I'll be upfront with you: this isn't a polished success story where everything went according to plan, and we high-fived our way to a unified CRM. It's the warts-and-all version – the one where we made avoidable mistakes, underestimated our people, and had to learn some very basic lessons the hard way.

If you're somewhere in the middle of a CRM modernization right now, some of this will feel uncomfortably familiar. If you're about to start one, consider this your advance warning.

A little context on Trustpilot

Trustpilot is a dual-sided platform. Consumers leave reviews. Businesses read them, respond to them, and use them to improve. We talk a lot internally about how bad reviews can be the start of a better business. Our customers can spot trends in real time – a sudden dip in scores because a product batch had the wrong glue, for example – and use that signal to act quickly.

A few numbers that put our scale in perspective:

  • We're the largest open customer feedback platform, with 350 million reviews and around 190,000 new ones added every day.
  • 58% of consumers are now using answer engines when researching purchases, and platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini regularly cite Trustpilot data to verify their responses.
  • We've used AI and machine learning for close to two decades to detect and remove fraudulent reviews, and we've removed 4.5 million fake reviews from the platform – around 7% of our total.

Businesses are worried about visibility; consumers are worried about trust. We sit right at the intersection of both. Trust is what we do.

But enough about us. You're here for the CRM story.

Where we started: Fragmented, disconnected, and showing our seams

If you've worked at a startup, or any company that grew quickly without a deliberate data strategy, you'll recognize this picture. We had disconnected systems and scattered data. I've worked at a company that had 78 different CRMs, and while we weren't quite at that level, we had around seven or eight. In the customer success team alone, there were four different CRMs depending on the market.

What that looks like in practice:

  • A customer calls in, and you can't just pull up a unified view of their history.
  • You have to raise a ticket with another department to find out what happened in a support interaction.
  • You're slow, your processes are poor, and you're showing the customer the seams of your business at every touchpoint.

When we ran NPS surveys, you could see the frustration in the data: support experiences, inconsistent journeys, the sense that no one had the full picture. Each team, whether that was support, customer integrity, marketing, finance, or customer success, was operating on a different system. Fragmented doesn't quite cover it.

So we had the idea that many companies have: let's unify it. We called the project "Unified CRM." Very original.

The strategy: 1 platform, 1 view

Our goals were straightforward:

  • A 360-degree view across sales, service, and marketing.
  • One data platform (we chose Salesforce, where our new business sales team had already been for years).
  • Automated insights to support proactive customer experiences.
  • Predictive churn risk scores.
  • Better tools for our CSMs, so they weren't constantly chasing down support tickets or working without the context they needed.

We also cared about being a destination employer. That's hard to pull off when your team is fighting against fragmented, clunky systems every single day.