Member Article

Migration to SuiteCRM: Components of Effective Switch

Business owners usually have an eye for a business strategy and map out the ways of primary processes running with the CRM software. However, they take into account scalability, integration abilities and pricing policy as the key features in choosing a system. SuiteCRM is a practical and effective CRM platform that boasts about its well-earned reputation. Due to this fact, more and more vendors are considering about migration to SuiteCRM.

SuiteCRM Changes the Face of CRM

Business owners get used to running their company in their own way and adapt to the changes quite unwillingly. So, the announcement about dropping of updating community version of SugarCRM has driven many vendors into depression and insecure future of their companies. This news was a tipping point and the time when appeared a fully open source and rich-feature SuiteCRM.

Reasons and Benefits of SuiteCRM

Being forked from SugarCRM, SuiteCRM is charged with robust and efficient tools that automate sales and marketing processes, as well as enhance building of trustworthy relationships between company and clients. Here are the short-list of reasons why more and more companies wish to migrate to SuiteCRM.

• Free download of platform or hosting in the cloud for an affordable price ($10 user/month)
• Advanced functionality and intuitive UI enhance the management of the software
• Flexible customization and practical workflow tool for the optimization of company’s performance
• Capabilities of upselling and cross-selling along with multi-channel marketing increase the revenue and cut the expenses
• Data administration tool offers the regularly updates database and role-based access for the users
• SuiteCRM has a built-in feature of scheduling data backup, as well as a restore ability
• Additional entities of quoting and invoicing facilitate the process of customer billing and payments receiving

SuiteCRM constantly presents new updatings and requires no extra fee if you want to upgrade your open source version.

Directions for Migration to SuiteCRM

Currently, there are a lot of various myths that describes the CRM data switch as a simple and effortless process while others insist that it complicated, very long and costs a pretty penny. Trying to dispel these misconceptions is like fighting with your own shadow. So, let’s divide the process of migration to SuiteCRM in three phases and analyze each of them.

Qualify Your Database

The cannonball problem of continually updated records is to keep them clean and refined. So, the foremost step in the migration preparation is double-checking your customer data, histories, and other documents. When you wiped out the duplicates, you need to choose the necessary records you wish to move to SuiteCRM. Everyone, who works with renovated data, knows the golden rule of records backup on the hard drive or another off-site device.

Take a note that after accomplishing migration procedure, you should analyze your database one more time. In order to make sure that all your records were transferred, and there are no duplicates or losses.

Select the Migration Means

Advancement of technology goes hand in hand with the CRM industry development. At present, you have several options for data migration to SuiteCRM.

If you haven’t included expenses on the data switch in your budget, you may do this procedure by copy/paste method. This process is time and efforts consuming, and can include records losses or damaging.

SuiteCRM enables its user with on default migration tool. As long as every data transference has its own challenges, the platform offers a limited number of supported CRM solutions. This opportunity comes at an individual cost, and you need to contact with SuiteCRM support service for figuring out details for this process.

As well, you may use a third-party application to the migration to SuiteCRM. It could be an online service Data2CRM that empowers with automated and secure performance. The drawbacks of this application are a limited amount of entities for migration and inability to move data from particular CRM platforms due to closed API access. The merits of this service are privacy of records, ability of a free demo switch or migration to a test SuiteCRM platform.

Help Your Staff to Handle with SuiteCRM

Despite the user-friendly interface, SuiteCRM has its specific peculiarities of usage and managing. With the aim to facilitate the adoption of software by your staff, the platform provides you with the user, developer and administrator support service. However, this option requires fee payment.

There are no insurmountable situations. You may hire a CRM consultant as another way out. This expert will teach your staff in using the software, as well as help you to tailor SuiteCRM to your business strategy.

In a nutshell, SuiteCRM is a beneficial and practical CRM software that extends the boundaries of its functionality and enlarges its user community. The migration to SuiteCRM requires thorough preparation, but the pieces of advices described in this post will aid you in realizing this process successfully.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Natalie Khomyk .