Alesia SirotkaDo you want to investigate the potential of having a custom CRM system for your business? What are the characteristics of custom CRM systems? Or curious about the cost and what it would take to build a custom CRM system?
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are widely available to businesses today. Custom software development is the greatest choice for creating and executing software from the beginning because one-size-fits-all software is not available. Custom software enables businesses to focus a greater emphasis on the people who are a part of the organization, including employees, vendors, clients, and service users. The only way to guarantee that the software precisely meets the company’s demands is to create custom CRM software.
A custom CRM can help you ensure that your business takes advantage of all opportunities to engage, convert, and retain clients. Regardless of the size of your business, a custom CRM system might streamline your operations, improve your interactions with current clients, and elicit new leads and business opportunities.
This article will help you understand the advantages of a custom CRM system, the implementation requirements, and the development costs. You’ll also be able to understand why a customized CRM system is perfect for your business.
What is Custom CRM System?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to all strategies, techniques, tools, and technologies used by enterprises for developing, retaining, and acquiring customers.
Off-the-shelf (OTS) CRM is ready-to-use software that businesses may buy unmodified and use right away. It often includes modules for keeping track of sales possibilities, managing marketing campaigns, and setting up procedures for customer service.
Custom CRM systems can foster customer loyalty and automate several processes, saving businesses time and money. The main purpose of CRM software is to allow salespeople and marketers to better manage and analyze relationships with the business’s customers and potential customers.
Custom CRM vs. Off-the-Shelf CRM: What are the differences?
The biggest difference between a custom CRM and an off-the-shelf CRM is flexibility. An off-the-shelf CRM is frequently already created and prepared for usage, in contrast to a custom CRM, which is created especially for the requirements of the firm. Off-the-shelf CRMs can provide less adequate features and possibilities, but custom CRMs can be designed to satisfy the particular wants of the firm. Custom CRMs typically require more technical expertise and effort to set up and run than off-the-shelf CRMs do. 
With a custom CRM, businesses may modify the program to meet their unique needs and requirements, ensuring the application is appropriate for their particular industry. Moreover, custom CRMs provide businesses the opportunity to integrate the application with their existing internal hardware and software, creating a seamless user experience. On the other hand, off-the-shelf CRMs were unable to offer as many customization and integration choices.
Usage of Custom CRM
With a customized CRM, any department in your company – from sales and customer service to business development, recruiting, and marketing – can benefit from improved methods of managing external connections and activities that are integral to success. As no two businesses are alike, a custom CRM is the only way to get precisely what you need without any unnecessary extras or having to make do with features that may not have been included in an off-the-shelf solution.
When it comes to investing in a CRM, you have three choices:
- buying an existing system,
- creating one with an in-house team,
- or outsourcing the development of a custom CRM.
When you’re considering a CRM investment, it’s important to look into all of your options. Although buying an off-the-shelf CRM system could be the most cost-effective option, it might not be the greatest fit for the unique requirements of your company. While developing a custom CRM in-house can be a terrific option, it often takes a significant amount of time and resources and costs over $50,000. Instead, you might outsource the building of a custom CRM, which would be more cost-effective and efficient. These factors make it crucial to thoroughly consider all of your alternatives before making a choice.
Why is custom CRM important for your business?
Custom CRM is important for your business since it offers a potent tool for managing client interactions and simplifying sales processes. It gives the ability to recognize, monitor, and control customer interactions, automate lead management, and examine customer data to learn more about how customers behave. This helps you better understand customer needs and create tailored customer experiences that drive customer loyalty and boost sales. As a consequence, improves client retention by raising customer satisfaction and a better understanding of their needs.
Types of Custom CRM
There are three major types of custom CRMs based on their function and the features they provide.
Collaborative
By establishing a clear framework for data exchange, collaborative CRM is intended to improve cooperation and communication. To create a custom CRM adapted to particular needs, it may be utilized internally inside a company or between external teams, such as partners. Common features of this kind of system include group discussions, content sharing, and real-time activity updates.
Analytical
Analytical CRM systems are intended to help in planning. Such a system offers helpful data, analytics, and insights. It must be able to compile data from several sources, process it, and deliver real-time changes to be useful.
Operational
Operational CRMs focus heavily on simplifying and automating company processes to increase productivity. Lead processing, automated messaging to clients via various channels, and follow-ups are frequently helpful. You have two options when creating your solution: either choose certain features or mix various CRM kinds.
Benefits of Custom CRM
Because of their numerous benefits, custom CRM systems are becoming increasingly popular among businesses. These technologies not only enable businesses to give great and individualized customer care, but they also have a wide range of positive effects on customers. As a result, businesses are using CRM systems more often to increase customer service. Some of the benefits of custom CRM systems are:
Benefit #1 Time Saving
Organizations can easily obtain the information they need to complete some essential activities thanks to custom CRM systems. They can also automate certain monotonous chores. Therefore they may spend less time providing services to their clients. This allows them to focus on other important duties while letting the custom CRM handle additional tasks like data processing, analysis, customer care, sales, and marketing.
Benefit #2 Improved Efficiency
Using a custom CRM for task management gives employees a straightforward way to access the information they need to do their jobs and each employee can use their individualized dashboard. This makes their work easier and more productive; in fact, 60% of businesses report an increase in productivity from implementing a custom CRM.
Benefit #3 Enhanced Customer Relationship
Data about customers, such as their preferences, needs, and pain points, is readily available from a custom CRM. 84% of consumers believe that a business’s experience is just as important as the goods and services they provide. Custom CRM enables you to provide customized services to your consumers while addressing their pain points thanks to all the data available from the system. This can help you improve the way you communicate with your consumers, which will increase their likelihood of becoming repeat customers and help you grow your business.
Benefit #4 Access to in-depth Report
Making data-driven choices, such as adjusting prices or marketing tactics, requires the usage of reports that are produced by custom CRM using customer data. A custom CRM can give you reports that will help your business decision-making process because employing itself might boost report accuracy by 42%, according to studies.
Benefit #5 Increased Income
Сustom CRM system can handle practically all of your company’s requirements for attracting new clients, turning them into customers, and offering top-notch customer service. Sales are boosted as a result since the data it gives may be utilized to deliver better customer service and foster customer loyalty.
What to Consider Before Building Custom CRM Software
A good CRM tool will let you store contact information for clients and prospects, identify sales opportunities, keep a record of service issues, and manage marketing campaigns and tactics – all in one central location. Easy access to this data about customer interaction will allow anyone in your company to make informed decisions based on analytics. Before beginning to build a custom CRM system, there are several crucial considerations to be made. By doing this, you may decide as soon as possible and avoid making costly mistakes.
Setting the Goals
Prioritize the most crucial custom CRM platform goals after determining their importance. This will enable you to select the custom CRM system’s features and design that are most appropriate for your business.
Types of Custom CRM Systems
Decide on the type of CRM solutions you need after you’ve defined your objectives. CRM is divided into three categories: organizational, analytical, and collaborative. Each is made for a specific purpose.
Access Roles & Levels
Since several departments could utilize the custom CRM for various purposes, we recommend adding user functions and permissions. For instance, this may apply to top management, marketing directors, sales, and customer care personnel.
Custom CRM Features
Base your decision on which functionalities to include in your custom CRM on your objectives. Pay attention to the features that will be most beneficial for your business needs. Some of the most important features of custom CRM are dashboards, reports, tasks, contact management, lead management, and mobile access.
SaaS or Internal Software
Think about whether you’re going to create a custom CRM system for internal use or whether you’ll eventually transform it into a SaaS platform. It can be challenging and expensive to change the software architecture. Make sure your architecture is adaptable and scalable from the start if you choose the latter.
Cost of CRM Software Development
Regardless of the size of your business, custom CRM software can benefit you. Estimating the associated costs can be difficult, so we’re here to explain the anticipated expenses. The cost of a custom CRM system depends on the features you want to include, the technical complexity, the development team’s experience, and other functionalities such as security measures.
To put things into perspective, if you manage a mid-sized business with more than 25 employees and your enterprise-sized subscription costs $125 per user each month, it works out to $3125 per month, $37,500 per year, and $187,500 over five years. The same amount of money, however, might be used to purchase custom CRM software that would be made to meet your unique needs. Determining the precise cost of your project is something we always advise doing in consultation with our specialists. We are aware that every customer is unique and needs a customized strategy to enable the smooth growth of their product.
Summing Up
Are you looking for a way to improve your business performance? A custom CRM system can be the perfect solution. It provides businesses with a powerful platform for better managing customer relationships and increasing sales. With the right planning and guidance, you can create your own high-quality CRM from scratch that is tailored to your business needs. By centralizing customer data and tracking customer interactions, you can gain insights into customer behavior, create targeted marketing campaigns, and automate specific processes. This can help you improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, and boost sales.
At Flatlogic, we provide full-cycle custom CRM development services to help you turn your concept into a working product. By leveraging our expertise and technical capabilities, you can create a high-quality custom CRM tailored to your business needs that will become the heart of your operations just in a few minutes.
Custom CRM with Flatlogic
Flatlogic Platform offers an easy way to generate a custom CRM system with full control over the source code. You can make sure that you have the right features, scalability, and performance to match your business needs. Plus, with no-code development, you don’t need to be an expert programmer to make the necessary changes – making it easier to scale and customize as your business grows. With Flatlogic Platform, you have the flexibility to create a custom CRM solution that is tailored to your needs, while still having the scalability of more traditional development.
How to Create Custom CRM with Flatlogic Platform?
Using the Flatlogic Full-Stack Generator you can create CRUD and static applications in a few minutes. To start using the Platform, you need to register on the Flatlogic website. Clicking the “Sign in” button in the header will allow you to register for a Flatlogic account.
Step 1. Choosing the Tech Stack
In this step, you’re setting the name of your application and choosing the stack: Frontend, Backend, and Database.
Step 2. Choosing the Starter Template
In this step, you’re choosing the design of the web app.
Step 3. Schema Editor
In this step, you can create your database schema from scratch, import an existing schema or select one of the suggested schemas.
To import your existing database, click the Import SQL button and select your .sql file. After that, your database will be opened in the Schema Editor where you can further edit your data (add/edit/delete entities).
If you are not familiar with database design and find it difficult to understand what tables are, we have prepared some ready-made sample schemas of real applications that you can modify for your application:
- E-commerce app;
- Time tracking app;
- Book store;
- Chat (messaging) app;
- Blog.
Or, you can define a database schema and add a description by clicking on the “Generate with AI” button. You need to type the application’s description in the text area and hit “Send”. The application’s schema will be ready in around 15 seconds. You may either hit deploy immediately or review the structure to make manual adjustments.
Next, you can connect your GitHub and push your application code there. Or skip this step by clicking the Finish and Deploy button and in a few minutes, your application will be generated.
