Why Your CRM Needs to
be Customized

Charlie Spaneas
What is CRM Customization?
CRM customization is the process of adding or modifying CRM features to fit the way you do business. Setting up your CRM to fit your processes increases user adoption, internal efficiency, and sales. Creating a custom CRM falls into three general categories.
Types of Customization
With so many CRM software choices, it’s often difficult to determine what level of customization your business needs. So how do you determine the level of customization that’s right for your organization? There are three main levels.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Advanced-Level CRM Customization
Advanced customization to 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 will also need to perform various testing of QA, regression, and analysis.
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. You will need some type of customization. Even if it’s 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 organization and how specific your needs are. However, you won’t need to build a custom CRM from scratch.
Key Areas to Focus on Customization
You may need to leverage custom integration with non-CRM tools and services. This allows you to pull in pertinent data generated outside the system. For example, integrating your CRM with accounting or ERP software.
Finally, having this custom data on your desktop will not be enough. The custom application should also be available on your CRM mobile app.
Foster Increased System Usage
User Adoption
Benefits of Customizing your CRM
- 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