Nowadays, building healthy relationships with customers is practically impossible without a robust CRM platform. For this reason, whether to invest in such software or not is no longer a question for most business managers. Yet, choosing between a bespoke CRM solution and a packaged system might be quite a challenging task.
To help you out, we collected the most essential benefits of custom CRM development. Take a look at them to understand why creating a system from scratch is totally worth your time and investments.
Uniqueness
If you decide to build your own CRM solution, a development company will include in it any features you want. This means that the system will cater to the particular needs of your organization. But, more importantly, you’ll be able to add functionality that is not available in similar ready-made software. For example, AI-powered analytics will give you an opportunity to personalize customer experience and make your company stand out from other businesses operating on the same market.
Simplicity
It’s not a secret that out-of-the-box solutions are very complex. Since vendors try to target a wide range of absolutely different businesses, they stuff their CRM systems with numerous modules. As a result, companies often find it hard to implement such software in their workflows. In addition, it takes employees an enormous amount of time to learn how to use such a tool.
Bespoke CRMs, on the contrary, contain only the functions a particular company needs. Such a system will be adjusted to your business processes from the very beginning. Obviously, the end-users’ learning curve will be much shorter as well.
Convenience
When choosing a solution for your enterprise, user convenience has to be on the list of top priorities. Specifically, it should be easy for your employees to find certain information or documents, communicate with customers, and create reports. Otherwise, you’ll just not receive the expected ROI.
Yet, the complicated interface and functionality of turnkey solutions often become an obstacle to the efficient work of end-users. Even if they’ve been trained, finding the necessary function may take them ages. The situation is, however, opposite with custom CRM solutions. As such systems have no distracting features, it’s convenient for employees to use them at full force.
Cost-efficiency
Although it may seem counterintuitive, developing a custom CRM is a more cost-efficient option than purchasing a turnkey solution. First of all, you’ll not have to pay for those pieces of functionality you will never use. Secondly, there will be no additional fees if your team grows and the number of users increases. Lastly, you won’t depend on the vendor’s pricing that can change any minute.
On top of that, a decision to invest in a system upgrade or new feature will be determined only by the financial capabilities of your company, not a vendor’s desire to earn more money.
Performance
Custom CRM development gives you full control over the system performance. It’s up to you to decide what technology stack to use and when your platform needs some improvements. That’s why you can keep your CRM relevant, handy, and high-performing even when the market conditions or your business requirements change.
In the case of a ready-made solution, you have to agree with what a vendor sells. It might seem quite satisfactory at first sight. But can you be sure that it’ll stay such for the next year or so?
Flexibility
One of the greatest benefits of custom CRM development is that a tailor-made solution can be easily scaled up as a business develops. You can add new components if you need them and change anything whenever you want.
In addition, custom CRM may become a platform for other applications that you may decide to develop in the future. For instance, your company will eventually become larger and there is a good chance you’ll need to build additional software for its new departments, service lines, and teams. With a custom CRM solution, it’s possible to create a holistic IT ecosystem that will connect numerous solutions across the entire organization.
Compatibility
When you buy a ready-made CRM, it’ll allow only for those integrations which are a part of the package. Usually, it includes the most popular social media and some emailing platforms. Anything on top of that either requires higher costs or is just impossible to integrate. But even if you manage to connect a turnkey CRM to other solutions, there is no guarantee that the performance of the whole network won’t be compromised.
At the same time, a custom CRM system will be designed with your existing IT infrastructure in mind. This means that it’ll be no problem to integrate it with any other software that your team uses in its day-to-day activity.
Security
CRM solutions usually store a lot of corporate information, including confidential and personal data. For this reason, the security capabilities of such software must meet the highest standards.
Unlike ready-made systems that can theoretically be accessed by third parties, for example, through the updates, custom CRMs are fully controlled by one organization. This makes them less vulnerable to cyber-attacks and the risk of data leakage is close to zero.
The bottom line
Many business managers hesitate to build a CRM solution from the ground up because they think that it’s just a fancier and more expensive version of similar prepackaged software. But, actually, it’s not quite so. Custom CRM development brings many benefits to an organization and its ROI is much better in the long run.
Want to build a custom CRM solution for your business with a team of professionals? Contact us!
