The Differences Between Customizable CRM
and Configurable CRM

Does your CRM have an architecture or structure that can respond quickly to changes? When the needs and demands of your customers change, can you respond?

Organizations are under increasing pressure to respond to change quickly. Changes in the competitive landscape and the evolution of a marketplace can wreak havoc with a CRM system if it is not poised for changes.

CRM that is poorly implemented or is not built on a modular architecture can hinder business agility and response to change. That lowers customer satisfaction which decreases overall corporate performance.

Although there are well over 100 different CRM vendors, some with multiple CRM solutions, it may soon become apparent to you that none of the solutions will accommodate your needs “out-of-the-box.” Most CRM vendors claim that their solution is customizable. That sounds great! But what does it really mean? The word “customizable” is used to mean quite a range of things.

Let’s take a look at what can be meant by “customizable” software. Loosely, it means “tailored to meet the unique business requirements of your business.” In reality, there are a large variety of changes that may or may not be able to be made to a given software to adapt it to your needs. In the end, you may have to adapt or mold your enterprise software to meet the requirements of your CRM software which becomes expensive and awkward at best.

In order to understand “customization,” you must also understand “configuration.” Configuration changes which can be made to CRM software by most vendors include:

– Creating rules that make the system behave in the manner you want and produce the information you desire. This includes report filters, escalation levels, and various business rules.

– Changing fields to capture required information. This includes adding fields, changing field names, or adding or changing field values.

– Formatting changes to the way elements look on the computer screen. This is basic stuff like which order various field appear in and how they look in terms of font (colors, bold, italic).

These things are often referred to as “customization” but are built-in configurational options that take only quick tweaks to the CRM software. True customization demands the time and expertise of a programming technician and the understanding of how the CRM software will interface with other software at your company. A business analyst may even be necessary to create the ideas to customize your CRM solution to address end-to-end busienss processes. Two examples of situations that demand these costly customizations are:

– Scripting logic to drive process or workflow. If you want an internal notice automatically sent to the account manager handling the account when that account is put on hold, you will need a programmer to handle that logic scripting.

– Managing the application programming interface to enable integration with other applications or systems. If you are not using an industry-standard application (like accounting packages), then you will need customization for the two softwares to communicate.

Software that is built on a modular architecture, such as Cynergy Software, is both more easily customizable and more configurable that total solutions. By purchasing several interfacing modules you are more likely to need less customization and configuration. And the changes you need may only be to one module which will make them much more cost effective.