Relationships are the cornerstone of any business. How you manage them can determine your success and the financial return you get for all your business efforts. That said, you want a technology that can help you effectively manage customer relationships. Enter CRM.
Short for customer relationship management, CRM solutions make it easier to create and maintain a productive, long-term relationship with your clients or customers. However, not all CRMs are created equal.
Most ready-made CRMs don’t cater to the unique requirements or needs of a business. Instead of force-fitting your business into these solutions, why not create a purpose-built CRM? This article shares the numerous benefits of building a custom CRM for your business.
1. Customized Features
Most out-of-the-box CRM software offers generic features since they’re designed for a wide range of businesses. Thus, they might not fit your business if your processes and workflow are unique or you have special business requirements.
Meanwhile, a custom CRM is built especially for your business needs. It offers a complete solution that fully satisfies your business requirements. Also, it removes the unnecessary features that your business doesn’t need, saving cost and storage space for the applications. Plus, it can automate and customize your analytics and reporting according to your business logic.
2. Streamlines Integration
For an off-the-shelf CRM system, you’re required to pay a fee to get additional benefits. Their extended APIs and functionalities come in more expensive packages. The integration approach for off-the-shelf CRM also complicates things. You’ll need to hire developers to integrate technologies and other platforms including Gmail, Google apps, project management apps, inventory and invoicing systems, and accounting apps, among others.
However, a custom CRM solution makes future integration less expensive and easier. You can have your developers make use of the API-first approach, making the process more reliable and future-proof. With custom integrations, your CRM can be a central hub for all departments and evolve into successful digitization.
3. Gain A Competitive Edge
The business world is becoming more competitive every day, and the only way to stay ahead in the game is to establish a strong customer management strategy. Using the right tools, you can build lucrative and long-lasting customer relations. You can also improve your organic and paid lead generation efforts. Improving your service allows you to instantly give your customers better value.
That said, if you and your competitor are using the same technology, then you have limited capabilities to create unique and personalized experiences for your customers.
A custom CRM can give you the flexibility of adding new features that can improve the overall experience of your customer that they can exclusively get from your business. While traditional CRM solutions do offer you benefits to an extent, they’re not as valuable at giving you the much-needed edge over competitors.
4. Cost-Effective
Most ready-made CRM software comes as SaaS products on a subscription basis. The amount they charge will be based on the number of users and the available features. They may seem like a great way to modernize your customer management without a high price tag, but that’s not always the case.
These plans have certain limitations. Most pre-packaged CRM solutions come with features that you might never use or lack some features that are important to you. Also, once your business grows and users increase, these plans become inadequate. Over time, upgrading a plan tier will leave your business with a significant increase. In the end, a business may end up subscribing to the most expensive plan and paying for all the features a ready-made CRM system offers.
A custom CRM system, on the other hand, can be a cheaper option. You can build your custom CRM using both custom and pre-programmed apps that only fit your requirements.
Don’t get us wrong—a custom CRM isn’t cheap. The cost will depend on several factors including the features you want, developer experience, technical complexities, and non-functional requirements, among others. However, in the long run, a custom CRM becomes cheaper than ready-made ones.
For instance, let’s say you have a mid-size business with over 30 employees. On average, the cost for ready-made CRM starts at USD$12 per user per month.
30 users x USD$12 = USD$360 per month
USD$360 x 12 months = USD$4,320 per year
Keep in mind that this is the average cost for the basic plan. If your business needs more advanced features, the price can range from USD$50 up to USD$300 for enterprise-level features per user per month. That’ll cost you USD$1,500-9,000 per month for only 30 employees. With that same amount of money, you can customize a more advanced CRM solution for your company.
5. A Software That’s Truly Yours
Frankly speaking, ready-made CRMs are resource rentals. You pay a monthly cost for service and licensing in exchange for platform access. Stop paying and you’ll lose access to the service.
And in line with the previous point, you pay a hefty price every month for CRM software you’ll never own. But by building your own CRM solution, you pay for something that you’ll have full ownership of. A custom CRM becomes a proprietary asset that’s customized for your business.
This can help your business avoid unwanted or unnecessary disruptions in service, but it also makes your company even more valuable in the eyes of lenders and investors.
6. Easy Scaling
One of the most important factors of an effective CRM is its ability to adapt to the growing needs of your business. Scaling your business with traditional CRM solutions has several issues.
You need to buy the more expensive plan to include all the features and functionalities you need for your business as well as accommodate the increasing number of users. You also need to integrate your own extensions and install new add-ons, which come with a hefty price tag and can be a hassle.
With a custom CRM, however, you can make any changes to the software to adapt to your unique business process. You can add any number of users without paying extra costs. Developing and adding new features and functionalities to a custom CRM is generally cheaper than upgrading your monthly plan cost. You can make the necessary changes according to your business requirements.
Conclusion
And there you have it! In today’s customer-centric business world, you must tailor the technology you use to your unique business process. Customized CRMs can provide you with tools, features, workflows, and organizational efficiencies that your business actually needs to make a positive impact on your unique potential and existing customers and ultimately strengthen your ROI.
