Is it time for a new CRM?

As essential as customer relationship management systems are to an adviser's practice, adopting a new CRM is a chore that most dread.

Whether they're getting started with their first CRM or switching from one system to a new one, advisers struggle to find time to do the research on all the CRMs available. Once they've settled on a product, they have to figure out a process for organizing their data and integrating it into their financial planning and other software. And then they worry about losing all the information they've already collected about their clients.

“For advisers I know, it's worse than going to the dentist without the Novocain,” said Jim Koch, founder and principal of registered investment adviser Koch Capital Management. “The big risk is loss of data.”

That loss can occur during the transfer from one software product to the next because each CRM maps data differently. While CRM providers are getting better at accomplishing seamless data transfers, it's still hard not to have a bad experience, according to Mr. Koch.

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For example, he said, he helped his wife, an executive coach, move all of her contact information from the Microsoft Windows GoldMine CRM to an intermediate product that didn't work, and from there to Norada Corp.'s Solve360 CRM, which financial advisers also use.

During those moves, their inability to transfer all the data from one system to the next resulted in an odd work-around.

“In the conversion of 4,000 or 5,000 records, we couldn't migrate all the data, and to this day we still have the GoldMine data on an old computer just in case we need to find some old information,