No two businesses are the same, nor do they share the exact same problems.
Your business processes, your goals, and your approach to growth are the basis of what you bring to the market.
At the center of it is your CRM (or it should be) – the workflow-hub for different teams that support your vision and allow you to put your customer in the center of your growth strategy.
Whether you have just started on your CRM journey or have been working on your strategy for years, the key to customer centricity is to continuously evolve as the market and customers' needs evolve. Customer expectations are high. Adapting to new channels, touchpoints and strategies faster is a strong competitive advantage.
But how do you get there? 🤷
Your starting point is the customer journey: map out the experiences you want them to have with your company.
And whatever that journey looks like, you need to support it through your internal processes, strategies and solutions. To make sure you can achieve that, customizing your CRM (and any other) solution can make a real difference.
Making your CRM your own through customization
First, tailoring your CRM to fit your business will help you become more productive.
Addressing specific challenges with tailored workflows or automating repetitive tasks will help save time for the most important activities in your company. And you can build upon a robust standard solution like SuperOffice CRM, jumpstarting your success.
That was the case for Sharp UK. They needed a CRM that could be molded to their processes. With a complex B2B portfolio, they looked for a CRM that could grow with them, being flexible enough to fit into their specific needs. By choosing SuperOffice they were able from the very first days, which proved especially important during COVID-19, when everyone needed to adapt.
Like Sharp, a lot of companies look for a CRM solution that can drive productivity seamlessly with existing processes. Integrating existing solutions and customizing the CRM helps enabling unique customer experiences, an important source of competitive advantage.
Such is the case of Vitec AB in Sweden. They turned to SuperOffice to support their goal of providing unparalleled customer service. How are they achieving this? With customized self-service options that allow their support agents to spend time helping customers with more complex questions.
Making SuperOffice your own is a starting point for ensuring that your team uses the system. When people find useful information easily, see their templates and processes supported, then chances are they will adopt the solution and use it every day.
Getting started with customizations
As in all things CRM, the success of customization is a joint effort of business and technology.
Start with your business processes. Set a clear goal on how you’d like to improve it. Let’s say you want to improve the experience for a user group in your organization. You want them to have valuable information at hand to improve their readiness when talking to customers. And different user groups need different information.
Once you know what you want to achieve, the next step is understanding how. That means getting to know the possibilities of your CRM system. What is possible? How can you achieve what you want to do? What do you need to do?
At SuperOffice we have always believed that companies should be able to take charge of their own CRM solution. That your own people should be able to configure and adjust a lot of your solution without having to call upon your IT department or a consultant every time you want a change.
This focus on sustainable customization tools is a way to ensure flexibility and low cost of ownership.
And this is why we want to put a spotlight on the possibilities of low-code and no-code tools, sharing with you a few examples of what is possible to do with such technologies.
Low-code and no-code: empowering business with technology
As their name states, low-code and no-code require little or no involvement from software developers. These tools enable what are now called citizen developers to use visual interfaces, drag and drop menus and other solutions to create, change, and customize applications.
With low-code and no-code technology you can use visual tools, drag-and-drop menus and other alternatives to create and customize applications.
Low-code and no-code (LCNC) tools are here to stay. According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of new applications will use this technology, a big leap from less than 25% in 2020.
The growth in LCNC is not by accident. Consider the sudden need for digitalization driven by COVID-19, the scarcity of software developers, and the “great resignation” phenomenon – and you have the perfect context for this popularity. But more than that, LCNC became popular because it offers real benefits to businesses, such as:
- Faster time-to-market: by adopting no-code tools, you need less time to define, test, implement, deploy, and get value from a customization or a new application.
- Less complexity: customizations can easily become too complex, needing too much effort from your team to make it work. With no-code, you get less complexity, and the possibility to tweak it as needed.
- Less maintenance: with standardized, already tested components, you will need to spend much less time on the maintenance side of things, allowing your software team to spend more time on creating value for your company. With visual tools, it is also easier to onboard new collaborators, spreading knowledge across the organization.
- Iteration: by using LCNC solutions you get to iterate faster, adjusting a workflow, or improving a specific area of your solutions as much as you need. You can also re-use components to prototype and speed development cycles.
⚡ Are you convinced by what LCNC technologies can do? See how you can use it in your SuperOffice CRM!
Most used no-code and low-code options in SuperOffice
The thing you should always have in mind when customizing a solution is: how can you make it sustainable?
With our sustainable customization strategy, we want customers to maintain and develop their own CRM solution as much as possible. It is no wonder, then, that we keep investing in no-code-low-code options, making them stronger and more flexible as recent technologies allow us.
Here are some examples of these customizations to inspire you:
See examples on how to customize your SuperOffice CRM
Looking for inspiration? Check out the webcast "Tailor SuperOffice to drive CRM Success" and see examples of customizations to help you do even more with your CRM solution.
Keep on adapting SuperOffice CRM as you grow
Driving CRM success is an ongoing, continuous effort that needs people, business processes and technology working together. To truly make your customer the center of your growth strategy requires adaptations, and your CRM needs to be flexible enough to allow you to keep growing and evolving.
Customizing your CRM can help you achieve a lot: from ensuring user adoption by catering to specific needs within your teams, to improving productivity and reducing manual tasks, there is a lot you can do.
And remember – the best way to start is by having a clear goal and understanding of your business processes. With that in mind, get to know the customization possibilities your solution offers or get help from our consultants to identify options.
Once you know what you want to achieve and how you can do it, go for it! And when you start customizing your solution, make sure to iterate it, keep improving on what you have, and create value quickly and constantly.
Tip: You can safely create your customizations in a test environment which mirrors your SuperOffice CRM configuration first. There you can test it and train users without risking any issues with your actual production data.
Whether you choose a low-code or no-code approach, feel like you can expand functionality with integrations or see the opportunity of creating your own custom application through APIs, we have the set of tools and experience you need to make the most out of your CRM.
Get in touch and let’s explore the best options for you.