My customer relied on its customer relationships ACT Crm, but the information about those customers was spread across several places. Sales contacts lived in an older system, spreadsheets and individual email inboxes, and the sales, service and office teams had no shared view of who they were dealing with.

The challenge

The business needed a single, central CRM that everyone could use. Moving to Microsoft CRM 3.0 meant migrating years of existing customer data, including accounts, contacts, activities and history, without losing anything or interrupting day-to-day sales. The new system also had to fit how the business actually worked, connect with Outlook, and be adopted by staff who were used to doing things their own way.

What I did

I led the migration from planning through to go-live:

• Discovery and design. Worked with the sales, service and management teams to understand how they handled customers, then designed the CRM structure, fields and processes to match.
• Data migration. Extracted customer data from the legacy system, spreadsheets and other sources, then cleaned it, removed duplicates and mapped it into Microsoft CRM. This covered accounts, contacts, notes and activity history.
• Configuration. Set up Microsoft CRM 3.0 with custom fields, forms, views and workflows tailored to the business’s sales and service processes.
• Outlook integration. Deployed the CRM Outlook client so staff could track emails, appointments and contacts directly from the tool they already used every day.
• Security and access. Configured user roles and permissions so each team saw the right information.Testing and go-live.
• Reconciled the migrated data against the original sources, ran user testing, and managed a planned cut-over to the new system.
• Training and support. Trained users across the business and supported them through the first weeks of live use.

The result

The business moved onto a single, shared CRM with a complete and accurate customer history in one place. Sales and service teams could see every interaction with a customer, follow-ups were no longer missed, and managers gained clear visibility of the sales pipeline and customer activity for the first time.

Core components: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, SQL Server, data extraction, cleansing and migration from legacy systems and spreadsheets, Outlook client integration, custom workflows, and user training.