As the owner or executive of a business, you naturally want that business to thrive. In today’s economy, it can be a tough act to pull off, but help is available by turning to custom application development. Whether you want a system to track potential and existing customers, a website that will make it easy to order your products and services, or both, custom applications as part of a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system gives you the competitive edge.

Cloud computing is a data storage and application system that is run entirely on the Internet; hosting data and programs in the cloud enables a company to forego the expense and maintenance associated with servers, a hardware infrastructure, and packaged software. With a cloud-based solution, your employees only need log-in authorization and an Internet-ready device—a desktop computer, laptop or mobile device.

An example of a company that successfully moved from in-house data management methods to a cloud-based system that integrated custom application development is the Haagen-Dazs Shoppe Company, which franchises the famous ice cream shops. The company had previously stored franchise leads in an Excel spreadsheet, while other data resided in an Access database. This was difficult to access remotely, which was problematic—a nationwide network of franchises means that the company needed to support its remote workers.

The Haagen-Dazs Shoppe Company’s business is unique, and it required a customized software solution. It selected a customer relationship management system hosted in the cloud, as well as a partner company to provide custom app development, and in less than six months, they had a customized software solution ready to go. Now, automated marketing is in place to drive potential franchise owners to its website. Marketing campaigns are streamlined, and other workflow processes can also be tracked and automated seamlessly.

Thanks to the application builder, Haagen-Dazs has an additional 15 leads on franchise owners every month. Employees are able to access franchise information no matter where they are located, by tapping into a centralized database. Managers can use dashboards and reporting capability to gain visibility into franchise activity.

Another business that has taken advantage of a customized application development platform is LinkedIn, a site allowing professionals to interact and hunt for jobs. Initially, the company did not have a computer system to manage customer information. After automation, the organization was able to keep information on thousands of leads. Harnessing the power of a centralized database allows the company to track and schedule activities to close sales.

There are a number of applications that have already been developed, and which companies can use out of the box or with minor customization. For unique workflows or data management associated with a niche business or process, however, custom application is the way to go. Why bother with application components that you don’t need, that will clutter up your system and potentially confuse your employees? Custom apps streamline and simplify your business, and that’s pretty sweet—even if you’re not in the ice cream biz.

What’s the best way to stay in touch with your existing customers, reach new ones, and follow up on leads? That’s a question that companies have been asking themselves for a long time. All too often, their attempts to find the answer have been haphazard and less than fruitful.

Sometimes just accessing the customers’ accounts is haphazard. Contact information, purchase history and service call data can all spread over several different databases. Some may even be in the form of handwritten notes stuffed in a file cabinet. When a customer calls, there may be a mad scramble to pull all the information together so that you can hold an intelligent conversation.

Marketing campaigns can be difficult and time consuming to prepare. All of your customer email addresses are lumped into one database, with little to identify who buys what, or any good way of personalizing the messages. You end up simply blasting the information into the ether, and never know whether it ends up in spam folders, is deleted without being read, or actually translates into a sale. Wouldn’t it help to be able to capture and analyze that information?

You can. In fact, all of these issues can be easily rectified by using contact management software, or better yet, contact management applications that run on the Web. These cloud-based applications can have several distinct advantages: they are updated in real time, easy to access even when you’re not in the office, and user-friendly. Most importantly, however, they can streamline information, sort and analyze data, and generate automated reports so that you don’t have to manually assess everything.

With cloud-based customer relationship management applications, every authorized user has the same, comprehensive view of the customer account. When someone calls in with a question, the CSR can call up an interface that shows all relevant information, and even offers some opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. The salesperson who’s calling on a customer can use her access to the cloud to view purchase history, upcoming product launches for pre-ordering, and even promotions or discount that might be available. After she closes the deal, the sales manager can easily see this status and route a new lead to that rep, or generate a forecasting report.

If you must have an employee retrieve data from your customer database and then try to set up profiles or contact information, you are doing double work. A good contact management software program will have all of that information consolidated in one place.

These were the types of issues that StepForth Placement, which provides SEO services as well as placements for small and medium-sized companies, was facing. Since a large part of their business comes from word of mouth referrals, fast and accurate contacts with customers were critical to continued success. StepForth needed to have instant access to all of its contact and account information, but their legacy system was disorganized, so they were unable to associate contact information with specific documents, or emails with pertinent records, or reseller data with clients.

Their solution was to chose a cloud-based customer contact management solution, which provided them with a way to organize data in a logical and accessible manner. The results? The time to prepare quotes was reduced, complete customer records could be retrieved in just a couple of clicks, and StepForth’s client relations improved. Not only that, but they lowered costs and saw their revenue grow. In the first year of using the new system, the company’s sales increased by 20 percent.

Contact management software, clearly, offers a vast improvement over the old sticky-note-and-a-prayer method that far too many companies are relying on. If you really want to improve efficiency and get results, consider running these software applications in the cloud for accessibility and scalability.

Cloud computing provides large, complex software solutions to companies, without requiring them to purchase expensive equipment, or maintain the software and infrastructure with an in-house tech team.
One of the best uses for this computing architecture is customer relationship management (CRM), a way of capturing valuable customer data, organizing that data and using it to improve sales forecasting, marketing campaigns and customer service. What many people don’t realize, however, is that companies’ unique needs can be met through application development—something that was very difficult and expensive to do with server-based software.

Cloud computing makes the process of having custom designed applications—for non-standard programs, internet communication applications, troubleshooting, specific data processing, management and storage, instant software upgrades and accounting processes—simple, easy and affordable.

In addition, once your custom applications are designed, they are managed by outsourced data centers and can be accessed by all authorized employees, using any Internet-ready device. This means that the apps are easily and quickly rolled out, and have a high rate of user adoption. Upgrades are automatic and require no downtime, and if you need more server capacity, it’s easy to add it.

Customized application development allows companies to fashion new applications to fit their needs, but these apps are also designed to match or integrate with legacy systems used by the company, so as not to disrupt workflow. Moreover, efficient application development allows some companies to outsource tedious work, further lessening company expenses.

Practical Application:
Plantronics is a designer, manufacturer and marketer of lightweight communications headset products, which needed a more comprehensive view of its customer, including a central data repository of partner and customer data. It also required a CRM system with support for multiple languages and currencies, as well as one that could integrate with its existing knowledge base, MRP and marketing systems. They needed all that, and they needed it fast.

After shopping around for CRM vendors, Plantronics settled on one that offered integrated sales force automation, marketing, customer service and support applications. It selected a number of applications from an online exchange offered by the vendor, but also chose to have a knowledge base app custom-designed, in order to provide its customer support personnel with call scripting and solution guidance, which has helped CSRs close more tickets with greater customer satsifaction.

These applications were seamlessly integrated with Plantronics’s legacy architecture, including Oracle MRP, Silverpop email marketing, RightNow and the corporate Web site. Data continuity was maintained despite a fast rollout—the system was deployed to over 400 users in less than 6 months, and has a very high adoption rate. More than 80 percent of customer calls to Plantronics are now logged to cases.

Simply put, application development that occurs in Web-based environment provides customer solutions that just make sense. These apps represent a cost-savings as well as a streamlined, secure and accessible way of capturing and storing data, and performing workflows. Application development can lead to more effective customer solutions—because it encompasses company solutions.

Although I know there are some tech geeks who would take issue with this definition, I define “cloud computing” as simply using the Internet to perform computing applications. Enterprise cloud computing? That’s when businesses run their apps and data storage over the ‘net. And Platform as a Service (PaaS) can be thought of as a way of outsourcing your entire computing system—application design, development and testing; deployment; hosting; database integration; storage and security—to a remote Internet host.

When a business uses cloud computing and Platform as a Service to increase its ability to use computer applications without the associated expense, it saves money. The company also saves time, and enjoys greater adoption rates among employees, as well as being able to reduce the number of IT staff needed to run the equipment or applications.

One of the many advantages of using the cloud PaaS is that it’s a pay-as-you-go system. It makes the platform an on-demand service, like buying movies over cable television. In other words, you get the ability to share resources without the huge up-front investment. PaaS provides everything necessary to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering Web apps and services.

Both software and information can be accessed as needed and are paid for by subscription or on an as-used basis, like electricity. The actual software applications used and data created or used are stored remotely on servers outside the business. A business creates a relationship with a cloud computing company for services that are delivered through data centers and external servers. Many cloud computing companies offer service level agreements (SLAs) to businesses, in return for which they can expect to receive a certain level of quality service.

It can be a tremendous cost savings when business do not have to continually buy and upgrade equipment or applications, provide space for equipment, or personnel to maintain the equipment and software. They enjoy access to the same sophisticated computing ability without the expense normally involved with private purchases of the same resources. Cloud-based PaaS is also extremely scalable; the platform allows you to add users at any time, without lengthy delays associated with obtaining additional on-premises servers or software. Just talk to your cloud-computing vendor, and you’ve got more capacity. It’s just about that simple.

Practical Application:
Many companies enjoy using their PaaS ability to scale capacity up and down as needed. At GettingHired.com—a web portal that helps connect people with disabilities and employment opportunities—CIO Frank Weichmann indicates that they are saving money on infrastructure as well as bandwidth. They use better applications and expand their user base. When they company experiences large spikes in service traffic, they can scale their capacity to meet those demands by using cloud services. PaaS also helps workers be more efficient, since training time is reduced. Most of the applications that run in the cloud are extremely user-friendly, with point-and-click capabilities. It’s much easier to roll out one of these systems to your employees than it used to be, with traditional server-based software systems that had lengthy training times.

The relationship between Platform as a Service (PaaS) and your business is very similar to purchasing electricity as a utility. You pay for what you use, you can access more anytime you need more, you only use what you need and you do not have to generate the product yourself. Updates are automatic, reducing downtime; user adoption rates are high, increasing employee satisfaction; and customer service is easier to provide than ever, meaning that you increase both customer retentions and profits.

Today’s businesses are faced with a reality:  budgets must be slashed as much as possible in order to stay alive in today’s economy. However, it’s a customer’s market, which means that increasingly demanding consumers still insist that companies use the latest technology and be able to meet their needs. It can often seem impossible to have things both ways. How can you have effective customer relationship management (CRM) tools yet still stay within your budget? Although it may be hard to believe, the answer lies in custom application development.

Don’t worry if you don’t have the resources to develop your own applications—there are many widely available, fully functional CRM applications that can be tweaked to meet your specific needs. Since you don’t need to develop the application from scratch, you save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in user meetings, requirements gathering, and software development tools. Not to mention the months you save in trimming the application development timeline.

Avaya, a company specializing in communications solutions for businesses, understands the value of CRM software. With the help of customized software, the company was able to import 500,000 customer records from grandfathered systems into a centralized location. The services delivery group is able to efficiently schedule and manage tasks and equipment. Thanks to custom application development, the company has a more thorough understanding of its customers and has been able to expand its business.

Another company with first-hand experience in the power of automated CRM is Kaiser Permanente. When this health care company needed to have a platform which would allow it to view sales data from eight regions, it turned to a software solution. In order to comply with state and local regulations, the company had to create reports that would take up to three months to complete. Kaiser Permanente was able to roll out its initial CRM solution to 120 people. Release of the application nationwide to 400 users was accomplished within four months. The company plans to expand its solutions to Palm Treo devices to allow sales people access to information on the go.

Because cloud-based applications centralize your data, the upper management has the information it needs to make effective business decisions. CRM consulting has enabled the company to change from being focused on different regions to being focused on nationwide growth. Kaiser Permanente salespeople have adopted the custom-built application, and as a result have been able to be more productive.

To get your business started with custom application development, you first need to be aware of what information your business needs. What is it about your business that keeps your customers coming back? What information about your customers do you need to store in a database? How can you describe your products and services in ways that will entice people to do business with you? Once you get the answers you need, turn to CRM consulting to help you build the solution.

The right solution will allow you to keep track of customers who visit your website, see you at trade shows or have been visited by your salespeople. By getting a clear picture of what your customers want, you can better allocate resources to develop efficient, effective marketing campagins, make more sales, and compile accurate forecasts. Best of all, you can have these maximized solutions while minimizing how much money you spend.

Is your company just like your competitor’s? Of course not. If it were, you wouldn’t stay in business very long. Entrepreneurs and big business alike strive to set themselves apart with unique characteristics, and since your company is unique, you need applications that are customizable to meet your unique needs.

Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems allows customers to access applications from any device with Internet access. The tools streamline business processes, increase sales, improve marketing strategies and improve customer relations. Additionally, data can be stored, processes can be automated, costs are reduced and sales and marketing coordinated. Each application can be customized to meet your business’s particular needs.

Through CRM utilities, companies are able to customize applications to employees’ work styles. When employees enjoy the software they are working with, it reflects in their work. Employees are more apt to capture the data and utilize the tool. When customer problems are handled efficiently, it improves the company’s brand image. Satisfied customers bring more business. A satisfied customer will not only continue to provide business, but also spread the word to other friends.

CRM tools allow businesses to generate reports that are specific to the company’s business needs. Studying market trends provides vital information regarding key customers. When companies recognize key customers, they can allocate resources appropriately to secure more business from the customer.

Businesses can customize applications to perform complex mathematical expressions. They can automate credit card processing online, data queries, and calculations, such as sales tax, pricing and shipping costs. Other eCommerce applications may also be integrated with a pre-existing accounting system, inventory systems, order tracking processes and other business applications.

Customizable applications may also provide certain members of the team access and not others. This is helpful if only management has the authorization to perform certain tasks within the company, or if the organization is temporarily allowing their customer to log into the system for a specific period of time. Some managers need to analyze data on a consistent basis in order to monitor the business and drive sales. These analyses are also customizable as well. Managers may also customize feedback specific to employee roles through automated systems. This enables employees to improve their accuracy and efficiency in performance.

Practical Application

Let’s see how custom apps helped a company called Author Solutions, a self-publishing company that includes the popular brand Xlibris. Author Solutions needed to automate the publishing production workflow for authors and for other publishers, with a common platform to integrate its systems. They wanted to increase visibility into business metrics, achieve superior customer satisfaction, and also build an innovative platform that can be resold to other publishers.

Author Solutions chose a customized application for its iUniverse self-publishing brand—and had that app built in just six months. It automates the workflow for authors, integrating editorial, design, marketing and distribution facets. The company can add features to the application easily as business needs change, and were able to integrate a vast amount of legacy data from existing operations to the new environment. The overall result? The ability to produce high-quality books at greatly reduced costs, with a streamlined beginning-to-end process that is a radical improvement over the original method.

Some customized applications created for other companies include:

• Membership Management Tools with Automatic Renewal
• Analyze the Source of Membership Statistics
• Analyze the Source of Member Satisfaction
• Find Veterinarians via Zip Code
• Statistics for Incident Reports
• Processing of Membership Payments
• Membership Card Creation Interface
• Data Analysis for 20 Reports with One Command
• Automated Distribution of Marketing Material
• Automatic Display of Scanned Customer Survey Forms

Each of these applications improved business practices and efficiency for a unique company. What does your unique company need to do?

Businesses seeking solutions to improve sales, marketing or support should consider customer relationship management software with customizable applications. Customizable applications allow businesses to mold the software around its own business needs, rather than the customer relationship management (CRM) system vendor providing a standard solution for every existing customer. Many CRM software vendors provide customizations that are simple and fast., and most applications can be customized by utilizing point-and-click wizards within the software platform.

CRM software provides point-and-click application customization as a convenience. Interfaces may be designed to meet the specific business needs of a customer. For instance, some companies require satellite video to locate potential customers for their business. When a potential customer is located, the data is cross-referenced with the address and contact information. Other companies may have no need for satellite video to locate customers, and this particular feature would be unnecessary. Companies select applications that increase productivity in their work environments.

When businesses upgrade their applications, the customized portions will automatically upgrade as well. Therefore, employees do not waste time recreating a customized application each time an upgrade occurs. This increases productivity and alleviates the frustration often associated with applications and upgrades.

Point-and-click application customization makes it easy for every employee to work smart—instead of having to be trained in a specific software program, and adapt their own way of engaging with material to the way that material is presented, they can adapt their interface. Employee morale and productivity  improve when they are able to make adjustments to suit their own work styles.

Savvy employees may also customize applications with code. Many developers may use special programming languages in order to create more software functionality. Open ended development environments allow these types of changes using toolkits.

For example, a company involved in control systems development may need applications that support strong analysis and graphing. With new point-and-click applications, these types of complex applications may be accessed easily. In the past, complex commands and syntax were needed in order to access these types of applications. Now, a novice can access them with no problem. Several financial companies have utilized point-and-click applications for financial modeling, designing, and other quantitative analysis. Many sophisticated mathematical and other applications are now available in this intuitive, clickable format.

Practical Application

Haagen-Dazs Shoppe Company integrated a CRM system into their current work flow. The system replaced their current spread sheets with new applications that were customizable by each employee. The company integrated applications that would allow them to locate real estate leads, manage ads, track inspections, monitor training attendance and streamline store openings. Each of the applications is specific to the needs of Haagen-Dazs. Not only that, but the system was rolled out to all employees in less than six months, since it required little training beyond the hands-on customization. The system was easily accessible to its remote workers worldwide because it operated in the “cloud,” or over the Internet, rather than being housed onsite and accessed through company-issued hardware. Now, any authorized employee can log into the the CRM system, see their personalized interface, and begin working.

After introducing the CRM software, Haagen-Dazs has gained an approximate 15 additional franchise leads per month. The company is also able to analyze data more efficiently and access data from virtually any location—and, perhaps most importantly, has seen an increase in employee satisfaction because of the new system.

Businesses can customize applications and resume business faster with point-and-click applications. The less time spent customizing, the less downtime the company will experience. That, of course, is good for the company’s bottom line.

Traditional customer service metrics are ineffective in today’s world of social networking, Internet blogs, and instant communication. Nor are marketing programs that focus on attracting new customers necessarily the best approach. Yet many businesses still base their key measurements on increased sales and first-time buyers.

Revenue changes are, of course, still one of the metrics you should be paying attention to. However, there are many other factors that should be included when it is time to analyze what these results actually mean. Only by taking the complete picture into account can you make the proper decisions.

One area that is often overlooked is an evaluation of the nature of the issues handled by the customer service department. Are there an inordinate number of requests for information that you could handle by posting the information on your website or including in the instructions sent with your product? Are they primarily related to one fulfillment center or one sales representative? Is there a particular product that seems to cause the most problems? Your cloud-based customer relationship management solutions should be running automatic reports so that you can determine these things—and if they’re not, then you need to find an application, or build one, that will give you those reports.

Another important metric is the number of contacts required to resolve an issue. In a perfect world, all issues would be handled on the first contact. Well, actually, in a perfect world, there would never be any issues, but since we don’t live or conduct business in an ideal environment, problems will arise. You need to know how efficiently they are settled, because this leads to another metric you need to track, namely customer retention. Poor customer service, in the form of inadequate issue resolution, can have a dramatic impact on how many repeat customers you have.

Your customer service department is your eyes and ears, a liaison with your customers that you need to evaluate. The facts and figures they funnel to you can factor heavily into other metrics, such as the cost of an individual customer, the lifetime value of a customer, referrals and more. Listening closely to customer service feedback will also give you insight into product research and development, marketing, and sales.

Practical Application

Monitoring the right metrics enables a company to respond better to customer issues. The desire to do just that was not possible with New Jersey Transit’s old system. The agency oversees all bus, light rail, and rail routes in the state. With over 250 million riders annually, it was natural that there would be complaints—after all, people have been complaining about buses since the first person stepped onto the first public bus, and it’s a safe bet to say that they complained about stagecoaches before that.

What was holding New Jersey Transit back was the fact that there was no system in place to track the nature of the complaints or how long it took to resolve them. When a complaint was received, the customer service desk responded by email or phone call, and records were scarce. There was no overall picture that management could use to improve service.

They began with a Web site interface that would turn a customer complaint into a case file for customer service to handle. One thing this eliminated was multiple responses to the same complaint, since actions could be noted in the file. New Jersey Transit was also able to measure complaints and commendations regarding employees, so that they could better train and reward their staff, weed out the bad apples, and offer improvements in customer service. As a result of streamlining the customer service department, all aspects of the business became smoother. Customers could track their cases, customer service reps had an easier way to view, archive and follow up on issues, and everyone was able to focus on problem resolution rather than problem administration.

Your business can do this too. A cloud-based customer relationship management system will help, as well thinking outside of the box when it comes to your metrics and benchmarks. You can no longer afford to bury your head in the sand and look only at the sales figures—there are too many other factors that are as important as those numbers.

One of the major selling points of customer relationship management (CRM) systems is customization. In the past, companies that wanted to utilize a CRM platform had to purchase software off the shelf; frequently there were many applications bundled together, which meant that the company paid for everything, regardless of whether or not they would actually use it all. It was expensive to purchase multiple copies of licensed software, and upgrades could be complex and time-consuming. Then came cloud computing, which involves the use of applications that run remotely, through the internet. Upgrades take place automatically, without employee downtime; apps can be shared across all channels without the use of multiple software bundles, and all data can be easily accessed, whether the employee is telecommuting, traveling or located across the globe.

Additionally, cloud-based CRM systems are extremely customizable. They can support sales and marketing processes along with customer support. The systems can be customized by fields, forms, views, and reports. They feature automated workflow processes and are able to use Jscript automation for forms.

CRM is designed to present a user friendly interface for managing customer information and interactions. Systems can be customized to meet needs of different departments, from customer service and collections to telemarketing and sales. The goal is to provide information about customers and prospects, manage the data collected, and ultimately sustain and increase sales activities. It can be used for any company department, including collections, directory services, and financial departments. The systems are data-driven.

Typical customizations include layout changes, custom fields and custom views. An app can be customized to present workflow development and custom reports and define business processes. Keeping in mind the need for CRM to be very user friendly, here are 5 best practices for CRM customization:

1. Know what sales and marketing processes need to flow into the CRM application. If you do not map out what is needed, the application you end up with will not match the needs of your business. Once a system is in use, options for customization may be addressed. Take time and work with your vendor before and after you make a decision on what CRM to purchase.
2. Know in advance which user needs and reporting needs must be met. Get input from users about what they need before any customization is done, to help make that customization accepted and useful to those users.
3. Test the system before it goes live. Make sure it functions properly and does not interfere with other activities.
4. Make sure data that is entered is clean data. There can be problems moving data from one application to another. There can be duplicate listings or wrong data placed in empty fields. A good CRM application will account for these kinds of glitches, but of course it’s best to avoid them from the beginning if at all possible.
5. Don’t rush to integrate CRM systems with other applications. It is good to be able to combine data from multiple applications to get a better, more complete picture of a customer. Loosely coupled systems are better than rigid interfaces. Being linked to other systems allows the CRM system to perform more functions and access more data.

Practical Application

CRM customization has worked well for Divisions Inc., a property management services company in the United States. They customized their CRM system to incorporate photo libraries. This allowed field representatives to use BlackBerry software to send photos from mobitheir le phones to customer email inboxes, as well as to store photos in groups for later recall. Photos are also linked to Google Maps. This capability brings customers what they want faster—which, of course, results in increased customer satisfaction.

Customizing a CRM platform can be one of the best decisions your company can make. Why not find out more about the benefits of custom application development, and what it can do for you and your customers?

Running a CRM platform in the cloud—using web-based and Software as a Service (SaaS) tools to help organize, access and disseminate the various aspects of customer relationship management—is one way to streamline and customize the software and data storage solutions that you need. Custom applications for CRM go hand-in-hand with cloud-based computing. There are many different ways to access applications, but custom application building is the preferred route for many companies, whether they are small or medium-sized businesses or large corporations. After all, why would you want to pay for applications you don’t need and will never use?

With custom applications, your CRM platform does exactly what you need it to do, and nothing more—meaning that your business is more efficient and more cost-efficient. Custom applications also have a built-in simplicity that makes them easy to build and to roll out, which means that you can streamline your IT department. Drag-and-drop functionality means that you don’t need a degree in complicated coding languages to make the application come to life. Teams and departments—in other words, those who will be actually using the application, and who therefore best understand their requirements and preferences—can create their own apps to integrate seamlessly with the company’s overarching cloud network.

Custom applications can start with templates that may address common business workflows in such areas as project management, sales management, marketing and HR. They can then be modified by end-users to suit a department’s own best practices model, to organize data in a way that it can be easily accessed and shared with other departments, and to offer more efficient responses to customers and sales reps alike.

Custom application builders also offer a company the flexibility and scalability that it needs to meet rising or changeable consumer demand. For example, Altium Limited is a developer of electronic design software, which was gearing up for a peak business period with a less-than-adequate system, which had proven during its last peak that it could not scale up to meet demand. After evaluating several external vendors of boxed applications, Altium decided to use custom application builders, and were able to develop and deploy six applications in a matter of just four weeks.

That’s great, you say, but what about the business practices these apps were built to serve? Did they meet the company’s demands during the peak season? They absolutely did, and just a few days into the building project, realized that custom apps could provide them with many more advantages than just the minimal scalability required at that time. The entire initiative has resulted in shorter response times, improved productivity, and an intuitive interface that has in turn increased employee morale. And they did it without the help of programmers—or the need for costly downtime.

To paraphrase an oft-quoted movie line, the main reason to customize your cloud-based CRM applications to meet the unique needs of your business is because, “If you build it, they will come.”