A team of 14 agents had been running on Chime for three years. When they brought on a new operating partner and started shopping for a replacement CRM, their first instinct was to export the database and import it into the new platform. The migration estimate from the vendor came back at two weeks. What nobody accounted for was the state of the data itself.
The team had about 6,000 contacts. By the time anyone looked closely, roughly 900 of them were duplicates created when Zillow leads and manual entries collided over the years. Another 300 contacts had no tags at all — they had slipped through during a staff transition and never been categorized. And the smart filters powering three of their five active automations referenced tags that had been renamed months earlier, which meant those automations had been running against an empty audience without anyone noticing.
What an audit actually looks at
A Chime data audit is not just a deduplication pass. It maps the relationship between your contacts and your active workflows before anything moves.
The first layer is structural: how many contacts exist, how many are exact or near-duplicate matches, and what the completion rate looks like across key fields — phone, email, lead source, and last-touch date. Chime's export format is workable, but it does not flag duplicates for you. That analysis has to happen in a separate tool, usually a spreadsheet or a lightweight script that normalizes phone numbers and emails and groups matches.
The second layer is relational: which smart filters, automations, and action plans are active, and what data conditions do they depend on? A filter that reads "tag equals seller-2024" breaks silently if that tag was renamed or deleted. If three action plans are pulling from it, all three are dormant — but Chime still shows them as active.
The third layer is ownership: which contacts are assigned to agents who have since left the team? Unassigned or ghost-assigned leads do not receive follow-up regardless of what the automation says.
What typically breaks in a migration without an audit
The most common failure is importing duplicates that carry conflicting activity histories. Say a contact exists twice — one record has six months of email opens and a showing logged, the other has only an original lead-in date. When both records land in the new CRM, the system treats them as separate people. The agent follows up on the cleaner record; the one with the history gets ignored or merged incorrectly.
The second failure is orphaned automations. Teams often rebuild their action plans in the new CRM before the migration, then connect them to contact segments. If those segments were built using Chime-specific logic that did not survive the export cleanly — custom field values, source codes, or legacy stage names — the new automations fire against the wrong group or nobody at all.
The third failure is timeline confusion. A contact imported without a last-touch date gets treated as a fresh lead by any time-based automation. A seller who was last contacted 90 days ago might receive a Day 1 welcome sequence on arrival in the new platform.
How the audit changes the migration plan
Once the data picture is clear, the sequence changes. Instead of exporting everything at once, the team exports in segments: active pipeline contacts first, long-term nurture second, archived or unresponsive leads last. Each segment gets cleaned before it moves.
Duplicates are resolved before import, not after. The rule is simple: keep the record with the more complete activity history, merge the other, and flag any cases where both records have meaningful data for a human to review.
Tags and custom fields are mapped to their equivalents in the new platform ahead of time, and any automation that depends on a specific tag is held until that tag is confirmed live and populated in the new system.
The team above ended up with about 5,100 clean contacts by the time their migration ran. Three automations that had been silently broken were either rebuilt correctly or retired. The migration still took two weeks, but the new platform launched working — not with a backlog of data problems to untangle post-go-live.
Where to start
Pull your full Chime contact export and run a basic deduplication check on email and phone before you do anything else. Group the matches and count them. If that number is more than five percent of your database, the audit needs to go deeper before any migration timeline is set. Real Estate AI Group typically runs this audit before scoping any CRM migration — it changes the estimate almost every time.