What is CRM Customization?
CRM customization is adding or modifying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) features to fit how you do business. Setting up your CRM to fit your processes increases user adoption, internal efficiency, and sales.
Three Types of Customization
With so many CRM software choices, determining what level of customization your business needs is often difficult. So how do you determine the level of customization that’s right for your organization? There are three main levels.
- Basic-Level CRM Customization – Most CRM systems have a basic level of customization. Your CRM administrator can make simple changes like keywords and picklists. General users can make personal changes like configuring their own dashboards or widgets with “drag and drop” features.
- Mid-Level CRM Customization – Some vendors offer more complex options to customize their out-of-the-box CRM solutions. Examples of these features include creating workflows, new forms, and light coding.
- Advanced-Level CRM Customization -Advanced customization of your CRM system requires services from an experienced vendor like Clear C2. Certain features will need developers to build functionality with the original source code. They must also perform various QA, regression, and analysis testing.
Common Reasons Businesses Customize their CRM
It’s very unusual for an organization to use a CRM platform out of the box without any configuration. Every company will need some type of customization. It could include simple features like setting up user profiles, importing data, or creating widgets for dashboards.
Certain businesses may need extensive custom changes. This depends on the size of your company and your specific needs. However, you won’t need to build your own custom CRM solution.
Key Areas to Focus on Customization
Most companies use CRM as a decision-making tool to meet their financial goals. To provide the correct analysis, your CRM needs to gather data that is pertinent to your business. Cookie-cutter CRMs are too general to have custom fields.
Here are some common aspects of CRM customization:
- Data Fields and Layouts – Customizing the data fields to capture and display relevant information to the business. This could involve adding new fields, renaming existing ones, or rearranging their positions.
- Workflows and Automation -Customizing the CRM’s workflows and automation rules to reflect specific sales and marketing processes. This may include defining sales stages, setting up automated notifications, creating task assignments, and establishing approval processes.
- Reports and Dashboards – Customizing reports and dashboards to provide relevant insights and key performance indicators (KPIs). This enables businesses to track and analyze sales activities, customer behavior, and other metrics.
- Integration with Other Systems – Customizing the CRM system to integrate with other software applications and data sources. Integration allows for seamless data exchange and enhances the CRM’s capabilities.
- User Interface and Access Control – Customizing the CRM’s user interface (UI) to align with the company’s branding and improve user experience. Additionally, customization can involve defining access control levels, roles, and permissions to ensure appropriate data security and user privileges.
- Custom CRM Development – In some cases, CRM customization may require developing custom functionality or features that are not available out-of-the-box. This involves creating custom coding and extending the CRM system’s capabilities through application programming interfaces (APIs). (Read more in ERP & CRM integration)
Foster Increased CRM Usage
When implementing customizable software, getting the buy-in from all your users is critical. This will create a database with more reliability. Executives can then make decisions based on this data.
Users must believe the software will boost their productivity and not be a burden. A customized application based on your data processes will foster increased system usage. The user interface is easier to use and more intuitive. Increasing the user adoption rate.
User Adoption
When implementing custom CRM software, getting the buy-in from all your users is critical. You want your team members to use the system regularly, resulting in a database with more integrity. This is important since sales management uses the solution to base their decisions.
To get the necessary buy-in, users must believe the software will help them to be more productive. A customized application based on their daily sales processes will foster increased system usage. The user interface will be easier to use and more intuitive. Thus increasing the user adoption rate.
Benefits of Customizing Your CRM
One of the main reasons businesses buy customizable CRM software is to be more responsive to the customer. As well as gain their loyalty and confidence. Here are a few benefits of a Customized CRM Solution:
- Marketing personnel can target top prospects and assign leads
- Custom reports
- Sales reps will focus their efforts on accounts and opportunities that better optimize their time.
- Sales teams provide better sales pipelines and forecasts. Resulting in the correct product mix and the customer getting their orders on time
- CSRs will offer better and more responsive customer service
- Track customer details that are important to your business
- The entire organization will look and feel more cohesive to the customer being on-point with their specific needs
Conclusion
When selecting a Customer Relationship Management vendor, it’s critical to pick one that will meet the specific needs of your business. Unfortunately, many vendors will force-fit your business model to their out-of-the-box software.
Some vendors have partners who perform the customizations—resulting in higher costs and continuing charging when your system needs adjustments. When you have a two-vendor (partner) solution, there can be a gray area of responsibility to the client. And often, there is the potential for finger-pointing on who is accountable.
CRM customization helps businesses optimize their CRM systems to match their unique workflows, data requirements, and business processes. By tailoring the CRM to their specific needs, organizations can improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and gain actionable insights from their data.
At Clear C2, we offer a consultative approach that configures our software to fit our client’s business model. We do not outsource any part of our solution and provide our own professional services. We deliver the appropriate expertise while being held accountable. Even well after the initial implementation is complete. Give us a call for a demo or a free 14-day trial. We’d love to help your business grow.
