Two-CRM Migration
An e-commerce group acquired a second brand and needed both CRMs merged into one Zoho instance without losing a single contact, deal or note — and without a single hour of downtime.
The challenge
Two brands, two CRMs, 1.4 million contact and deal records — many partially duplicated across both systems. The business couldn't afford downtime during peak season. Previous migration attempts had failed because of custom field conflicts and Deluge scripts that only one person understood.
The approach
Field mapping & deduplication
Exported every object from both CRMs and ran a Python deduplication pass using email, phone and company name as match keys. Built a canonical field map resolving 47 conflicting custom field names into 31 clean properties.
Staging environment dry-run
Stood up a Zoho sandbox, ran three full migration dry-runs over two weeks. Each pass caught edge cases — unicode characters breaking Deluge scripts, timezone offsets on deal close dates, association limits on the target plan.
Delta-sync bridge
Built a PostgreSQL delta table that tracked every record change in the source CRM during the migration window. On cutover night, applied the delta in under 90 seconds — zero records lost, zero duplicates created.
Post-migration validation
Wrote 200+ automated checks that ran immediately post-cutover: record counts, association integrity, workflow trigger counts, user permission sets. Green across the board before handing back to the team.
The outcome
- 1.4 million records migrated with 99.8% data accuracy verified.
- Zero downtime — the cutover window was a Sunday night, back online before Monday standup.
- Duplicate contact rate dropped 40% versus the combined pre-migration state.
- All Deluge automations rebuilt, documented and tested — no black-box scripts.
"We'd been putting this migration off for two years. It was done in eight weeks and we didn't lose a single record.
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