Inside Superchat’s CRM Migration Journey: Part 1 - Why We Took the Leap to a Unified CRM

Migrating systems is never just about switching tools—it’s about rethinking processes, aligning teams, and responding to the inevitable missteps along the way. In this short series, we want to reflect on how we at Superchat consolidated all our GTM processes under one roof after four years of operating with siloed systems. There were plenty of miscalculations along the way, but even more valuable learnings—and we are excited to share both.

In this first part, you'll learn how our legacy setup created challenges and why we decided to take the leap. From assessing risks to choosing the right timing, this is how we set the stage for one of Superchat’s most pivotal projects.

The Fragmented Legacy Setup

At Superchat, our go-to-market teams relied on multiple tools along the customer journey:

• Pipedrive for sales;

• Spreadsheets and Looker Studio for marketing and data visualisation;

• Vitally for customer success;

• Intercom for customer support.

While this setup “somehow worked,” its flaws became increasingly apparent—especially during periods of substantial lead generation growth or when experimenting with new growth hacks. Such moments were clear signs that our current system could no longer grow or scale alongside us.

The Cracks in the System and Hesitation

At some point, the weaknesses of our fragmented setup became impossible to ignore. Data often slipped through the cracks between tools, leading to frustrating information loss. A good example would be our hacky duplicate detector—an automation that identified duplicates in our CRM and would give up each time we increased the lead volume.

RevOps teams found themselves wasting valuable time syncing data instead of focusing on driving results. You don't want to know how many zaps we had that just sent data from one tool to another! Just imagine: each lead that gets closed needs to go through a handover process and a marketing feedback loop, be created in Vitally with all the customer data, get onboarded and put into the right stage. If everything goes well, the process gets even more cumbersome when it comes to the commission payout.

The lack of transparency across departments created silos, which in turn fueled misunderstandings and friction. Perhaps most critically, the absence of a unified view of the customer journey left us making scaling decisions based on guesswork rather than reliable data.

We had considered a migration before but always postponed it in favor of short-term priorities, such as achieving new ARR goals. There was no doubt that such a major project would slow us down and potentially jeopardize other objectives. The process felt scary, like opening Pandora’s box: What if we missed our targets? What if we disrupted team momentum?

The Turning Point

This summer, we sat down and considered our options: either take advantage of the summer break to minimize the impact on GTM productivity or postpone the migration for another year. The longer we waited, the higher the cost of switching systems would become.

I clearly remember one day during the summer, discussing the migration again with Maurizio Blötscher and Yilmaz Köknar . We had many big plans till the end of 2024 and it became clear to us that most of them would require a different, much more resilient setup. That’s when Yilmaz said, “You have my go.” And that’s when it all started.

With the decision made, the toughest part began: crafting a detailed migration plan, mapping out the timeline and the order of processes to be switched, and accounting for risks that might happen. Every detail required scrutiny to ensure the project strengthened—not strained—our operations.

The next part will be just about that: how we organised the migration and whether any project management framework is suitable for such a big project. Stay tuned!