Third-Party CRM? Custom CRM? Which CRM Suits Your Business?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is often by companies across the world. A typical CRM combines the practices, strategies and technologies that a company can be used to manage and analyze customer interactions and data. All these data and customer interactions form the customer lifecycle. The end goal behind a CRM is to improve customer service relationship, retain loyal customers, and even drive sales to “users” who haven’t yet made a purchase from your company.

For example, a third-party tool such as ActiveCampaign is at the same time an email marketing program, and a CRM (with the functions to run marketing automation). Such a tool like ActiveCampaign, or even Mailchimp, GetResponse, ConvertKit, or Constant Contact aren’t really custom CRM. All of them can be seamlessly integrated with your B2B website of your company, or even your ecommerce platform. But after all, the tools are able to store information of your contacts, leads, or customers.

But what is custom CRM? A custom CRM is usually seen as a specific software product. The custom CRM is often built according to the business goals of your company (if you ever have built one). The customized solution enables your staffs to effectively manage the relationships with your existing/loyal customers, and may enhance the attractiveness of your business for new potential customers.

Using the full features of the CRM including customer lifecycle and workflow management, reporting, user roles and permissions settings, your staffs can track and optimize all the stages when building relationships with your customers.

Some of the advantages that can be provided by a typical custom CRM:

• When the CRM is customized, it can be a light-weight solution that is right for your specific needs. Other companies may have purchased an out-of-the-box but rather expensive and complicated enterprise-level CRM system, and may not be able to meet those very specific and detailed requirements for their business.
• A custom may be significantly cost-saving in long term because it provides only those features that are absolutely necessary for your company.
• When the custom CRM system is created based on your company’s workflow, you will end up spending much less time training your staffs (who are to involve in the daily operations of the CRM).
• If you have planned ahead in the first place, the custom CRM should be able to seamlessly integrate across all the different departments of your company.
• The custom designed CRM can consolidate all your databases.
• When the custom CRM has its development completed, the source code is already there. In later stages or years, you can always go back to the source code, if you need to enhance a part in your CRM, or add new function to it, without problem.
• For those out-of-the-box CRMs, you will have to keep paying a license fee, whether it is per year or per month. With your custom developed CRM, you own the solution, and you won’t have to pay license fees anymore.