CRM is a category of integrated, data-driven software solutions that improve how you interact and do business with your customers. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage customer data. It supports sales management, delivers actionable insights, integrates with social media, and facilitates team communication. Cloud-based CRM systems offer complete mobility and access to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.
Gartner reports that the CRM software market is the fastest-growing market with expected revenues of over $80 billion by 2025.
A lot of organizations and business owners have thought about custom development CRM at least once. A Custom Crm can make organizations of different sizes streamlined, integrated, and more dynamic than ever before. Custom CRM enables marketing and sales processes to be automated, without losing the intimate and personalized character they need. The advantage of custom CRM development is that you pay once, and that’s it. But in case of a market-ready solution, the more functionality the CRM offers, the more expensive it is. Licenses tend to be time-limited and if a program doesn’t meet all of your requirements, you may have to buy other modules to fill gaps, adding to your overall costs. Along with this, sometimes you need to pay a fixed amount of money per month per user which essentially means the cost dependency is on the total number of employees who will be needing the access.
The Out-of-the-box CRM system’s features are typically designed for a specific department like sales or marketing. However, by developing custom CRM, organizations can choose what departments to focus on, and build the CRM accordingly. Advantages of a custom CRM are User Friendly, More Flexible, Empower users, Gain a competitive business advantage, Increase in ROI, Automation, Cloud Mobility for Millineal users, etc. A Custom Crm Solution is designed to fit perfectly into your business’ workflow, making it quick and easy to train in-house teams on how to leverage it as they are already familiar with the workflow.
In this article, We have listed the best 6 practices to build your custom CRM solution.
- Fully Tailored to Your Business Needs
- Multi-Phase Development Approach
- Multi-device Support
- Third Party Tools Integration
- Automate Business Functionalities
- AI enabled CRM
1. Fully Tailored to Your Business Needs
Most CRM software that comes off-the-shelf is not tailored to your unique business needs. Out-of-the-box CRMs are packed with a wide range of functions that may not be relevant to your organization, which adds costs and complexity to a process. With a custom-built CRM solution, companies get exactly what they want, how they want it, and in compliance with their exact needs. This helps avoid added complexity, costs, time, and resources as it is easier to train employees on a system that is based on a workflow they are familiar with. Businesses that don’t invest in this customization and integration tend to be the ones that fail to implement their CRM at all. Without compromising on the best practices, the custom-built CRM can still accommodate all your business needs such as Mapping Customer Journey, creating custom fields, stages, pipelines, migrating customer information, Invoicing, Integration with Social Media, etc. As per the Pareto principle, 80:20 rule applies for the CRM usage too. It is widely understood that 80% of the sales resources use only 20% of the CRM functionality. With a custom build CRM, the organizations can focus on features and functionality that best fit the sales process rather than having an Out-of-the-box CRM with pre-defined features that may or may not be aligned with a particular organization’s process and need.
2. Multi-Phase Development Approach
Determining the right core scope is critical when leveraging a multi-phased approach. One of the most common reasons CRM fails for an organization is because they try to do too much, too quickly. A phased approach to the development of custom CRM, with an eye on key pain points, can simplify the process. If you try to do everything at once, you’ll likely spend too much and your team will feel overwhelmed. Although many companies historically started with a big bang mindset because it costs less money, there are several reasons why phased implementations continue gaining traction. Big bang implementations are very challenging if there is significant diversity, heavy transaction volumes, or a large number of users that need to progress through the change curve. By applying agile concepts to custom CRM development, A phased approach often makes sense, where the first iteration of a solution has basic functions such as a contact database and access to documents. More sophisticated functions such as the deployment of marketing automation can occur in subsequent phases.
3. Multi-device Support
In the coming years and decades, the tools you use at the office will change, and so will the workspace and culture. Studies indicate that by 2020, Millennial or Gen Y are projected to be 50% of the workforce and by 2025 this number is expected to reach 75%. Millennials grew up with technology, mobile apps, and innovative platforms. Companies across the globe have already started investing in more devices and technologies as Millennials take over the workforce. Multi-device support is becoming a necessity. Users can access, edit, and add new information anywhere anytime via a mobile device. Due to the inherent ability to work on-the-move through a smartphone will certainly assist you in increasing the productivity of the team and enhance their performance too. Mobility provides a competitive advantage whenever you work with customers in different time zones. Your team will be able to instantly answer customer queries. Offering mobile CRM access does not just increase the use of the software, but also the productivity of the workforce. Statistics from Forester have shown that 50% of teams improved their productivity by using mobile CRM. A Nucleus Research report finds that for companies using mobile CRM, 65% are achieving their sales quotas. While only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets.
4. Third Party Tools Integration
CRM integration means that your system can be connected to your website or 3rd party service to exchange data seamlessly. This will allow increased productivity in all your departments such as sales, marketing, finance, support, etc. With an off-the-shelf CRM system, their extended functionalities and APIs come in more expensive packages. This may force you to upgrade to a more expensive payment plan, only for the opportunity to have this feature. But a custom CRM system makes future integration easier and less expensive by enabling the API-first approach, making the process more reliable. CRM solutions usually pair up with services such as Google Apps, accounting apps, Microsoft Office, project management apps, email services, time tracking apps, and more. With a custom-built CRM solution, you can make sure the solution integrates with other external services as well as with in-house processes across multiple departments of the business operation. This will help you work faster and smoother and reduce the time spent on jumping between apps.
5. Automate Business Functionalities
Many off-the-shelf CRM systems lack automation. Teams generally spend a lot of time on data entry. As a result, the team won’t use the CRM system wholly, no matter how much you have paid for it. With a custom CRM solution, you can save a significant amount of time and money by automating the functionalities you need for your business. With custom CRM, you can automate customer support to send faster responses to customer queries and managing regular customer inquiries. Daily sales-related activities, Create follow-up reminders, lead management, assign leads to a specific resource can all be done while you custom build your CRM software. From automatically importing contacts to email automation all can be done through custom CRM development. Automating business functionalities in your CRM can help your business place it at the forefront of your sales goals. By automating business functionalities you can minimize human errors, improve customer satisfaction, increase productivity through integration, reduce spending, and improve scalability.
6. AI enabled CRM
In 2011, Gartner predicted that 85% of customer enterprise interactions will be managed without a human by 2020. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are continuously increasing and refining the efficiency of CRM tools. AI integration into CRM delivers a more predictive and personalized customer journey. AI and ML technology coupled with CRM helps the team to Engage, Nurture, Qualify, and Follow-up with Leads in a much better way. Organizations struggle to efficiently manage data essential for meeting customer service requirements. The solution to all these problems is integrating AI into CRM. AI and CRM together enable businesses to enhance their customer relationships. With the fusion of AI and CRM, chatbots will become more intelligent and integrated. NLP based semantic analysis will augment the capabilities of CRM software to reveal brand sentiment accurately and improve marketing efforts. AI also allows marketing and sales to assess the customer experience and customer journeys and to gain real-time insight into customer pain points, preferences, sentiments, and other buying triggers, all of which help to create more accurate sales forecasts. It has been predicted by Gartner that within five years more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 will be using a combination of neural sales data and sales AI for better optimization of their sales.
According to Gartner, the global CRM market is predicted to grow at a 13.7 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) by 2021.
According to Grand View Research, The global customer relationship management market size was valued at USD 40.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14.2% from 2020 to 2027.
Custom CRM solutions aren’t a boxed, one-time development effort. It is a continuous process for improving the overall business operation. The cost for custom CRM is based on the system complexity, further maintenance, and enhancements, but this will be a valuable asset with all rights and control belonging to you. If you are looking to develop a custom CRM and interested in knowing more details to it, You can talk to our expert team at [email protected]
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