Getting your data out of a CRM
Every vendor says yes to "can I export my data". Six questions that find out what the yes is actually worth, and our own answers to all of them.
Ask these before you sign. Afterwards you are asking a company you are leaving for a favour, which is a much weaker position than the one you are in today.
The six questions
Can I export without asking you?
The difference between portability and a favour. A self-serve export is a right; a support ticket is a negotiation you will have during a relationship that has already soured.
Answer that should worry you: "Just contact support and we will arrange it."
What format, and can you show me one now?
Ask for a sample file before you sign. CSV per entity is fine. A PDF report is not an export, and neither is a screen you can print.
Answer that should worry you: "We can produce a report for you."
Do the relationships survive?
The single most important question and the one least often asked. A file of clients and a file of policies are worth little if nothing in either says which policy belongs to which client. You need a stable id on both sides.
Answer that should worry you: "You get all your contacts and all your policies."
Does it include notes, activity history and documents?
Records export easily. History rarely does, and documents almost never. Find out now, because the call log is often the thing you most wanted to keep.
Answer that should worry you: "All your data is included." Ask specifically about each.
What happens to the data after I leave?
Retention period, deletion process, and whether you get written confirmation. Relevant to PIPEDA and to whatever you told your clients.
Answer that should worry you: A vague reference to the privacy policy.
Is the export the same data I can see, or a subset?
Computed fields, scores and derived views are often absent. That may be fine — you can recompute a score — but you should know before it matters.
Answer that should worry you: "It is everything."
Why relationships matter more than records
A brokerage export is not one table. It is clients, policies attached to clients, renewals attached to policies, activities attached to clients, and tasks attached to both. If the export flattens that, you have a pile of rows rather than a book.
The test is concrete: open the policies file and check there is a column identifying the client, and that the same identifier appears in the clients file. If the only link is a name, the relationship will not survive contact with a system that has two J. Smiths.
This is the same reason a good importer matches on a stable id rather than an email address, and it is worth asking both questions in the same conversation: how does data get in, and how does it get out.
Our answers, including the weak ones
- Self-serve, no ticket. Contacts and policies export to CSV from inside the application, by you, whenever you want.
- The client link is a name, not an id, and that is a weakness. Our policy export carries the client's first and last name rather than a stable identifier. It is readable and it re-imports fine for most books, but it is exactly the weaker of the two options described above, and in a book with two J. Smiths it is ambiguous. We would rather write that down here than let you find it during a migration. It is on the list to fix.
- Documents are the weak spot. Files you uploaded come out individually, not as a bulk archive. For a brokerage with years of documents that is a real limitation and we would rather you heard it here than discovered it while leaving.
- Account deletion is self-serve and removes your agency's data. What we retain and for how long is written on the privacy page rather than summarised loosely here.
An exit checklist
- Export everything before you give notice, not after.
- Open each file and check the row counts against what the system reports.
- Check total annual premium in the export matches the book value on screen.
- Confirm the client identifier appears in both the clients and policies files.
- Retrieve documents separately, and budget real time for it.
- Keep the export somewhere governed. It is a full copy of your client book.
- Get written confirmation of deletion, and keep it.
Step three is the one people skip and the one that catches problems. A premium total that does not tie means rows are missing, and finding that out later is much worse.
Ask us these in the trial
The export is in the product on a 14-day trial with no card, so you can test the claims above rather than take them on trust. That is the right way to evaluate this.
Related: cleaning data before a move, all guides.