How much does it cost to develop a custom CRM software

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May 16, 2021

Customer relationship management software is one of the essential tools for B2B or B2C business system as it saves much time and effort. The only important thing for companies is whether it’s better to use ready-made or develop a custom one. Here in this article, we will explain which CRM is more helpful and how much does a custom CRM software cost.

Custom CRM system: How much does it cost?

A good-working custom CRM solutions are significant investments for every business as it keeps your customers in one place and helps your sales department follow up it regularly.

There are a few fundamental challenges for businesses that custom CRM systems can solve. First of all, CRM allows users to aggregate the data, including contact details, orders history, transactions status, customers’ status, communication chain. Custom CRM systems integrate with chats, emails, calls, and planners and synchronize all the data from these contacts with teams and customers. This data is essential for strategic planning and understanding clients’ needs as it helps both sales and marketing departments to measure the customer retention rate, conversions rate, churn rate, etc. Furthermore, custom CRM solutions could optimize the data storage, when all the data is saved in a central database, and there is no need to work manually with duplicates.

CRM software is usually integrated with some side tools like Google Calendar to schedule the meetings and set reminders quickly. Establish a full accounting process in consequence with the sales funnel starting from lead generation to the final deal closing, and you will notice the effectiveness of sales department work. To automate the sales processes is not the only advantage of custom CRM development services, we would share the more other benefits you can find from using it:

  • CRM stores all clients’ data including the responsible sales manager name;
  • The manager of the department has direct access to the workflow process and can check the progress on working on each lead;
  • The inbuilt scheduling functionality in CRM allows cooperating between departments;
  • Inbuilt analytics allows for analyzing data quickly;
  • With CRM systems, it’s easier to summarize the progress and simplify reporting.
  • The list of features is different in every type of CRM system, as well as the number of clients you can add and manage simultaneously. The more advanced solution you get, the higher price will need to pay.

    Types of CRM Solutions

    Every type of customer relationship software is aimed to solve the different issues according to the various tasks. Here is the list of widely used CRM samples:

  • The analytical system will help to analyze customer’s behavior data, collect the data from different sources, apply data segmentation to improve the strategy-building process and support the team in creating more efficient campaigns.
  • The collaborative system will synchronize all chats, phone calls, email in one place. With this custom CRM solution, the team will have all the data gathered in one place. It allows teams to integrate custom communication tools and tracking systems.
  • The strategic system will assist in supporting long-term customer relationships by analyzing the customer’s data. This type of custom CRM is focused on providing a comprehensive data view for the team that works with strategy planning.
  • The operational system will focus on marketing, sales, service automation. The priority for this type of custom CRM is in automation of basic everyday tasks. Operational CRM helps send emails or distribute relevant information for clients according to their previous requests or search.
  • Some of these modules can be included in enterprise-level custom CRM software development, where multiple solutions are gathered in one operation to control several business processes. These solutions can be both ready-mades like HubSpot and custom-made according to your specific business needs.

    The Opportunities to Get from Ready-made CRM vs. Custom CRM

    Each type of CRM software contains a list of advantages and disadvantages. But which one to choose depends on your budget mostly. Сustom CRM development cost depends on various things such as a list of features, a number of users able to use it simultaneously, etc. That’s why let’s compare already existed CRM solutions and define the full range of diversities. 

    Ready-made CRM 

    Ready-made CRM is a good choice for companies, who started a small business and understand that just excel tables will not help them to keep customers’ database in the right order. Ready solutions require a monthly payment and have limited opportunities with the specific number of features given by service providers. Here are some of the well-known CRM software examples you might hear about:

    HubSpot CRM

    HubSpot CRM

    HubSpot CRM supports between 10 and 999 number of users. The price is counted after you will use the software during the free trial. The HubSpot CRM is perfect for small and medium-sized companies forced by spreadsheets but with no need for cool features or complex software.

    Salesforce CRM

    Salesforce CRM

    Salesforce CRM supported up to 1000 users and appeared to be a multi-tenant cloud computing model. The current platform can serve all sizes of companies in any industry and provide real-time data about the users’ activities. Salesforce pricing begins from $25.00 per month, per user. For a quick start, companies can try a free trial.

    Zoho CRM

    Zoho CRM

    Zoho CRM is another good sample for organizations that started from small to large-size. If companies need to manage marketing, sales, customer support tasks in one business system, then Zoho CRM will be helpful. CRM Pricing starts at $12.00 per year, per user also including a free program version and a free trial to check how it works.

    Sugar CRM

    SugarCRM

    SugarCRM is a tool to serve all sizes of businesses from small to large and helps them to manage the main business tasks in sales, marketing, customer support. Depending on the business size, there are three pricing packages per user billed annually: Professional 40$, Enterprise 65$, Ultimate 150$.

    Microsoft Dynamics

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM also serves companies of all sizes focusing on enterprises. The platform is easily integrated with Microsoft Office applications for better adoption. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has 3 paid versions: Professional – $50/user/month, Professional – $65/user/month, Sales Productivity – $85/user/month.

    To sum up, all of the CRM as mentioned above software examples, the list of features they contain are divided into the next main menu which needs for businesses:

  • Sales Automation
  • Marketing Automation
  • Customer Service and Support
  • Analytics and Reporting
  • The other functionality depends on the product provider.

    Custom CRM Solution

    Comparing to ready-made solutions, custom CRM development has a universal scheme as it is created from scratch, especially for your business and without the extra features. If you build your own CRM system, it will make you more flexible in business decisions. With a ready solution, you have a standard scheme, but with custom CRM you will have a system based on your business needs and does not have unnecessary functionality. 

    At the planning stage, you may define the exact functionality, the list of third-party services and APIs to integrate (mail servers, messaging servers, etc.), the number of users to support. The ready CRM solution, in general, can not be combined with all types of tools you already use. For example, a ready CRM solution supports only a specific number of users despite a custom solution allowing adding as many users as you need. If you develop customized CRM solutions, it will work without any additional payments. At the same time, the ready CRM solution will have monthly or yearly subscription payments. 

    Another advantage of custom CRM is that it’s placed on the company’s servers, and the source codes plus system rights belong to the company. Also, it can be pretty challenging to add new functions to ready solutions. Custom CRM can be clarified and updated by our team or other programmers upon request.

    How To Develop Own Custom CRM System?

    Before you’ve finally decided to build a CRM, define the main goals, it will solve for your business, and for which department you are going to implement it. To ease the process for you, we prepared a detailed list of features required for each custom CRM.

    Features Of CRM Systems

    For Marketers

    The need for CRM for marketers leads to the proper organization of marketing processes to reach out to potential customers. The marketing department is aimed to increase a business income, that’s why the quality of leads’ management for them is as outstanding as for sales managers. According to our experience in development, we would define the next visible modules:

    Campaign management module

    Each marketing specialist is working on creating a campaign with multiple events. It can be both with using digital tools and offline tools. For example, a marketing specialist has to promote a company event, and he used email newsletters together with Facebook ads. He has to track users’ activities during the campaign and sum up the results at the end of the event. Managing campaigns in CRM will keep informed all the marketing department with the outcome of this campaign. Campaign management module cost varies between $8 000 – $15 000. The development process will take approximately four months. 

    Client segmentation module

    Marketers usually run different contests and interactives with separate target audiences even within the same product. That’s why it is vital for them to segment customers and determine the best content for them. Other additional tools for segmentation features are filters, charts, previews.  The current module will cost between $5000 – $10000.

    Analytics module

    Real-time analytics is critical for marketers to track and check actual results, such as which campaign is the most successful, and which one is giving the best ROI.  This tool can sort the data from marketing campaigns in your dashboard according to your needs, such as the success, cost, target auditory, and others. The cost for this module development varies from $5000 to $10000.

    For Sales Teams

    Similar to marketing specialists, sales are also working with people and responsible for the company’s income. The list of customer CRM features for sales is focused on people, for example, the Accounts section, Leads section, Opportunities section, and other more. The other more functionality we’ve mentioned below.

    Account and lead management module

    The core features in CRM for sales are lead management and account management. Sales need to add data about a new lead and follow them to the next stages of sales funnel. Here on custom CRM need to be visible, all steps from the newly generated lead to the final deal closed. Sales need to have multiple fields to add personal lead’s data, filtering, and grouping options. If you want to develop customized CRM solutions, the cost of this module will start from $10000. 

    Analytics module

    Another essential feature for sales is analytics, given a diagram or dashboard. To group and filter information, there have to be drop-down menus with the submenus on it. For precise data marking, there can also be implemented color listing feature. If you choose to create a custom CRM, the analytics module cost will start from $5000.

    Forecasting & planning module

    While working with leads, sales managers need to add new goals, leave reminders, define strategies, add individual plans, and assign a capable sales team member to each target. That’s why without planning and forecasting features, custom CRM for sales will be useless. To build CRM from scratch for this planning and forecasting of goals and tasks will cost $5000 and more.

    For Customer Support

    Other groups of managers are customer success representatives, who are responsible for clients’ satisfaction from the product. A custom CRM for them will be a useful tool in communicating with clients via calls, emails, live chats, messages, etc. Here are the modules needed for support managers in using CRM.

    Help Desk module

    The primary need for support managers is to receive all user’s request to answer them shortly. The best option from custom CRM will be the inbuilt integration with email services, social network messengers, and the ability to receive calls. With the advanced CRM customer, success managers need to be able to create tickets or tasks and assign them to the responsible manager. The cost of this module will start from $10000.

    Knowledgebase module

    Support managers have to be keen on every detail of the product they are working on, so having quick access to the information is another advantage custom CRM may give. CRM architecture for this type of operation can cost $5000 and more.

    Service Analytics module

    Similar to marketing specialists and sales, support managers need to have stats in their CRM where they could collect and combine data from all sources: tickets, calls, emails, and social media channels. It is difficult to say how much does it cost to build a CRM system with this module, but the cost will start from $8000.

    CRM Development Stages

    Similar to any project development, the stages for programming on-premise CRM are next:

  • Idea planning & prototyping. It is the most critical stage for understanding the strategy of this software’s future project and business goals. In this stage, the developer needs to find how to create a CRM that will fit all the clients’ needs and have a clear image of the final project.
  • UI/UX design. Usually, developers know how to build a CRM system from scratch, but they also need to have a clear vision and usability of the specific final product. In this stage, the work is focused on how the client will use all the features and how understandable and unique they will be.
  • Product programming. According to customized needs, the backend and frontend teams launched the programming stage. To create a custom CRM, the team needs to integrate tools the business already uses for other tasks.
  • A/B testing, bug fixing. There is always a time to fix the errors and find problematic scenarios in the system running. Testing the CRM helps to define the weaknesses of the system and stabilize its work.
  • Launch & maintenance. The final stage in the development process also needs some time for integration with previous CRM or transferring the data to a new system. Also, it is crucial to teach the team how to use appropriately new custom CRM.
  • According to the given data, the approximate custom CRM cost starts from $50k. But it depends on your type of business, team size, and additional requirements.

    Custom СRM Software Development by Amcon Soft

    Building CRM is a complicated process that required dedicated professionalism and experience. Our team received a request to develop online booking system for tour operators with an integrated custom CRM system. We were asked to develop a platform for searching the nearest activities within the selected area. Our main task was to create a convenient platform for both users and managers where users may select, filter, search, schedule appropriate excursions. With the help of custom CRM system managers may check the incoming requests, set it following the requested schedule, manage the bookings itself.

    We build CRM from scratch on the web to manage bookings by managers, and separately created the iOS and Android apps for customers which send the data about bookings to the CRM. Managers can set up alerts and reports in advance and trigger them as often as we want to. The CRM allows to insert bookings into customers calendars and keep them up to date. The real business benefit comes from being able to do this for all calendar services through one API. Managers don’t have to build and maintain integrations to all of the calendar services customers could be using. All data is gathered and stored in a custom CRM system.

    Read full case study: Online booking platform

    We at AMCONSOFT know how to build a CRM for various business needs. If you are puzzled with the features you need for your own software, and CRM cost, contact us, and we will assist with advice.

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