The relationship of a business with its customers is paramount for its growth and success. While keeping that in mind, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of off-the-shelf CRM solutions available in the market today that may not suit your specific needs. Creating a custom CRM software that is the perfect fit for your business systems could be a better bet for your business.
But how do you get started? Read on to know all about how to create custom CRM software for your business.
Why You Need Your Own Custom CRM Software?
Before jumping into the hard work of finding the right CRM solution, it’s crucial to understand the need for custom CRM software.
Let’s look at the basics. What exactly does a CRM do? CRMs gather, store, analyze, and make a rundown of the information on a company’s users and prospects. The bigger a business, the more pressing the need for CRM software becomes.
CRM makes it easier for companies to understand their audiences and connect with them better. A custom CRM ensures that it focuses on powering the functionalities best fit the needs of the business.
How To Build Your Own CRM Software?
The importance of a CRM ( Customer Relationship Management) solution in a business is not up for debate. A functional CRM is an easy game for a good development team. But before building it from scratch, you have to analyze what your needs exactly are. It should address the problems regarding your business, particularly not what most CRM systems might offer.
CRM software aims to solve problems. If it’s operational costs you want to reduce, you don’t need to invest too much in marketing features and vice versa. If you feel lost on the goals, here are some primary company goals that generally every company needs to tackle –
● Maximizing customer satisfaction and loyalty
● Detailed insights on customer behavior
● Managing leads and understanding where they come from
● Keeping watch of KPIs and ROIs
Once you incorporate that, it’s time to look at some essential features you need in your CRM that should not be skimmed over. They are –
● A dashboard
● A simple calendar
● A contact information panel
● A knowledge base
● Pipeline Views
If you are trying to drive more out of your CRM, it’s best to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning implementations. Not only will this boost productivity by automating repetitive tasks, but also greatly reduce the risk of human error.
Types Of CRM Software’s
Once your goals and essentials are sorted, you can move on to decide what type of CRM software works best for you. Arguably, all CRM systems fulfill the same set of functions. But each of the types functions for specific tasks.
Operational
Operational CRM will serve your business perfectly if your goals involve marketing, sales, customer support. As the name itself suggests, this type of CRM keeps a close watch over all the operations with the help of dashboards and custom reports. You can even closely monitor operations and how they contribute to the generation and retention of leads.
Finance, retail, and healthcare mostly choose operational CRMs.
Strategic
Here, the customer comes above all. Strategic CRM focuses greatly on building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers. It collects, divides, and applies information about customers and market trends to come up with value propositions for the customers.
As it would seem, customer opinions keep a company afloat.
Analytical
Analytical type is for you if you want to capture, process, and interpret customer-related data. It includes inside business data like Sales, Finance, and Marketing Data. A well-planned analytical CRM can come up with different selling approaches varying in other demographics. For businesses, it provides more prospects in sales, customer acquisition, and retention.
It also helps launch dedicated marketing strategies and mainly contains tools like charts, diagrams, dashboards, and reports.
Collaborative
While the focus of the CRMs remains the same, being customer relations, each type has a different way of tackling the same issue. For example, collaborative CRM is a complete alignment of resources between other businesses for identifying, developing, and maintaining valuable customers.
It is mostly used in the B2B side of things; it helps multiple businesses develop products and perform market research and market collaboration.
Functionality of a CRM Software
Depending on the tasks a business wants to accomplish, the functionalities of the CRM can vary, too. Therefore, the functionalities of a CRM might include:
Performance Management
Standing by its name, performance management targets areas that obstruct the achievement of goals. This focuses on sales effectiveness and customer loyalty.
Contact Management
You can find a neat trick to take customer information into account, like demographics, history, transactions, and personal data, to boost relations.
Communication Management
Aids in providing suitable modes of communication with customers, partners, and thereon.
Document Management
Used to make, manage, edit and share documents between all important components of a business. It also allows integration with primary document management systems like MS Office and Google Docs.
Opportunity Management
Wired to monitor the sales funnel and catch hold of any possible opportunities in the customer’s journey. It tracks the visitor’s activity and follows through accordingly.
Order Management
This keeps track of all the workings of an order, ranging from refunds, payments, and delivery information. With automation added to the mix, it can get rid of the confusion and delays.
Forecasting Ability
To closely watch the profits and losses on the sale pipeline, this focuses on generating sales reports for strategists to monitor and tweak their plans accordingly.
Marketing Information Management
It is mostly focused on marketing; it gathers marketing data and looks for new ways to build relationships that would fulfill your end and your customer’s expectations.
How Much Does A CRM Cost?
Building a custom CRM is cheap, but it can be the more affordable option for some companies. Why some companies prefer to have a custom CRM is simple – because it addresses issues particular to their select company instead of a holistic solution.
Like most SaaS providers, the payments are made ‘per user, per month.’ For mid-sized companies with lesser usage, it can range up to INR 45,000 and additional costs. Per person, per month can be from INR 2000-5000.
Conclusion
With the widening gap between marketing and selling, the customers’ demands have also transformed beyond recognition. Trust and loyalty of its customers help a company develop a long-term business and ensure smooth sailing. Therefore, business owners need to be equipped with the best strategies and tools to enhance their relationships with customers. If you still want to explore more about this topic, our experts are here to help you. Connect with us now!
Frequently Asked Questions About CRM Software:
Q1. What is a custom CRM?
A. A custom CRM is a CRM platform built from the ground up by in-house software developers or a contracted development team. Custom CRMs can be particularly attractive when a company’s sales model is complex or doesn’t neatly fit a typical B2B sales model.
Q2. Should I build my own CRM?
A. In many cases, you even have to tweak your proprietary processes to adjust to the software. By designing and building your own CRM system, you get the features and functionalities that match your exact needs. You can make the system adapt to your unique workflows, not the other way around.
Q3. Can you create a CRM in Excel?
A. Yes, you can do CRM using Excel. But it’s really a tedious way. We believe that essentially all businesses run on Lists. Customer List, Contact List, Prospects, etc, and all we want to do is to collect add updated data in these lists, collaborate with team members, and perform a variety of actions.
