When a company thinks of CRM software, many concepts appear: reliability, speed, simple design, many reports… but there is something that is often difficult to achieve: flexibility. How flexible does an application have to be for a company to be tempted to buy it?
Much is said about certain values that good software must possess. In a CRM each of them takes on a certain importance. Some companies place more emphasis on some values than others, depending on their needs. But when evaluating the process of acquiring CRM software, flexibility is often asked. "An application capable of adapting to the needs of our company". "A software with simple functionality but that can grow as we need it."
"The company needs something simple in principle, over time we will see where we are going." These phrases are commonly heard by computer professionals on many occasions. These virtues are simple to ask for, but how simply can it be fulfilled in an application? What does it mean for a CRM software to be flexible? How flexible should it be?
We could list a series of processes that a basic CRM should comply with:
- You should be able to manage contact and organization data.
- You should be able to manage opportunities (possible contacts or leads)
- You should be able to manage the events that occurred to each contact. This is essential and tracks what happens to the contact. The task of generating events should be automated as much as possible within a CRM software. If this administration is done manually, then it doesn't work.
- You should manage tasks for users and schedule them, with due dates, notices and compliance with them. All this work should generate different events automatically.
- Of course there should be a number of reports that allow conclusions to be drawn and, after analysis, to establish different steps to follow.
We could detail some more concepts. Where does flexibility come in? Let's take an example: The company that wants to acquire the software agrees with these processes, but needs to carry out an exhaustive follow-up of collections: Generate tasks for users so that they know whether to call a client who is late in paying of your debt. Of course the fulfillment of these tasks must follow the normal course of the rest of the tasks within the CRM, with generation of events on contact for its history, etc. Perhaps this process, simplified here, is not within the standards of a CRM software, but if it is flexible enough, this new functionality should be added.
What are the advantages of flexible software ? It gives us the possibility to develop a large part of the software according to the standard requirements of the market and, saving development time and costs (both from the point of view of the client and the point of view of the developer) so that it can be achieved a favorable economic agreement for both parties.
