Can your In-house System accelerate growth?

Many businesses believe that owning a customer facing application makes them a customer-centric organisation. They hastily embark on the CRM initiative by solving a specific 'current' problem, rather than having a holistic CRM approach towards customer-centricity. As the organization grows, newer problems arise and the application becomes more of a gridlock than an accelerator for progress.

Being a home-grown system, it further compels rework. This tangles maintenance, updating and training - taking the organization further away from customer-centricity and making them a victim of their own invention.

Have your organisation's CRM needs outgrown the in-house application?

The moment of truth, a reality check -

Can your home-grown CRM create a single view across all customer touch points, channels, applications and functions?
Can your system embrace newer media, add teams, geographies, etc. on the fly, without making any code change?
Does your system build on the foundation of best practices not only of your industry but also across industries and geographies?
Is your system able to implement unified TAT and comply with SLAs that span across multiple departments and systems?
Is the outcome of reports just data or information that provides actionable insights to facilitate better decision making?
Are you able to provide decision making with progressively evolving reporting engine support?
Are you able to maintain the application with high attrition in your IT staff?

The genesis of home-grown applications

Organizations aim to make their services or sales more efficient by building applications that lower response time and create a database of leads/ customers' likes, dislikes, investments, etc. As the number of customers increase manifold they invest more time and money into their application to make it cope with the new responsibilities. The puzzle becomes more confusing as the operations required from the in-house application grow complex, since it was originally designed only for a specific existing problem.

The exponential traffic growth at a customer support desk forces an organization to build a system for managing their service requests. To improve demand, a telemarketing group is set-up; however, leads are still missed, so a lead management system is also added.

With the growing volume of customers, servicing becomes more complicated, lead management more unpredictable and marketing expenditure is unknown. The in-house application starts to cripple the progress instead of supporting it!

In-house systems may meet your past/ current needs, but do they provide any added advantage for surpassing future needs?

	In-house CRM	Commercial CRM
Cost Aspect	Low to start, high in the long run	Options available - SaaS and On Premise
Time to Implement	Delayed ROI	Instant ROI
Functionality	Replicates the current scenario	Comprehensive
Security	Less secure	Best-in-class security
Best Practices	Organisation's practices	Across industries & geographies practices
Application shortcoming	Risks are internal	Onus of Commercial CRM provider
Maintenance	Dedicated team to support	Commercial CRM provider's responsibility
Enhancement	Rigid structure	Flexible & scalable
Upgrades	Internal responsibility	Commercial CRM provider's responsibility
Solution Approach	Current problem-based, more departmental in nature	Futuristic & versatile
Reporting Nature	Mostly operational MIS	Analytical and insightful
User Adoption	Low - usability & productivity features are missing	High - more productivity features with universal appeal
Documentation	One-time, seldom up-to-date	Comprehensive and up-to-date
Integration	Mostly stand-alone, weak Integration	Strong integration framework