Case Study
Seven acquired businesses brought onto one platform, and 100,000 duplicate records cleared without a customer losing access
Enterprise Software
Advisory · Delivery
A UK enterprise software provider
duplicate records removed from a 600,000 record base
acquired businesses consolidated onto one platform
release cadence, from one all-or-nothing release every two weeks
The situation
The platform was drowning in complexity and nobody wanted to touch it. Changes had been pending for over six months because the team no longer had the skills to make them safely. Billing would get stuck for months, so invoices were not going out. Customers landed in different queues with different service levels, because the same customer existed as several different accounts. Behind it all sat seven acquired businesses, each arriving with its own systems and data, on a platform never rebuilt to hold them.
What we found
The team was firefighting data instead of fixing root causes, so we grouped their backlog by underlying problem rather than working ticket by ticket. The same answer kept coming back: most of their problems traced to bad data. Products with no lifecycle, quotes with no parent, contracts that could not be amended or renewed. And a replatforming programme, built by another partner, was about to go live without addressing any of it.
What we did
We stopped the programme going live with the old data, and took ownership of the data workstream ourselves. Over four months we deduplicated more than 100,000 records from a base of 600,000, keeping portal access live for over 40,000 customer users throughout, while validating every email and standardising every phone number across the book. After go-live we rebuilt what the implementation had left behind: a deployment process that went from one all-or-nothing release every two weeks to multiple releases in a day, a security model separating public customers from offshore support, data backups and archival, single sign-on mapped to personas, and the MDM strategy that keeps future merges in sync with the service and billing systems downstream. Alongside the platform, we helped them hire and train the team to run it.
The result
One platform, seven businesses, one view of every customer. Agents stopped guessing which account was the real one, and customers finally received the level of support their contract entitled them to. Releases became routine instead of feared, and the team went from firefighting to building on a platform they trusted.
Where it led
The strongest reference we have is what happened next. Their head of platforms has since moved to a new company, and the first call he made about Salesforce was to us.
Salesforce products
Sales Cloud · Service Cloud · Experience Cloud
Most of these started with a platform review.
If any of it sounds familiar, that is usually where we start too.