Introduction
The use of a CRM software, or a customer relationship management system or software could help boost sales by up to twenty percent, sales productivity of up to 34 percent, and forecasting sales accuracy of 42 percent. Indeed, CRM could add true business value, from marketing automation, targeting enhancement, to manual work minimization and activity tracking.
What functionality should a CRM have? How to build it? Let’s find out.
Building a Custom CRM Software—the How To’s
Building a customer relationship management software is not only about coding the requirements necessary. Just like any other software, the development of a custom CRM solution has a full life cycle.
Step One – Identify the Business Goals
The broader objective of implementing a CRM solution is of course to boost profits. Nevertheless, you have to identify exactly how the system would help your business grow. Do you need software that automates tasks and thus minimizes costs? Do you need it for insights that help understand the customer and thus, boost your sales?
For a system that reduces operations costs, you need not spend much on building sophisticated marketing features. Building a custom solution from scratch enables creating only the required parts. Define your goals to create a cost-efficient solution for your business.
Step Two – Research on the kinds of CRM solutions
Determine the system you need based on your goals. A CRM solution indeed provides various functionalities to some extent. They are, however, categorized based on which department they’re designed specifically to help.
There are three kinds of CRM, such as collaborative, operational, and analytical CRM. A collaborative CRM is a very niche system, which yields information regarding the customer’s journey in your operations. Retaining customers is the main objective by understanding at what point a customer leaves the sales funnel, which helps make incremental changes in certain workflows.
For automating and integrating marketing, sales, and customer support, an operation CRM is the perfect solution. With the help of custom reports and dashboards, it helps you keep close tabs on routine operations and keep track of how they contribute to lead generation. An operational CRM is a common choice for business organizations in the retail, real estate, financial, healthcare industries, and so on.
For maximizing customer acquisition, an analytical solution is the best option. Creating your own custom analytical CRM software with the kind of filters and reports you need on customer data is ideal.
You get a better understanding of where the target customer is coming from, the preferences, and what aspect of your service and product appeal the most by analyzing these reports.
Step Three – Determine the CRM features
It’s time to figure out the functionalities and features you need to build in your CRM solution. The most important component is to understand what features to include and which ones you need not include. Important features include:
– Contact management
– Task management
– Lead management
– Dashboards and reports
– Calendar and reminders
– File sharing
Step Four – Functionality Levels of Access
Make a clear definition of what parts of the software will have certain features. You should, furthermore specify who could access what features.
Step Five – Create a budget
There really is no point in making plans if you don’t have the resources for it. It’s important to determine your budget and how much it will cost you to build a custom CRM system. Understanding how much functionality you want is of utmost importance.
You should have a clear understanding of the cost of the functionalities you want.
Conclusion
In these highly competitive times, businesses would be better off having a custom CRM system that not only boosts their ROI but streamlines their business processes as well.