Business Problem
Our client was in the process of converting their membership organization from a group of home grown systems to a new commercial customer relationship management (CRM) system. They had overlapping sets of contact information in multiple systems, and needed to extract, validate, merge, remove duplictes and convert all of the records to the final format required for importation into the CRM system.
The files containing the contact records were a mix of comma delimited files, Excel spreadsheets and MS Access databases. Moreover, some of them had been updated by a company that validated the names and addresses, appending new names and addresses for some companies. Additional information needed to be extracted or inferred from existing fields, including the the free-form notes field. Finally, the client requested that we use the information appended by the data validator to create new prospect records if it differed from the existing contact information.
