across data, processes, and training on the new system. Let’s break them down:
Data model inconsistencies
No two complex systems will have the same or even compatible data models. This can be seen even with easy-to-resolve differences like naming. For instance, when you add the name of a customer’s organization to DevRev, it would be tagged as ‘Accounts’, which have the same name in Salesforce, but are called ‘Companies’ in HubSpot and ‘Organizations’ in Zendesk.
There are more complex inconsistencies though, such as unique properties in one system and not the other, and different ways of forming relationships between the different types. All in all, this boils down to the fact that data migration is not a simple process of copying/pasting the data from one system to another but rather of performing the required transformations to make the data compatible with the new system while still maintaining a reasonable semblance of what it represented in the original system.
Volume
Depending on how long a system has been used and by how many users, the volume of data can be quite large. We are talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of items that need to be migrated. Writing simple scripts to migrate this volume of data can be difficult, due to API rate limits, network issues, and the evolution of data over time.
Confidence
When migrating data, you want to be confident that everything came over as expected. This is easy enough to do manually for small data sets but a manual verification is impractical for larger data sets. This means that migration is not just a matter of bringing over the data but also a matter of being confident that the data has made it over and is in a reasonable state in the new system.
Compatibility with existing business ecosystem and tech stack
Unless a team is very small, no team works in isolation. The ecosystem is usually composed of two components:
- The other teams you interact with
- The other systems/tools you interact with
When migrating, one of the big challenges is figuring out if the new system can work with the other services/tools you use and likewise for the other teams that you interact with but don’t necessarily use your tool.
How are businesses currently handling them?
Almost all CRM solution vendors have some sort of migration path. These standard migration paths tend to work for smaller data sets without too much complexity but they don’t work for larger data sets with more complex data. For this reason, there are a myriad of third-party services that provide migration services. While these services provide flexibility and can handle complex data sets:
a) They tend to be pricey
b) There could also be a lot of time involved in configuring the migration plan, even before performing the actual migration
How Airdrop migrates data and connects teams across tools, effortlessly
DevRev’s migration and sync tool is called Airdrop. Airdrop provides a set of features that make migrating or syncing to DevRev easy without having to resort to third-party services.
How does DevRev’s unique solution enable a better experience?
DevRev’s Airdrop can handle migrations of millions of records, complex data sets that include custom fields, custom states, and even state diagram flows. All of this is done via the DevRev app itself.
DevRev Airdrop is available out of the box and has an intuitive UX that lets you customize and verify your migration. Here’s how it addresses the challenges of migration:
1. Data model inconsistencies - Airdrop addresses data model inconsistencies by providing sane out-of-the-box defaults for how most external systems, their data types, and fields should map to DevRev. When that is not exactly what the customer wants, Airdrop allows configurability of what types and fields to bring in and how they should map to DevRev.
2. Volume - Airdrop is built with volume in mind. It can migrate everything from systems with only a few dozen records to systems with millions of records. Airdrop honors and handles external system API limits and network issues that may arise so you don't have to.
3. Confidence - Airdrop generates a report of what it found on the external system and how it was (or was not) created in DevRev. Airdrop also allows customers to fix records that fall outside the norm to account for those rare exceptions and corner cases.
Want to test the migration and see just what the new system would look like?
You can choose to migrate all your data at once, over time, or keep data in sync in both directions. This helps you to use DevRev in parallel with your old system until you feel confident enough to let it go (And trust us, you will.)
Airdrop allows you to choose:
- Which data types to bring over
- Which fields to keep
- How to map types and fields to DevRev
With Airdrop reports, you can see what data we found and where/how it ended up in DevRev, providing confidence that what you care about made it to DevRev.
Here’s how Uniphore did it.
Uniphore supports 1500 customers and clients at the world’s biggest enterprises, across major industries like telecom, banking and financial services, healthcare, retail, insurance and other verticals. Their leading Enterprise AI platform supports billions and billions of customer and employee engagements across 20 countries on a weekly basis.
When Uniphore made the decision to move to DevRev, migration was a breeze. Using Airdrop, they were able to migrate:
- 16,000 tickets
- 72,000 comments
- 17,000 attachments
All that in just 6 hours!
There is a steel thread between how a customer requirement gets captured, coded into design, developed, and delivered. Once it's deployed in the real world, we get instant feedback on how it's performing, and if there are any usability issues. DevRev allows us to be able to have a 2-way seamless flow of information without loss of context. That is the holy grail.
