Case Study

Modernizing and Migrating Legacy CRM to .NET

Type of projectWeb and Mobile App

IndustryFinance, Government

LocationUSA

Technology.NET, AWS

Product Description

It is a software modernization project in which a product-based company collaborated with us to upgrade its outdated VB6 system. Our client for this project is a product-based company in the Netherlands having warehouses across European countries for efficiently fulfilling their customer demands. The organization got to know about some of the minor data breaches in their system and from there, using the latest technology platform became their primary goal. At first, our business and technical analysts go through every feature, component, API, and plugin of the VB6 system. Our consultants assess the details to find out the most relevant tech for the custom CRM software development of our client.

Challenges

While evaluating the outdated VB6 CRM system, our team interviews all the stakeholders and verify the business solutions work with their requirements. As a result, our project team supported the client in defining the significant drawbacks, goals, and scope.

Data Security

Our client has sensitive details about their clients, such as name, address, email, phone number, and billing details. And, securing all the information using a VB6 system was not aligning with NIST and government guidelines. The cyber-attacks were rapidly increasing, and the system could not handle extensive user traffic, which can become a potential vulnerability in performing DDoS attacks. Our client’s first requirement was to establish a secure environment in which they can assure data integrity, confidentiality, and availability in every state.

Lack of Marketing Features

Lead generation, sending bulk emails, and interaction tracking are essential marketing modules available in the latest CRM system, but all these were missing from our client’s software. Due to this, they were facing a loss in their customer base, revenue, and market position. Now, it was high time to adopt a new business CRM solution. The second most essential requirement was integrating all these modules and creating the system according to time-to-market.

Different Databases

All the company warehouses used different databases to store their data, and retrieving data for finance and other business operations was a complex task. Also, the products were shipped from one warehouse to another, making it difficult for the support team to track the package for a customer. To resolve this issue, our technical consultants advise our ally to have a single centralized database for precisely and securely access any information for completing the business tasks. In addition, the client also needs an auto-report generation tool.

High Maintenance Cost

Our associate stored its data on an on-premises server and hosted its website on the same system. Moreover, the VB6 system was barely consuming more resources to provide its services. Also, our client was paying a considerable amount to a third-party vendor for maintaining the performance of their CRM system and IT infrastructure. We found this a high-priority risk for our client, and our .NET team comes up with a reliable solution to eliminate every extra charge.

Manual Data Entry

All the internal departments have to open multiple windows to view the data and enter it into a separate excel sheet or database for completing their business tasks. Further, our client analyzes a delay in achieving the milestones and generating new strategies to optimize productivity. Also, there were minor errors in the manually input data, and for correcting them, the employee had to perform the overall process from scratch. For enhancing the workflow, automating the data modification was a crucial goal.

Unpleasant User-Interface

Due to poor UI, staff members could not find suitable features and modules, making the process time-consuming. Also, updating a single component impacted the functionality of the overall architecture. In addition, the application was unable to load properly on different screens sizes and devices, affecting the core workflow. For mitigating all these difficulties, we define a goal to develop a cross-platform compatible CRM solution.

Solution

After assessing all the challenges, goals, and requirements, our .NET development team quickly escalated the project plan for building custom CRM software development, migration, and modernization to cover the edge-to-edge requisites of our client.

Single Database

For solving the complexities faced by our client in fetching the data of multiple warehouses, our team embeds a centralized cloud database, which every authorized user from any location can access. In addition, it will allow the administration to store, process, organize, and backup an extensive amount of data quickly without impacting the core business operations.

Assurance of Data Integrity

Our security professionals enabled advanced authentication, authorization, hashing, salting, and VPN mechanisms to maintain data confidentiality. In addition, we implement HTTPS for allowing staff to securely access the CRM through a browser from a remote location. We also create an error-log file to discover and remove the root cause of user-reported errors effortlessly.

Latest Analysis and Reporting Tools

For generating reports as per the latest standards and format, we adjoin custom APIs to use ZOHO, SAP, and SolarWinds analytics and reporting tools from the CRM solution. Moreover, the APIs could interact with the database, which reduced the effort to open multiple apps and then manually input the data for generating essential description files.

Auto Data Updation

With the new system, if a customer sends an inquiry, complaint, or orders a product, its details are automatically updated in the database. Furthermore, the interface of the finance and sales department gets simultaneously updated, helping them to craft top-notch business strategies and achieve their goals within the time constraint.

Custom Marketing Modules

Our .NET development service builds cutting-edge APIs, plugins, and widgets for our client to support managing leads, sending bulk marketing emails, and handling mail lists and content. Additionally, we integrated a machine learning-based module, which provides vital advice to our clients for boosting marketing campaigns.

Easy-to-Navigate and Platform compatible UI

We renovated the overall front by adding gradients and highlighting vital features, buttons, and checkboxes. In addition, we modified the icons, helping the client navigate impeccably over different modules and select the appropriate option. In addition, we added a hovering effect, making the system alluring and responsive.

Less Resource Utilization

Our .NET specialists integrated cloud infrastructure with the CRM system to reduce maintenance costs, as it utilizes less computing power for executing intensive user requests. It also provides leverage to our clients to scale up and down the resources as per the requirement.

Result

After the successful custom CRM software development and migration to the latest version of the .NET platform, our client accomplished the following milestones and goals.

Zero cost for on-premises server maintenance.
Increase in productivity and customer satisfaction rate.
No delay and errors in updating the information in the database.
Prevention from cyber-attacks and assurance of data confidentiality.
Secure access to CRM solutions from desktops, browsers, and mobile devices.
Better collaboration between employees in different warehouses and departments.
Improved marketing strategies, leading to more visitor conversion, sales, and annual revenue.
Perfect format for creating analysis reports as per industry norms.