How to create a clear concept of a custom CRM system?

It goes without saying that any business won’t succeed without customer loyalty. For this reason, companies do their best to get on clients’ good side. Over the course of time, the operation with the large quantities of data customer becomes too troublesome. If that’s the case, a CRM system goes to bat for your company. As our company has a solid experience in collaborating with businesses of any size, IDAP Group realizes all benefits of using a customizable CRM system in a modern enterprise. If you plan to build a CRM system fitting to your business needs but don’t know how to start, our article “How to create a clear concept of a custom CRM system?” will provide you with a brief guide.

Tilting towards a pre-built or a custom CRM system

When it comes to choosing the best option for your CRM system infrastructure, there is always the same question: is it worth creating a custom CRM system or buying a ready-made one? In fact, it is impossible to give a clear-cut answer since both variants have own pros and cons. Nowadays there is a plenty of available off-the-shelf CRM packages. As a good few of the ready-made CRM packages allow customization, they can adapt to any business strategy. For this reason, it is the most optimal solution for businesses that plan to utilize the whole scope of CRM functionalities. Since most pre-built CRM systems are designed to appeal to many businesses, some of their functionalities may be unnecessary and not relevant to your company. As a result, you may face several issues when dealing with a pre-built CRM package:

You need to pay extra money for functions that you will never use in your business strategy.
Deploying and configuring a ready-made software system can be problematic and time-consuming.
It takes quite a lot time for your employees to become familiar with the new technology.

To avoid facing such problems, many companies opt for creating a custom CRM system. The reason for such decision is simple and straightforward – custom CRM systems are created to meet the exact needs of a company. What is more important, they integrate with any marketing strategy and business operation. To help you build up an own concept of a successful CRM system, we would like to suggest five primal steps for your consideration.

#1 Specify a purpose

To make a first step towards building a successful concept of CRM system, you need to get all your thoughts together. The following questions will help you make up your mind which kind of a product you want to get ultimately.

Which kind of customer data do you plan to track?

What goals do you want to accomplish with your CRM system?

What tasks does your CRM system have to perform?

How will a CRM system provide interaction with customers and between employees?

How will a custom CRM system ensure database security?

What is your budget for custom CRM system implementation?

#2 Define estimated costs

The average expenses on custom CRM system development depend on the urgency and the customization complexity of the project. The total pricing hinges on the following factors :

Number of users

Acquisition of internal and external human resources

Software development costs

Training

Maintenance and support.

#3 Elaborate the primary set of features

This coverage outlines some essential functionalities of CRM systems used to improve and simplify your company’s workflow and interaction with customers.

Address book

An address book is a must-have for your CRM system. It helps store person’s full name, email address, and social networks links in one place. In such a manner, this feature makes keeping in touch with business partners and customers easy. Moreover, your address book can add new contacts automatically by gathering information from social profiles and importing contacts from email services.

Calendar

With a scheduling tool in your CRM system, your employees will never miss anything important. This feature allows adding info on upcoming events, weekly meetings, calls, along with setting on-time reminders.

Dashboard

Your CRM system should present comprehensible analytics to provide your customers with a meaningful response to sales-related questions. In such a case, a user-friendly dashboard can serve as an ideal option. Most CRM dashboards offer special filters and fields which a customer can use for getting necessary information by defining a specific time, location, and channel. This received data can be presented in various formats: tables, diagrams or charts. Notifications To increase the company’s productivity, your employees have to keep up-to-date with the recent activities of your company. With the help of this feature, they regularly receive emails or push notifications about latter updates, closed transactions, completed and new tasks.

#4 Allow third-party apps integration

In fact, the development of own project management functionalities for your CRM infrastructure takes a lot of time and efforts. For this reason, it is more reasonable to allow your CRM system integrate with the third-party apps. This way you can benefit from using various management tools in one CRM system.

#5 Think about security means

CRM systems store a bulk of the sensitive data, such as customer databases, transaction information, employee productivity reports, etc. For this reason, you have to provide extra effective means for your data protection. Thus, put an increased focus on multiple security measures such as two-factor authentication, session timeouts tracking, support for different access roles, etc.

Summing Up

Since the mentioned tips are basic, they don’t touch upon the technical input of the CRM system development. Nevertheless, they can come useful while creating a draft concept of a well-thought-out project. Thus, if you devote particular attention to every feature of your custom CRM system now, it will undoubtedly bring your business to a new level in future.