Is your old CRM too expensive and not doing enough for you?

With further COVID-19 restrictions now in place across Ireland and the UK, having a good online, GDPR compliant business CRM in place is now a necessity.  A modern CRM is one that provides a secure distributed working model that makes working away from the office simple along with a wide selection of integrated applications.  Too many businesses are unsure of what are the best CRM solutions available but don’t want to find themselves unable to trade or purchasing a CRM that is not fit for purpose.

Problems with ‘old’ CRM’s

Many organisations invested in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications between 2000 and 2010.  These CRM’s were effectively second generation CRM applications – moving away from an on-premise CRM 1 system hosted on your own servers (client server or standalone) to a cloud based application licensed on a software as a service (SAAS) model.

The most successful of all these CRM 2 systems was Salesforce.com – it broke the ‘traditional’ model and established SAAS as the way forward.  Cloudtech implemented Salesforce.com for many of our original clients and they gained genuine business and financial benefit from using the product.

However – license costs for these CRM 2 products are typically still very high with limited features included (you have to pay extra to use other applications) and they are becoming difficult to administrate and update.  It may be that your own business is now feeling the pain of these expensive software licenses and are looking at a major cost of change?

New 3rd Generation integrated CRM’s

Over the last 2 years the third generation of CRM’s have been brought to market (what I’m calling CRM 3) and have rapidly gained market share.  If you would like to know more about CRM 3 then please click on the following link in order to book yourself onto a free interactive Introduction to CRM online workshop that we’re running next Tuesday 27th October between 10:00 and 12:00.

There are now several CRM 3 providers who have built suites of integrated business applications using the CRM application as the core – and who only charge a single low license fee no matter how many of the applications your business uses.

In the case of the Zoho One business suite there are over 40 applications that can be used – and they are all enterprise level quality systems!  Typically CRM 3 systems also built in GDPR compliance right from the start.

Our Clients are moving to new CRM’s

Cloudtech has now implemented the Zoho One business suite at many clients – with each one using the applications that are appropriate for their business needs and having a roadmap to replace their current products as and when the existing licenses come up for renewal.  This is saving them both time and money and general feedback is that their customers are also getting a better service.

We have clients from the following sectors who have recently moved onto the Zoho One platform – manufacturing, management services, administration services, accountancy, not for profit, retail, training, credit management, telephony, home fittings and construction.

Typically these clients have either had an ‘old’ CRM that has fallen into disuse and/or they have been using spreadsheets plus Office365, GSuite, Sage, Eventbrite, Survey Monkey, Mail Chimp, Drop Box, Zoom (or similar) to manage their business processes.  They were manually moving data between these (non-connected) applications and having problems with data quality, duplicate and corrupt data, delays when staff are unavailable as well as not being able to provide reports quickly.  Compliance with GDPR was very difficult to achieve with the data held in so many silo’s of information.  We also found a high level of end user frustration – they just didn’t have the right technology to do their work.

What to look for in a new CRM?

Using this suite of products provides a genuine 360degree view of the business and will allow you to make better decisions more quickly, communicate with and manage your teams more efficiently, improve security and compliance, reduce manual errors and avoid rework by automating repetitive tasks.  This will lead to a reduction in your costs and an increase in profitability.

Book onto the online CRM Introduction workshop

If some of this strikes a chord with you please feel free to attend next Tuesdays (27th October) free Introduction to CRM workshop.

It is running from 10:00 through to 12:00 and will be very interactive.

We’ll be using a genuine CRM system (no powerpoint or screen shots) and we’ll be encouraging attendees to ask questions and dig into the CRM with us in order to see what it can do for them.

I’d be very happy to discuss CRM 3 with you at any time – please call me on +353 866 044 820 if you have any questions.