Stabilizing a customer data migration into a China-based CRM, from cutover through hypercare
This migration moved customer clienteling data for an international luxury retail brand from a global system into a China-based regional CRM, so local sales teams could manage clients directly. The project ran about a year and a half from initial build to full regional handover.
I joined about two-thirds of the way through, after the core system architecture was already built. During cutover, I tested customer-to-sales-associate binding and data reconciliation and supported UAT sign-off. During the hypercare period that followed launch, I diagnosed and resolved live data issues, then handed stabilized items to the regional operations team.
Before I could investigate live issues, I needed a clear picture of how a customer actually gets bound to a sales associate and synced into the CRM. Here's the flow I validated during cutover testing:
Once synced, each CRM record groups into three kinds of fields — this structure mattered directly to the data issue below.
Both diagrams above are redrawn and generalized — no client system screenshots, real customer data, or brand names are shown.
During hypercare, migrated customer records kept showing up out of sync with the regional system for a subset of customers. Initial investigation took about a week of comparing data samples across both systems. The root cause turned out to be inconsistent character encoding on certain fields, which caused records to fail merging cleanly — not a logic error. Once the pattern was recognized, resolving it was as simple as re-syncing the affected records, and similar cases afterward were resolved within a day instead of a week.
Of 24 issues tracked during hypercare, 16 were resolved directly. The remaining 8 were mostly cross-market logic questions — how certain metrics or purchase channels should map between systems — rather than defects, and were handed to the regional operations team to continue investigating after stabilization.