Fintech CRM Migration Consulting to Optimize Costs and Minimize Risks

About the Customer

Our Customer is a fintech company providing APIs for secure payment processing, customer or business identity verification, and fraud prevention.

Outgrowing the Existing CRM

To support customer relationship management, the Customer relied on Pipedrive CRM and 18 other business tools (e.g., a business messaging app, an appointment and event scheduling service, an e-signature app).

Pipedrive is a good fit for small companies with standard customer onboarding and communication processes. The Customer’s team used to work with Pipedrive pretty comfortably until they hit the wall of the platform’s scalability and extensibility. The delivery of new features was hampered, and there were no ready-to-use APIs for several systems the Customer used. Despite the availability of multiple tools, many business processes stayed half-manual and time-consuming.

Facing the mounting backlog and insufficient process automation, the Customer wanted to make a weighted decision about the need for migration to a new CRM. To take the first exploratory step, the company decided to hire platform-agnostic CRM consultants to analyze the challenges and advise on the best-suited future-proof CRM platform.

CRM Platform Selection and Migration Planning

ScienceSoft suggested a three-step approach to help in the Customer’s situation.

Discovery

As the Customer came with a high-level explanation of its pains, we started by thoroughly analyzing the business processes within the Customer’s CRM ecosystem and revealed the following problems:

• Pre-qualification and customer onboarding processes were manual, which caused delays in customer communication.
• CRM didn’t collect the fullest customer data automatically; some parts needed to be added manually.
• In some cases, employees had to use several systems to complete a single workflow. They had to log in the systems separately, as there was no centralized user management.
• There was no role-based security management, so customer data was unprotected from insider threats.

With a clear understanding of the Customer’s needs not covered by the current CRM, we moved on to researching CRM platforms.

CRM comparison

Based on our knowledge of the CRM market, we selected three suitable CRM platforms for comparison: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and HubSpot. We also included Pipedrive in the comparison table to assess the feasibility of staying with this platform.

We analyzed the platforms by 3 parameters:

• Features and functions important for the Customer’s processes.
• Integrations with the Customer’s business systems.
• Costs.

The comparison table left no doubts that there was no reason for the Customer to stay with Pipedrive. Each new platform had its strong and weak points, but we saw a clear advantage on the side of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and recommended it as a target platform for migration.

As an extra value for the Customer, we analyzed the efficiency of having so many CRM-related business tools. Based on the analysis results, we offered to replace several existing systems with SharePoint that alone covered the needed functionality.

Migration roadmap planning

We planned the three-stage migration from Pipedrive to Dynamics 365 CRM to cause minimum-to-none disruptions to the Customer’s workflows. We offered to conduct user training at the end of each stage for CRM’s gradual and stress-free adoption by the Customer’s team.

Stage 1 was supposed to start with the implementation of the core Dynamics 365 Sales solution and security controls (single sign-on and role-based security system).

Stage 2 was planned around the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and SharePoint, integration of the installed Dynamics solutions with the Customer’s systems, and tuning business-critical processes of lead pre-qualification and onboarding.

Stage 3 was to end up the migration by implementing Dynamics 365 Marketing, setting up data analytics in Power BI, establishing the remaining integrations, and migrating customer data.

Overall, we estimated the Customer’s CRM migration project to last 10–15 months.

Laying the Groundwork for a Strategic Decision

The Customer got a research-based recommendation on the best-suited CRM platform and a step-by-step roadmap for smooth migration. ScienceSoft documented all the findings and plans, so the Customer could examine them and make a decision anytime.

Techniques and Tools

Business analysis techniques: document analysis, interviews, facilitated workshops, business process modeling, gap analysis, functional decomposition, CRUD matrices, and architecture diagramming.

Analyzed products: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, SharePoint, Azure Active Directory, Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI.