How to Build a CRM System That Drives a Business from primafelicitas's blog

A market-ready CRM system cannot fully meet your needs. Therefore, always opt for custom CRM development if you have unique ideas that cannot be implemented with a market-ready CRM system. Before you start planning how to build a CRM, you should have a clear picture in your mind of what you want to develop and how it should function. What are the important points to consider?

CRM’s primary purpose is to boost revenue, cut unwanted expenses, extract data for a more in-depth strategy, and automate business.

As per Salesforce data, forty-six percent of sales experts agree that deeper customer relationships are a key objective for upholding success. Develop a deeper understanding of a customer’s business starting with a detailed view of their history with your company and it will build a strong relationship founded on trust.

Focus more on the upsell, cross-sell, and renewal benefits in your customer portfolio. Ultimately it will help you to generate new customers.

Offer better customer service, when you have access to a customer’s complete history, your team can quickly provide personalized mails, messages, and solutions, with the exact resources. Smoother interactions build trust and more continuity in business.

Different CRM varies in terms of their features and focus, and they are mainly divided into three major categories.

• Collaborative CRM systems

• Operational CRM systems

• Analytical CRM systems

How collaborative CRMs work

Collaborative CRMs gather up-to-date data for everyone through the same platform, across all departments and places. It becomes easy for the user to find the precise information they need when they need it

Collaborative CRMs focus more on customer retention and satisfaction than on making sales. 

Collaborative CRMs provide common dashboards and data feed where different teams can share their data collected during customer interactions, work concurrently on the same project, engage in conversations, and check out the latest contributions from teams.

How operational CRMs work

To bring greater efficiency to all the work related to customer relationships, operational CRMs often include features for marketing automation, sales automation, and service automation.

Marketing automation can eliminate lots of manual work and save time by creating email campaigns that trigger relevant emails based on the customer's specific activities.

Sales automation can streamline the lead management process by automating the lead-generating process, so it’s easier to identify which potential customers to prioritize. Operational CRMs can also automatically determine the best tasks to assign each sales rep based on priority level.

Service automation can take all the information the operational CRM has about a customer’s situation and use it to determine the most important details an agent needs to help a customer quickly and effectively. It can also automate the process of sending surveys to customers to measure their satisfaction and help you figure out how your team is doing.

How analytical CRMs work

Where the other two CRM are likely to be used frequently by teams who interact with leads and customers every day, analytical CRMs work best for high-level planning. Data analysis is how you gather all the customer information you’ve collected over time and start answering questions with it.

Analytical CRMs provide reporting features that help you understand:

• What specific marketing campaigns generate the most leads

• What kinds of leads most often turn into sales

• What types of sales actions lead to a purchase

• Which types of customers have the highest lifetime value

• What issues do customers most often contact support about

• The most frequent customer complaints

• What features and resources do customers use and like the most

• How effectively your support team resolves customer issues

• How quickly do your agents achieve resolution

Every stage of CRM development involves recent problem identification, strategy, work planning, and proper execution. 

Stage 1: Research & Design Phase

The primary aim is to find the best concept for your idea implementation. It involves the determination of your strategy and business goals, creating a conceptual model, planning the interactions between the main project and integrations, and breaking down the functionality of a CRM into smaller chunks.

Since CRM is a complex system, you might also need to think through the interactions between the system roles and their relationship to each other and the system. 

At this stage, the CRM design is created and tested for usability. The design process should start with the most effective UI/UX flows based on previously created use cases, user personas, and competitor research. Then, for the best variant, we make an interactive prototype and test it with the help of a focus group.

After final prototype testing, a designer prepares a visual concept using your brand guidelines. Upon your approval, the complete graphic design is made and transferred to developers along with the design library.

Stage 2: Development Phase

Keep an open mind in the preliminary discussions with your development partner. Sometimes it may turn out that there is no need to build a CRM from scratch. Unless you serve a particular niche or have precise needs.

Developers choose the most appropriate tech stack based on their previous experience, set up an environment, and start coding. By this time, the list of features to be implemented is ready, and there is a detailed development plan.

While building your own CRM system, be sure to include essential components such as:

• Sales automation

• CRM data analytics

• Marketing automation

• Interactions tracking

• Tasks management

• Customer and partner management functionality

• Pipeline view

• Enterprise-wide CRM-based collaboration apps

• Customer service automation

Implementations like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can increase your system efficiently – from eliminating regular manual tasks to delivering advanced sales and marketing reports, making customer analysis, optimizing employee performance, etc

Stage 3: Testing Phase

After all the CRM elements are ready, they are tested rigorously as a system to ensure that different components work together smoothly. The testing phase also helps to reduce the number of bugs and glitches that may appear as separate features start working as a whole.

At this step, testers check if the system meets all the requirements previously defined in the SRS document. If there is an issue or glitch, it is logged, fixed, and the system is tested again until it meets the required standard.

Stage 4: Security and Legal Requirements

When building a CRM, it’s important to take into account the security and legal requirements of your business. A well-designed CRM will stick to stringent regulations and protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or use. It will also provide a secure means of communication between your employees and ensure that all transactions are properly documented and tracked. 

By following these guidelines, you can build CRM software that meets the specific needs of your business, without sacrificing any of the functionality or features that make it so popular.

Stage 5: Testing & Launching Phase

After all the CRM components are ready, they are tested as a system to ensure that different parts work together seamlessly. The testing phase also helps to reduce the number of bugs and glitches that may appear as separate features start working as a whole.

After achieving all the development requirements, the software will be launched for the users initially in the beta stage and users' feedback will be the main focus. In order to fix issues and enhance the software functionality for users, the launch phase is most important.

Stage 6: Support and Maintenance

To ensure the operational efficiency of service support and maintenance is a must. Most of the work includes new updates, new features, and modifications according to customers' feeds.

 1. People

People are the most significant pillar of a successful CRM. If your employee isn't committed, enthusiastic, and well-trained, your CRM efforts are doomed to failure. 

In reality, people's issues receive less attention when we compare the other three pillars. The assumption is that if the rest three work well, the people will follow automatically. 

At least, your people must be trained to use the system properly. This typically involves formal training as well as coaching to make sure your people know how to use the system. 

Past training on the system, there is developing a customer-centric orientation in all your customer-facing team. Often this requires a complete transformation of the philosophy of the business from sales driven to customer driven. This requires strong effort and leadership on the part of management, but it is perhaps the most important people issue of all. 

2. Strategy

 A successful business requires a carefully framed strategy to guide the enterprise.

The primary step in forming a victorious strategy is to take a deep look at the business and determine its strengths and flaws. Focus more on what the business is doing right and where it needs to refine.

Setting up goals that are concrete, definite, and quantifiable is much needed. These goals also need to be clear and exact. Quantification is equally important because if you can quantify – measure – your goals you can't determine how near you are to attain them.

A business strategy should always be uncomplicated. While the goals, and especially the processes, can be fairly complex the basic technique underlying them needs to be simple.

 3. Processes

CRM felicities potential customer relationships, making the O2C (order-to-cash) cycle smooth. Being able to track and develop the system to automatically classify your work in a way that’s the most appropriate to your business, therefore, is highly important.

This is where process automation plays its most significant role. By automating as many processes and workflows as you can—from follow-up emails to scheduling calls and meetings to automatically assigning tasks to other teams and individuals—you can improve user productivity and remove that ‘extra step of the process’ that can quickly become a burden for employees.

 4. Technology

The last pillar of a successful CRM execution is technology. Technology is an important part of a CRM implementation, but it exists to support strategy and processes, not the other way around.

For example, one common mistake is to design a CRM implementation based on the features in the CRM software. In fact, you should select those features from the CRM software that support your strategy and processes and ruthlessly ignore the features that don't support what you are trying to do.

By considering these four pillars and giving each of them the appropriate weight, you can design a CRM implementation that will be successful and build your business's bottom line.

The more complex the task is assigned to the CRM developers, the more effort and time are needed, and the more experience they will have to apply. All this, of course, is a custom CRM development cost. And the more complex the system's functionality you need, the higher the custom CRM cost will be.

The more staff will use the custom CRM, the higher the total amount will be. This parameter includes both the need to develop for a certain number of users and the cost of setting up CRM in the workplace and basic staff training. Consequently, it also affects custom CRM development costs.

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