Your company is unique, and your customer relationship management approach should be too. After all, without solid customer relationships, pretty soon you won’t have any 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.”
