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AG Weekly: Migrating Accounts

Leif Boren
Jan 11, 2019 8:05:00 AM

 

 

Transcription:

What Is Account Migration?

Account migration is the process of moving accounts from one central station to another. So if you have an account base that is monitored at Central Station A, and you wanted them to be monitored a central station B, that is what we refer to as an account migration.

What Does It Take To Migrate Accounts?

Migrating accounts is a pretty involved process and it takes a lot of different steps. In layman's terms, essentially what it takes, is we need to get all account data from your current Central Station, meaning the names, addresses, zoning, as well as getting the receiver lines pointed into our central station. There are a lot of other steps involved with that, but simply put we need to make sure that all of the information that is the current Central Station is processed over and moved into our central station.

How Long Does It Take To Migrate?

The process of migrating accounts can really vary from one dealer to another, and really from size of migration. So if we have a dealer who has 10 accounts to migrate that's going to be much quicker than if we have a dealer who has 50,000 accounts to migrate. However, at AvantGuard we have a system that we've put to the test and proven, and we feel that we can get any account migration done within 90 days.

How Should Dealers Prepare For Migration?

The number one thing the dealers can do to prepare their accounts for migration is to know what their account data should look like. So when we move the accounts into our environment, if a dealer can go through and audit those accounts and say this is correct or this is incorrect and help us to clean those accounts up before we start monitoring them, that really is the number one thing that dealers can do to prepare for a migration. They should understand what their accounts should look like, so when we move them over, we have a really good idea of what we're handling on our end.

What Does Clean Data Look Like?

So one thing that we really try and do here at AvantGuard is to have our data consistent from one dealer to another, and even from account to account. So when we're doing a migration, what we really try and do is get all of the accounts to look the same way, have the same format, get the data entered the same way. And really that's a big part of the data conversion, making sure that we take it from the format that it used to be in and converting it into our format and having that be consistent with all of our other accounts.

Why Would A Dealer Want To Migrate Accounts?

There are a lot of reasons to migrate to a new central station. Really what it comes down to is the level of service that you can be provided, the quality of the operators, the quality of the service on the dealer services side, as well as the technology they offer. For example, does the potential central station have texting capabilities, IVR, AG Chat, etc. All of those things are really good reasons for dealers to move their accounts from one central station to another.

What Does The Migration Process Look Like?

After speaking with your onboarding specialist they will then recommend you to a migration specialist who will help you get in touch with the different teams here at AvantGuard that will be involved with your account migration. So that will be you dealer services team, your I.T. team, and the accounting team.

How Is AvantGuard Different?

Over the years at AvantGuard, we've gone through the conversion process several times where we migrated accounts from one central station to another. We have a lot of people who have a lot of experience doing that.

We have also developed a scalable checklist for migration purposes. So whether there's ten accounts that are migrating, or tens of thousands of accounts migrating we use this checklist to make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row and making sure that all of the accounts are monitored and subscribers are safe and being taken care of.

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