If you are reading this post, then you are well aware of what those terms SaaS and CRM mean. May be you are in the process to evaluate the best CRM system for your business. You are doing this because CRM from brands such as Salesforce, Sap or Microsoft is too complex for your medium sized business to fit in.
So which is the best SaaS based CRM for your business? Believe me, none of them are your best fit. Now you may think that this is baseless argument. Of course, it’s not. I am going to tell you the thoughts collected from various entrepreneurs during my freelancing from last 5 years. Read ahead, if you are interested.
Missing factor in SaaS based CRM system
Your company finds a sweet spot in the market by differentiating on how you serve the customers. This is directly dependent on how the company operates internally. In simple word, business process directly reflects the customer service. Better the business process at your company, best you serve your customers.
Now that said, most of the CRM available as SaaS focus on 3 key areas – Marketing, Sales Customer service. This is required by all the companies irrespective of their size. These CRM can be customized to a predefined extent to increase their relevancy to your business. But they real miss is the business process integration.
Business Process Impacts Customer Service and Sales
Business process just does not impact your customer, but also impacts the performance of your employee who faces the customer.
Most of the sales people define CRM as another system to make a data entry .By their experience they are right. Most of the time, they just don’t see it helping them in their work other than getting all the data under single page.
In anyways either customer suffers due to bad service or company suffers in terms of sales.
Looking into CRM from different angle
We have to look a CRM not just as tool for sales, marketing and service, but as a complete back office system that brings everyone in the company together. You need to build business process right into system which makes every team to follow it. If this is achieved, you could actually give better experience to the customer. In other word, your CRM becomes a CXM – customer experience management system
My final argument
None of the SaaS based CRM system today have such option for you. In fact it’s very difficult to have such feature even in future. Every company business process differs; human factor defined by the company at different stages of the process differs.
Being said all these; I would suggest building a custom CRM for your company.
To summarize custom CRM gives following flexibility
- More specific and personalized feature for your business
- Better integration of with business process
- Invest once – avoid monthly pay out
- Change and tweak as your business changes