What was the best part about using Starfish CONNECT?
This extraction, transformation and loading software as a service allows you to migrate your company information from one source to another much easier than doing so manually. You can utilize the software with a free trial to know if it will work with your particular migration with about a dozen, or so common customer relationship management softwares integrated natively into your account, as well as the option to work with 'other' CRM's to migrate to and from. There is also the option to do the migration using their automation, or you can pay more to have them do the whole thing for you. If you can dedicate a few straight days to minimize the learning curve enough to proceed then it will save you money. If technical challenges are not your strength than it may be best to have them do so, on your behalf. Though there is always the option to hire a third party from a freelancer site, or locally who could help you perhaps less expensively than their team may, though you are still enabling the risk of human error more so than having a team which specializes in only this full time to do it. It's nice to have a few options anyways. The connectors are very good with the addition of HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. There are also quite a lot of common CRM's already such as VTiger, SugarCRM, SalesForce, Workbooks CRM, Zoho, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Infor CRM, Sage CRM and SalesLogix SData but I would like to see Pipeliner CRM in particular it's easily my favorite CRM. You can also migrate to and from services for other purposes with several useful native connectors such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle and some other databases which is definitely convenient. And you can migrate Google Apps information which is awesome as well as Facebook, Twilio which is another big one I use nearly every day. Twitter, Quickbooks if you haven`t discovered Xero or Wagepoint yet, Sharepoint which is a cool Microsoft product which you may have used to build your website or manage your business processes. In addition to XML files, CSV spreadsheets and Excel files specifically too, which is good to note.
What would you change about your experience with Starfish CONNECT?
The pricing is not going to be affordable for a lot of small business and start ups though there is not as much of a need of course, it's the annual contracts which are the costly part in my opinion. Though I respect their business model they are offering companies with a lot of data and complex migration needs the ability to do this much more simply. I realize the 'other' category makes it simpler still than doing this manually and appreciate it. But it would be nice to see dozens of common CRM's at least, if not hundreds in my opinion if they truly wish to differentiate themselves as the authority in their field. This is perhaps their development pipeline and it is a certainly a process I understand.
Overall Feedback
Overall, this is a highly useful software that is quite costly to implement with limited native CRM connectors though if you`re saving money through a more sustainable setup for your company long term, it is most certainly worth the investment to have this done for you. Save the headaches and the hassles involved doing it manually because it is going to be a huge chore if you don`t have a pristine CRM workflow setup currently, and any decent amount size of information to transfer. There`s a learning curve involved to do it yourself still using it but it is massively lower than a conventional manual approach, and if you cannot afford the premium migration done for you service than any version of this software will enable you to still get the migration down in record time relatively speaking.