How do you get data in?

Lizzy™ is a very powerful customer relationship management system (CRM) that can help you keep track of all of your contacts, but the obvious question that must be answered is how do you get the data into Lizzy™ to begin with? Most of our competitors allow you to import data yourself using built in mechanisms and we’ll explain those here. We’ll also get into a few specifics about why we’re not using many of those here and what specifically we do, in order to get your data into Lizzy™.

To begin with, most systems allow you to export your customer data into what is called a flat file. These files can be in all sorts of formats but the most popular is some sort of text delimited file. An example might be a csv file format where you have quotes around each field and commas between them. Once the file is exported, you can then upload it to your CRM system, select which fields are which and them import into the new CRM system. However, these sorts of processes only work for the most basic types of imports. To explain, lets take a look at one of our actual customers, and the process involved in getting them into Lizzy™.

CompanyZ had an existing CRM system that was written internally years ago. It didn’t allow access outside the company and stored a lot of company specific data that Lizzy™ didn’t support out of the box. As a result, the first thing needed was to add custom fields to Lizzy through her customization interface. Once done, we then had to map each of the fields within the old system to new fields in the new. However, because of the way things were broken down in the old system, it wasn’t possible to export all of their data into a single file. Also, a lot of the information was actually broken down into multiple lines of data due to the storage processes in the old system. As a result, the processes used by most other systems wouldn’t work for importing data.

To further complicate matters, their telephone records in the old system were recorded by user names instead of any type of ID, so we had to write a custom mapping table between the two so that we could import and remap telephone calls to the proper employee records. This included calls logged by employees that aren’t even employees any longer.

Luckily, at Nizex Inc, we don’t use typical conversion processes and we believe that most of our customers don’t know enough about data manipulation to insure data integrity throughout the process. As a result, instead of having an import process that you click to import, we actually do the import for you with our advanced import processes. We will also write custom import processes where needed to insure data integrity. Our data specialists will walk you through each step involved in the process to insure that everything ends up exactly as it should. Data not able to be imported will be quickly identified and eliminated from the process, or custom routines might be written to retrieve as much as possible, but instead of leaving all this work up to you, we walk through it with you.

There may be additional conversion fees required depending on your needs, so contact a sales representative to get more information.