Get started with a custom CRM system for your business

Tech Blog
Digital Services
September 22, 2021
Custom CRM

Do you want to make your business more efficient?

The One CRM is a made-to-measure web-application customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The One CRM helps businesses manage their contacts, leads, sales and more. The perfect solution for entrepreneurs looking to take their business in an exciting new direction.

With our easy-to-use interface, you can quickly organise your client data into one place. You will spend less time on admin tasks and focus on what matters – growing your company.

We know how frustrating it is when you have no idea where vital information about clients is stored. That's why at The One Point, we designed The One CRM with an intuitive interface that makes managing your contacts straightforward.

Don't waste hours looking for a contact list in a confusing user interface. Never again watch on frustrated that your team is simply busy being busy. Instead, enjoy faster response, times increased productivity and better customer satisfaction!

Read on and discover how you can get started:

This article will help you decide if an out of the box solution is right for you or if your business needs are more suited to a custom development. We will look at some of the factors you may need to consider before reaching out to an expert and experienced development team like The One Point. We will also look at some of the custom functionality in applications and what you can expect to pay for from an investment and support standpoint.

What is a custom CRM?

With CRM tools being so fundamental to many businesses, it is wise to know the variety of options available when choosing the ideal platform where you will invest your resources. CRMs enable you to store customer data, track sales, and data concerning marketing strategies. They help improve customer service, customer management and more. With the custom option you will not get a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, your custom CRM build works specifically with your company in mind. Taking into account your business goals, processes, data storage needs and more.

Some CRMs suit specific industries' needs and work to bring together larger enterprises, while others work best for small businesses with fewer than 100 employees.

Imagine having a CRM that works the way you do, bringing together your whole team, The One CRM can help make this happen.

Custom or Off-the-Shelf CRM: Which is better?

Customised CRM systems make it possible to help you precisely align your data recording processes with your business processes. Alternatively, CRM's can come preloaded with standard features for typical processes. On-demand CRM solutions are more affordable, but developers typically can't customise offerings unless the third party provider agrees to allow access to the code base.

An 'off-the-shelf' CRM solution

Off the shelf, CRM providers can offer you pre-defined processes. These easy solutions can work well for businesses that need to access CRM features quickly or on a budget or when their internal processes are not much different from any other business.

Many off-the-shelf systems have massive development teams and come fully loaded with every typical business's features.

On the other hand, often, an off-the-shelf CRM doesn't have the flexibility to adapt a specific feature necessary for your business, ultimately meaning their existing CRM holds them back.

A custom-built CRM solution

A custom CRM has a specific system configuration to suit your needs and integrates easily into other applications within your business infrastructure over an API. Extensive data management abilities allow organisations to efficiently manage virtually any digital asset, including documents, images, videos, and customer records.

Examples are how well-configured CRMs will work with customised workflows using email marketing tools, point of sale systems and accounting software provided by third parties—allowing the monitoring of all these processes from one system.

When is custom CRM development the right choice?

Since a CRM development is an integral, crucial component to a growing company's success, custom CRM systems are the centre of your customer relationship management operations. They enable businesses to provide personalised experiences for their customers anytime, anywhere and precisely in line with their USP and the processes they already have battle-tested and know work.

Custom CRMs help businesses record and report on data precisely how they need to, so the experience will always be superior. Matching your processes is especially true if your companies' people are already well versed in working within a well-defined process and if disrupting that process would be well... disruptive—all to meet the needs of the 'none existent' average business.

David Carr, our Principle Software Architect and twice published programming author, says:

Our team thrives on helping businesses improve theiroperations and workflows, freeing them from dependingon multipletracking tools.

No two businesses are the same, so finding a decent off-the-shelf system can be tricky. Our custom-built systems bridge the gap with a made to measure solution. A custom CRM is a worthy investment for a business, so we believe in making sure the platform bends to your business, not the other way round, with flexibility for your future plans.

Custom CRM development services: Making no mistakes

Make no mistake, a Custom development entails real financial risk. These are risks that can be hard to estimate upfront and over-budgeting could lead to serious losses.

For CRM projects, too often timeframes are underestimated while incremental costs tend to increase - so you need to avoid this at all costs!

The upside however is that a well planned and robustly built CRM system like The OneCRM will pay off dividends for your business for a long time to come.

Digital Services Lead Alistair Kenyon-Brodie says:

Ensuring a project is managed well is essential to any good project. This means the customer knows where they are concerning project completion. Frequent meetings with the development team also assure customers that their project is making progress in the right direction.

These meetings also give our customers an excellent opportunity to provide feedback on the project as it's being built to ensure that the final product is what they initially wished for. Once a project has been completed and signed off, our role doesn't stop. Our customers maintain a direct line of contact to us to request changes or updates to their CRM.

How The One Point can help?

At The One Point, when delivering your new business transforming CRM solutions we take every effort to make sure you can be in a position to make the best business choices for your CRM solution whatever your crm software customisation needs are. That way your CRM meets your business needs - and complies with the highest standards of security, reliability and scalability.

Our team take the approach to meticulously listen to your business requirements and then plan, create and deploy CRM solutions that empower you to maximize the ROI of your CRM system. We are the kind of CRM development company that prioritised customer support and customer experience when delivering our CRM consulting.

And when it comes time for our extensively experienced CRM development, we will stay in close contact with you throughout our CRM development process - delivering frequent updates on the CRM build progress.

The functionality of CRM software

Some of the most requested features from our our customers include:

Mobile ready

Teams need to work from anywhere and work on the go, so all functionality is available straight from the browser on any device.

Did you know we also build mobile apps, see our full range of digital services?

Pipeline

Good CRM pipelines will be your sales teams best friend. CRMs often come with built-in pipelines as standard features which can be shipped as stand-alone or integrated into an email marketing provider such as Mailchimp. CRP tools help to keep your communications organised and streamlined, and The One CRM is ideally suited for this type of system because it is ready to do just that: communicate with customers and prospects.

You can think of the CRM pipeline as a strategic planning tool that helps companies see the different stages in a process.

Data backup

Data loss is among the worst disasters that could happen to any business since business data is a significant asset for many companies. Data loss of customer information could negatively impact perceptions in anything from customer experience to marketing activities—the nightmare of any Managing director.

With The One Point, a development project protects and backs up business dats. So you can have peace of mind knowing your data is backed up automaticlly multiple times a day.

Ticketing system

Ticketing systems can help you organise your customer support needs in an organised and efficient fashion. Organisations can use a CRM Ticketing system to manage customer service requests, automate responses, track the status of open issues, and report on ticket activity. You can even invite customers to rate the level of service or give reviews for great service.

Quote management

CRM-based quote management systems are an excellent solution to streamline any project. CRMS solutions can eliminate the time spent on paper following up or generating quotes on projects that may not move ahead because of doubtful prospects. At the same time, they empower you with new insights into your projects.

A CRM is a comprehensive solution for managing quotations and associated projects in a repeatable, efficient manner.

CRM solutions with so much more to offer

Additionally, we can provide much more in terms of capability and functionality from our CRM services and can accommodate integrations with a wide variety of external systems.

Integrations within custom CRM development services

Most of the projects we have encountered require a CRM integration solution, and our expert developers are ready to take on all types of third party systems.

Some of these custom integrations include:

  • Microsoft Office
  • Pipedrive
  • Xero
  • Paddle
  • Signable
  • Survey Monkey
  • Paypal
  • Companies House
  • Mail Chimp
  • Signable
  • Paypal
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Sage
  • Stripe
  • Google Analytics
  • Poly: Amazon Alexa
  • Jot Form
  • Event bright
  • Dropbox
  • Campaign Monitor

Don't be concerned if we have not mentioned your requirement here; our satisfied customers routinely ask to work with niche new solutions with great success so you can work in new ways your existing CRM may not allow.

Many off-the-shelf systems seem to focus on integrating with only the most well-known brands, which may not suit your business. Often leading to the reason enterprises end up with data stored all over in the first place.

Custom CRM solutions: What to know before contacting a development team

It may feel intimidating to commission a bespoke project from a CRM software development company; you may be wondering how even to know where to start, so we have outlined steps to take and questions to prepare.

Step 1. Research your options

Begin by researching providers of CRM software development services.

Conduct a development company search to see if they can provide what you need in an integrated CRM solution with a strong customer focus.

Did you know The One Point won the HDM business Customer Focus Award 2021?

Step 2. Define important features

This step is all about knowing your processes. More than just what does your business currently do, but what does it aspire to do.

If you already have an existing system, consider how much functionality you currently have and the cost of upgrading or rebuilding your current CRM infrastructure?

Step 3. Consider a your budget needs

Know the number of resources you can invest upfront. With a custom build, you can incorporate the most critical business processes first and then build added functionality later down the line.

Your CRM is a continued development that should be able to flex with your business as it grows. So perhaps a phased approach would suit your business best as your project takes you from strength to strength.

Step 4. Know your support and maintenance needs

Mainly depending on team sizes and roles, your custom CRM software development will need varying support levels. Development companies can work with your business to ensure maintenance schedules that fit your business best. Any successful implementation is dependent on customer care, so your new CRM will come fully supported throughout the company.

A specified contact within your CRM team is ideal since account managers will communicate requirements appropriately when needed.

Step 5. Find an expert team

Start by contacting The One Point on 01482 420150 to discuss CRM development with an experienced CRM software development company.

We will provide you with custom CRM development services, suggestions, and business growth ideas to help you increase your market share and sales revenues.

Suppose you already use one of the existing off-the-shelf products. In that case, we can handle data migration, ensuring you include and make the most of the customer information contained in your current systems.

Last but not least, consider your CRM software design

An attractive CRM is a place where your team will benefit from spending time. Adoption, however, can be hindered by an ugly, unintuitive and overly complex interface.

Before going ahead with CRM software design, make sure you have a CRM system design specification. Don't worry if you don't know where to start; our team are here to help you with a specification.

This project scope is needed to provide a developer with the information they need to build a CRM solution that will meet your needs and be a joy to use.

The One CRM's pleasing visual aesthetics will help keep your team together and contributing to the same system.

Custom CRM development: Types of development services

Classifications of customised CRM development services tend to be either Marketing or Sales. Here we'll be discussing the core features that make up these types of CRM systems and their sub-features.

Marketing automation CRM

Marketing CRMs are focused more heavily on tracking marketing efforts and quantifying the effect of marketing campaigns on potential customers. In contrast, sales CRMs will cater more to understanding the quality opportunities for teams to sell products and services.

A system made for marketing would feature tools accommodating lead generation, customer life cycle management and web analytics, among other things that measure customer engagement - generating numerous reports that show the ROI of each campaign.

Sales automation CRM

A system made for sales would offer better insight into pipeline management, lead management, opportunities and sales forecasts. These are CRM's with components suited to a business's need of facilitating sales.

A manage and optimise sales opportunities. This CRM would also include a system of collaboration and communication throughout the sales process.

The primary use of sales system is for the internal connection with teams, helping set goals and track progress against those goals.

More types of custom solutions:

While a CRM is often used chiefly for sales or marketing purposes, these tools are now used more than ever for multiple purposes.

Collaborative CRM

Businesses are using CRM systems to improve communication between the company and their customers. Thes systems provide structured data that can be analysed, meaning that professionals can monitor essential data points for their business more quickly than they could before CRM adoption.

Keeping various departments transparent is another advantage of custom software - it facilitates accurate communication, so there's no room for misinterpretation.

Analytical CRM

Analytical systems come with extensive reporting capabilities, providing visuals and reports on all aspects of your business, including sales pipeline, lead aquisition, and customer service metrics.

With this software, you can start to compare your business against industry benchmarks for a clear understanding of where your CRM solution is serving you best or where you could improve.

Operations CRM

Frequently CRMs are introduced to function as an intranet for a whole company. CRMs become spaces where your sales team, senior management, and other team members can share information, share responsibility, and organise team workflows. CRMs provide your employees with a place where they can centralise their work schedules, access demands ahead of time, make reservations for off-site tasks or arrange meetings. A fantastic way to turbocharge your business efficiency while building customer relationships.

Strategic CRM

Stratigic systems provide a tool for professionals to conduct planning. CRMs streamline communications between channels and coonect activities that will directly correspond with business objectives. For business strategists, CRMs offer solutions that make data processing easier when it comes to generating reports.

A CRM can help with planning by forecasting and anticipating client needs and catering accordingly, highlighting where more resources and personnel may be needed than usually allocated in response to demand.

Conclusion on finding the right custom CRM solution for you

Strategic CRM development services streamline your team's business processes and help you save time while helping your business operations improve and your customer engagement increase.

Typically these systems comes with built-in pipelines, ticketing systems, and quote management tools to track quotes generated or outstanding projects.

CRMs also provide automation for repetitive tasks and insight into the status of all customer service requests so you can stay on top of what needs attention at any given moment.

Which features do you want to include in your custom CRM solution?

The One Point is a managed technology service provider and a custom CRM development company and can't wait to provide you with the most effective software solutions so that you can shine.

Let us know, and we will have the solution to help.

Don't delay implementing the best possible tool to skyrocket your business to its full potential.

Contact us now on 01482 420 150.

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