Update: My CRM data import took three full days to fix

I thought moving our contact list to a new CRM would be a quick job, maybe a few hours. I was wrong. The file from our old system had weird date formats and some phone numbers had extra spaces. Every time I tried to upload it, hundreds of contacts failed. I had to open the spreadsheet and clean each column by hand, checking for things like 'N/A' in email fields. It took me three full days of just staring at rows and rows of data. I finally got it done this morning after my third cup of coffee. Has anyone else hit a wall with data cleaning when switching tools? What helped you get through it?

3 comments

3 Comments

wyatt85129d ago

Sounds like you made it way harder than it needed to be. Couldn't you just find and replace those spaces and fix the date format in the spreadsheet? Three days is a lot of time for a simple clean up job.

seth_craig8519d ago

Right? Some jobs just blow up on you. The find and replace never catches every weird space, and dates can be a total mess if the source data is bad. What looks simple can turn into a real puzzle. Glad it's not just me.

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the_blair28d ago

Oh man, I feel your pain! I learned the hard way to always run a few checks before the big import. I make a small test file with like 20 contacts first to catch those format errors. Then I use text functions in the spreadsheet, like TRIM to kill extra spaces, before I even try to upload the whole thing. It saves so much headache.