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Many companies rely on rigid, outdated, legacy systems that don’t empower them to keep up with the fast-paced nature of modern consumers or scale to meet their growth. Others depend on a multitude of integrated point solutions that make it challenging to execute engagement effectively.
However, shifting to a new system can seem incredibly daunting; it means rewriting your processes and procedures, learning a new solution from scratch, and migrating your precious data. And with this shift come risks, including how secure the data transfer is, how long it will take to learn the new system and execute campaigns, and how long before you’ll get value from the costs associated with the migration.
It’s no surprise then, that many companies have anxiety around making this shift. Despite knowing that a change will certainly be beneficial, it means leaving the perceived safety of what you know and venturing into the unknown. However, this ‘safety’ is really only based on your familiarity with the system, and not its actual ability to deliver the customer engagement features and capabilities required to meet customer expectations.
Potential risks aside, without the right system in place, you’re missing out on critical engagement opportunities because you don’t have an optimized marketing tech stack for customer engagement.
In this article, we’ll help you get a kickstart on navigating the complex (and sometimes scary) migration process by explaining the benefits of platform migration and how to do it successfully.
A platform migration is the process of transferring your organization’s digital assets from an existing solution to a new one. This means migrating all of your data, including customer details, account information, campaigns, content, and more.
Consumer behavior is constantly changing which means that marketers must regularly assess and evaluate the technology they use to engage them.. At the same time, technology is also evolving rapidly. Failing to adapt can lead to significant drops in efficiency and output, leading to higher customer churn and lost revenue.
Updating your tech stack is critical to ensure your operations can maintain pace as you scale and grow. Sometimes, this can be done using an upgrade to your existing solution, an add-on, or a third-party integration, but in other cases, it may be time for a full platform migration.
A customer engagement platform (CEP) migration involves consolidating data from your existing systems and migrating it to a new CEP. By the end of a CEP migration, you’ll have fully migrated all your data and have your new system fully set up and operational. This means transferring all customer data, campaign data, and customer journey data.
When migrating to a new customer engagement platform, you’ll need to take a number of crucial steps. The platform migration checklist below lists a few of the main things you need to do to complete the migration.
You must migrate all your data securely without loss. It’s a daunting task and you need to trust the provider you choose with your data. To help you make the right choice, we’ve created a CEP buyer’s guide, complete with a breakdown of an enterprise-level migration process.
If you aren’t seeing the engagement you expect from your campaigns, or they simply take too much time and effort to deploy and manage, it may be a sign that you need to update your CEP.
Below, we look at some top signals that your current CEP is no longer performing up to standard (and may need to be replaced).
For a more in-depth analysis of why you should be using a modern, mobile-first customer engagement platform that’s insights-led, review our full list of warning signs you need an intelligent customer engagement platform.
Now that you know the basic steps to follow in the initial phase of the migration and what to look for in your own system that may warrant a migration, it’s time to look at top strategies for carrying out your migration successfully to completion.
Below, we cover some of the best CEP migration strategies and best practices to follow.
Work with your new vendor to map out each stage of the migration, including migration elements, what each step entails and timelines, and who would need to be involved from both teams. Review this with your team and your CEP’s team to set it in stone.
💡Fun Fact: Drop, a card-linked offers and rewards app, went live via MoEngage in just seven days. Our flexibility and ease of integration ensured they had well-documented SDKs and APIs so they could easily import historical data, integrate customer and event data, and set up server-to-server backend events so they could quickly and easily activate email and push notifications.
You’ll likely want to appoint a designated team for the migration job, with stakeholders from all necessary teams and departments, such as product development, marketing, IT, and data management. The goal is to have a CEP that enables all of your team members to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently, so you’ll want to tap their insights and expertise when planning and implementing the migration to ensure each team’s needs will be met.
Manual procedures can be a huge time suck on the migration process and often lead to significant downtime, cause bottlenecks, and result in a longer wait before your engagement campaigns are deployed. Automating as much of the process as possible will help you save time and allocate resources more effectively.
It’s important that your team can carry out everything they need to efficiently and potentially even replicate the process in the future. Your new provider should give you thorough documentation for APIs and SDKs so you can confidently set up data transfers, and potentially refer back to this documentation.
Despite your best efforts, when you flick the ‘on’ switch, it’s unlikely that absolutely everything works without a hitch. Make sure you allow time to test your system and that you have a well-defined plan for doing so. Don’t just check off easy boxes, but rigorously test that the new platform will perform as expected. It’s critical you run these tests immediately after setup while you still have the vendor’s support.
Even with all the preparation in the world, you won’t be poised to take advantage of all the CEPs capabilities on day one. Make sure to get some onboarding support to get familiar with the tool, complete with training and additional time to acclimatize yourself. But make sure your provider doesn’t just disappear after setup, and that they’re around to provide consistent support in the coming months as your team adjusts to the new platform.
💡When working with ClickRain, the MoEngage Professional Services team clearly defined all phases and steps of the onboarding process and provided full transparency on progress along the way. This ensured a swift, seamless migration from their legacy solution and weekly training on key touch points so they could be fully operational once the migration was complete.
Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise-level organization, a CEP migration is a daunting task that naturally brings with it some fears and anxiety. While this new solution may be intimidating in the short term, most brands know that a shift to a more modern, intuitive solution is for the best. Still, though, making that leap—and a final decision—can still be difficult.
Here at MoEngage, we understand that this process can be uncomfortable, which is why we aim to make it as painless and expedient as possible. Our Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) has a future-ready tech stack that’s agile and scalable, so you can adapt to your customers’ ever-changing needs and preferences.
But it isn’t just about convenience and peace of mind, it’s also about mitigating downtime so you can stay operational. We work quickly to get you live and operational so your campaigns can get back on track. And our job doesn’t end there either; we support our customers well beyond onboarding, offering them end-to-end support so they can always get the most out of MoEngage.
Learn how seamless the implementation process was for brands that moved to MoEngage with real-life examples from our clients.
Also, schedule a demo with our sales team today to learn how we handle CEP migrations and how we can help your business achieve its engagement goals.
Falguni is the Content Manager for North America at MoEngage. She is passionate about writing various types of content, from epigrams and micropoetry to long-form content, across multiple topics. Having spent her life living in different parts of the world, she enjoys traveling, meeting new people, and learning about different cultures.
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