Besides powerful ERP capabilities, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite offers comprehensive CRM solutions for companies to automate and streamline key customer-facing processes, including sales, marketing, customer support, and field servicing. By using apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, or Dynamics 365 Marketing, companies can drive operational efficiency and service quality, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
However, if a company decides to unlock these and other advantages by migrating from a legacy CRM system to Dynamics 365 CRM, it should be ready to encounter multiple challenges inherent to this intricate process. Experts from Itransition, a firm providing Dynamics 365 CRM consulting, present the most common migration challenges and share useful practices to help you overcome them.
Challenge 1: Assembling the right talent for Dynamics 365 CRM migration
To execute Dynamics 365 CRM migration, a company requires an expert migration team that can handle all business and technical aspects of this process. An efficient CRM migration team should include different roles, including business analysts, project managers, CRM architects, developers, and testers. However, assembling such a cross-functional team can be challenging, as a company may simply lack the necessary talent in-house.
Useful practices:
Implement an AI-powered upskilling program
If your internal team lacks competencies to execute a CRM migration, you can initiate a corporate training program to upskill employees. However, as upskilling can take a couple of weeks to several months, which can cause migration delays, companies can accelerate the training process with the help of AI-powered learning software, such as Retrain.ai, 360Learning, or Degreed.
These solutions can analyze employee-related data from enterprise software systems (HRM, HCM, etc.) to create a systematized skills inventory based on this research and identify skill gaps for the CRM migration project accordingly. Then, an AI-powered platform can develop personalized learning paths for each individual employee and provide them with relevant learning materials, thereby ensuring people receive consistent training content tailored to their roles within a CRM migration team.
Outsourcing Dynamics 365 migration
If you realize that your internal IT team can potentially handle Dynamics 365 CRM migration, but you still have specific skill gaps, you can also consider augmenting your team with outsourced developers. This way, you can avoid spending time and resources hiring and nurturing the necessary talent, whether a CRM architect, tester, or AI engineer.
If your company lacks an internal CRM migration team altogether, and staff augmentation is not an option, you can outsource your entire project to a third-party team. Such an external team will execute all the project’s steps, including business analysis, data strategy development, and data migration while being fully responsible for the final result.
Challenge 2: Running accurate data migration to Microsoft Dynamics 365
Migrating data from a legacy CRM system to the CRM solution based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be the most complex and risky aspect of the migration process. After all, even if a small amount of corporate data is lost or corrupted throughout the migration, your business operations can be disrupted, which can incur financial or reputational losses.
Useful practices:
Running a comprehensive data audit
To begin, you should determine what types of data you need to migrate from your old CRM system to Microsoft Dynamics 365. During the data audit, it is critical to not only discover and document all critical data, including its format and structure, but also review all the data fields used in your current CRM, as it will help define your data integration requirements.
Testing data mappings thoroughly
Once you have documented all the data fields used in your existing CRM, you should run data mapping to define their equivalent data fields in a Microsoft Dynamics 365-based CRM solution. Data mapping will help your company ensure that all the data fields are accurately matched between the two CRM systems, which can reduce the risk of further data integration issues. To streamline the data mapping process, your CRM migration team can use automated field mapping capabilities offered by Microsoft or other third-party solutions.
Regardless of which specific tools you prefer, you should thoroughly test data mappings, as it can help reduce data errors later on. To execute these tests, your team can run sample data through their mappings in a training Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment. Your company can create such an environment via Microsoft Power Platform or purchase a ready-made environment from one of Microsoft’s official partners.
Conducting data cleansing and grouping
Inaccurate data migrated from a legacy CRM system can cause data errors in the new Dynamics 365-based CRM solution, so it is critical to ensure data accuracy and integrity before migration. CRM migration teams can improve the quality of migrated data by using data cleansing and grouping techniques. While the former enables a reduction in the number of data errors and incomplete records, the latter helps group data into categories so it better matches the data fields in the new CRM system.
Challenge 3: Ensuring high adoption of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM among employees
Even if you successfully migrate your data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM without any technical issues, the migration cannot be considered successful unless your employees adopt the new CRM system. After all, if employees refuse to use Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM or do not use the platform’s capabilities to their full extent, your company will not be able to ensure the maximum technology ROI.
Useful practices:
Gaining employees’ buy-in
To achieve and maintain a high level of user adoption, it is critical to involve marketing, customer service, and sales team members in the migration process from the beginning. It is important to explain why your company is initiating the migration, show which workflow inefficiencies can be fixed with the new CRM solution, and highlight how these improvements can impact their work. Clarifying all these nuances for employees can help the company make them more enthusiastic about migrating to Dynamics 365 CRM.
Taking a combined approach to employee CRM training
Even if employees are encouraged to use Dynamics 365 CRM, they are unlikely to utilize Microsofts’ solutions efficiently without the necessary technical skills, which can cause frustration and negatively impact user adoption. To avoid such issues, a company should provide consistent training to all business users (including role-based training, which is one of the most efficient and engaging training approaches).
In particular, a company can provide employees with official courses from Microsoft Learn, including those focusing on different Dynamics 365 CRM products (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, etc.) and those focusing on specific user roles (business users or administrators). In addition, a company can involve official Microsoft partners in the training process. Microsoft partners can assess your employees’ current skills and provide training materials catering to their needs.
Final thoughts
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a comprehensive software suite providing reliable CRM solutions for marketing, sales, and customer service teams. If your company is considering migrating to Microsoft Dynamics 365, it’s crucial to anticipate potential challenges and develop a clear strategy to address them.
To ensure maximum return on your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM investments, we recommend you resort to official Microsoft consultants right from the start. A reliable technology partner can analyze your migration requirements and goals, provide a tailored migration strategy, and handle the technical aspects of the migration to help you accelerate and streamline the transition.