We perform data conversions for our customers. Our experience is that, while it is possible for customers to do their own conversion, it is better for both parties if we do it.

Conversion

It's best to face the facts at the outset: conversion to a new fulfillment system is always a headache. No matter how carefully you plan or how well you think you understand the systems involved, problems always crop up. Our experience has shown, however, that some approaches work better than others. Here we try to pass on some of this experience.

Who should do it?

Our first suggestion is to let us do the conversion for you. If you try to do it yourself, you'll be faced with two obstacles. First, it is unlikely that you have done enough conversions to learn how to avoid the pitfalls. Second, you will be making decisions about how you should set up QuickFill at precisely the time when you know the least about the system and the effects of the decisions you are making. This means that you will have a large learning curve to cope with at a critical time.

At CWC we have considerable experience with QuickFill conversions and have developed a large arsenal of programs and tricks to make sure things go smoothly. We have also done conversions from several common systems, including Publiphile, PUB/DATA, MacSUB, Stark, Kable, Neodata, FCA, KCMS, ZZSoft, Compupower and First Edition.

Other decisions.

Besides making the fundamental decision of who should do your conversion, you must answer a number of other questions before actually converting:

How much history should you convert? There are a variety of reasons you may want to convert more than just current information about your active subscriptions. It would be nice, for instance to preserve payment rate and renewal rate information for subscribers that are in the middle of being billed or renewed at the time of conversion. If the data already exists this may be possible. To do so you must convert the orders that have cancelled as well as the active ones (otherwise you have no way to compute the correct payment and renewal rates). In most cases it is very difficult to retrieve the necessary information from the old system. If you cannot get this data, you can usually piece together a pretty good idea of what the statistics would have been by looking at the reports from your old system along with the ones from QuickFill.

You may also want to convert your cancelled subscribers so you can promote them.

How much reformatting of data do you want to do? As standard practice, CWC converts your existing data to upper and lower case and attempts to sort out company names, titles, and individual names so that they will appear in the correct fields in QuickFill. For most purposes this is more than adequate. In special cases, however, your existing data may have unusual problems or you may have some special reason to cross all the t's and dot all the i's in your converted data. In that case it may pay to do some manual editing as part of the conversion. We can advise you better once we have seen your data.

What about missing data?

Many people have found that some of the data that is useful in QuickFill is simply not available in other systems. Sometimes you can work out ways to deduce probable answers from other pieces of data, and sometimes it is even worth filling it in by hand from outside records. (This is often the case where financial data has been maintained separately from the mailing records.) Again, the only way to know for sure is to look at your specific situation.

Conversion Pricing.

We offer a 20% discount for conversions done by CWC at the time you buy or lease QuickFill. The pricing below reflects this discount and is for conversions that are done in a single phase. If you want to spread your conversion over several phases there will be additional charges. These charges are determined on an individual basis.

If subscription data comes from multiple sources each source is individually subject to the minimum charge.

If prospect data is on a system other than the subscription system there is an additional charge of $150 per data source.