Tag: WEB

Think it’s high time for you to switch to a great customer relationship management system to improve your business process? But don’t know how to choose the proper one and the technical partner who can help you with that? This CRM Customisation Guide has got you covered.

In short, the structure of this CRM guide is as follows:

What Is Customisation And What Are The Ways To Customize?

CRM or customer relationship management system is a great option for any modern business. When it comes to CRM customization, it means that you simply add new or altering existing CRM features to make it a better fit for the needs of every certain business. Instead of using numerous SaaS systems for every activity, you have a completely customized CRM solution.

There are different ways to customize, here are three most typical ones: 

1. Custom table grids: you adjust the table to your specific needs. For instance, you can move, reorder, delete, and manage column titles. Choose which columns go first, which you don’t need, determine how to display the dropdown menu.
2. Custom fields: you can add custom fields to the existing CRM software solution, to gather additional important information that default forms fail to allow.
3. Advanced custom settings: some specific features which are developed from scratch and added to the existing CRM system to meet your specific requirements. These may include custom dashboard widgets, custom menus, form layouts, opportunity lines, and etc. You can also create or modify workflows to run in accordance with the way your business works. In most cases, advanced custom settings include managing different API integrations.

Before we go further, interesting is to mention that you can meet both customiSe and customiZe and these words are the same term meaning the same. The only difference is that a word “customise” is used in a British way of spelling whilst Americans prefer “customize”.

Why Should You Consider Using A Customized CRM?

It’s for sure that you can hardly find two businesses that would have identical workflows or operations. Companies may use similar options, still, one business might need specific features tailored to its ultimate needs. So, you might want to create new functionality to help you efficiently explore the market, change your user interface and navigation methods to improve your customer relationships management. That’s why to take maximum the CRM has to offer, it should be either developed from scratch or fully customised. Of course, it’s great to have your solution developed from scratch, but not always it’s the best way to go. Intrigued, right? Consider the following: there are many benefits expert CRM customization has to offer, not to mention:

• It does not require a lot of investments
• It’s pretty fast to implement
• It caters to thousands of customers across a wide range of industries
• It can save you lots of human and time resources in the long run.

Basically, these are the most widespread cases when you need to customize the CRM system:

• You find a good CRM system, but it lacks some of the features you business would benefit from. For instance, you want to be able to track leads and engage proactively with your customers.
• You want to achieve a more closely fit with your organization’s industry
• You have a web accounting platform, but you need to generate quotes and place orders on the go.
• You need to better understand your customers, identify inactive clients and find out the reasons why they have become inactive.
• You want to automate the major everyday activities of your business.
• You want to improve your user engagement by personalizing and targeting messages and implementing several data distribution channels.
• You want to be able to set different privileges for your team members. Such security roles would help you manage your business in a more effective and secure manner.
• Your business needs extra options to improve data management.

Thus, to get many benefits which may help you win against your competitors, opt for a customised product. By the way, you can implement many customizations without developer agencies by using tools that are part of the particular service. There are many famous services which offer you such a possibility and now, we will reveal them.   

The Big Names In The CRM World

Today, there are a bunch of great customer relationship management systems available. When it comes to the big names in the CRM world, we have to mention the following ones: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Infusionsoft, HubSpot, Salesforce, ProsperWorks, FreeAgent CRM, and Base CRM.

Every of these services is unique in its ways, but all of them offer numerous customization options and come with the inbuilt optimisation tools. Moreover, they configure business demands, and have a proven experience in the area. Plus, every of the mentioned above solutions can be applicable to multiple industries.

What Should Any Good Customized CRM System Offer?

By default, any CRM platform helps businesses manage their workflows and control expenses. Plus, major CRM capabilities help businesses manage interactions with new and existing customers. However, there are many other technology features a good customised CRM solution can offer. Wondering which ones?

In general, any good customized CRM system does the following:

• Places the customer at the core of the company and its concerns.
• Keeps all data easily manageable, centralized, securely archived and linked to each other in an intuitive way.
• Assists sales, marketing, customer service technicians and admin personnel to become more efficient in their everyday activities.
• Retains customers by giving them a higher quality of service that is uniquely adapted to their needs.
• Helps you configure business rules and optimise your business process flows, setting all your activities and preferences to the way you need.

So, now you agree with us that you need a customised software. Wondering how to customise and who can help? Let’s find out more about that.

How To Customise And Avoid Common Mistakes?

The process is pretty simple and straightforward: you browse the reputable CRM solutions, check their reviews and CRM features, and finally find the one that fits your business the most. Once you’ve done that, you need to decide whether you want to customise by your own or address a professional development company. If you need the basic CRM features, for instance, marketing automation, consider choosing the company from the big list of best SRM systems. But if you decide to customise crm on your own, make sure you don’t make the common CRM customization mistakes.

Common Mistakes with CRM Customization:

• Your custom software is too complex and powerful: make sure that the solution you have meets all your business requirements, but doesn’t seriously overgo them. In this case, a too complex or a too powerful system will bring more harm than use as it will significantly lower your working processes.
• You have too many checkboxes: that can be too time-consuming as you will need to always put the
• Your system doesn’t show the parent fields in a child table: your employers will need to spend extra time on finding the parent fields upon adding the tables.

There are other common CRM mistakes you should try to avoid, so make sure to look for them before you decide to customize the CRM on your own.

Should you need something more specific and advanced, find a reputable IT partner and an expert CRM implementation. Luckily, there are many services which can help you with the SRM system customisation, for instance, Unicrew. We can customise your existing platform or create custom software solutions from scratch. Plus, we also offer CRM support services. No matter which industry you are involved in, we can deliver you the top-notch CRM software solution that will cater to the needs of your business.

The Bottom Line

There are dozens of reasons why you might want to customise your CRM software, but most likely you just want to find a solution that will help your business easily and effectively manage your workflows and sales cycle, keeping you ahead of competitors. And you have two ways to go: to find and use an already existing CRM customisable platform and customise it on your own or to ask a custom software development company to help you customize your business software.

What should I do to stimulate the business growth? With dozens of ready-to-use management software solutions out there, why should I opt for a bespoke business operations software? And how to find out that it’s the right time for my business to start thinking about the business operations software? How can business operations software streamline all of my website business operations and improve my business performance?

These are the most typical questions business owners ask themselves on a regular basis, right? Let’s try to find answers to all of them.

Basically, a good custom software platform is tend to improve your business operations and it saves time and money in the long run. We all know that. But, a bespoke business platform also takes time and money to be developed in the short run. So, how to find that you need a custom-made business solution and are there any bespoke solutions advantages apart from just cost savings?

We will check the main advantages a customer-centric software solution brings and you will be able to determine whether you need it for your business.

In short, a bespoke business operations software brings the following 7 advantages to your technology business:

1. Saves time and money by automating multiple business operations which usually require hours of work: Surprisingly, but that’s a fact: whilst it takes time and money to be developed, it brings time and money savings. You can optimize your business resources in a great way: your team members will spend fewer time on routine tasks, instead, all your business processes will be optimized and automated.
2. Keeps track of the day-to-day operations of your business: all your business management operations are managed and controlled within one platform. No more switching from one channel to another. You can keep, check, review and analyze all your documents and business important data within one platform.
3. Improves business operations: all operations and updated, optimized and always run without errors.
4. Improves Your Business’ Quality: you can now focus more on quality control rather than daily operations and activities. You can easily identify and correct errors and deficiencies, eliminate pitfalls and reduce risks.
5. Lives space for further development: by default, any bespoke software development team takes into consideration the future needs of your business, ensuring the bespoke software solution you get is sustainable and able to evolve with your needs over time.
6. Makes your customers happier: a customer-tailored software product is not only robust and straightforward, but also intuitive, user-friendly, and of course, effective.
7. Brings more profit and adds value: your custom software takes into account all of your business requirements and offers great customer experiences, and you have more happy customers, which lead to returning customers and novel customers. And therefore, due to the proper development process of your ultimate software product, you have the solution that adds value to your product and brings more profit.

The Bottom Line

With millions of software applications out there to stay competitive in our digital world you have to turn to custom software or, in other words, bespoke solutions. By default, bespoke solutions can bring at least seven ways to improve any business management system. The key advantages of bespoke software are that it brings cost and money savings to all of your projects, satisfies all your specific business requirements, helps you control and examine your day-to-day operations, and makes your customers happy, providing you with more profit and ways to grow. But to benefit at full, don’t forget that you need an experienced custom software development company. It’s crucial to find a great team of software developers, such as Unicrew that can deliver a top-notch software package for your ultimate business. We’ve already developed a lot of  software applications, both web based and desktop, and we can provide you with the shelf software that will make your business processes more transparent yet effective.

So, if you want to improve business operations and are at the moment looking for a bespoke software solutions provider, our application development company is here to help you. We’ve got the needed skills and resources to make your future product important to your customers.

P.S. If you are worrying when it’s the right time to opt for the bespoke software solutions, here’s an answer – right now. While you are just considering the possibility of turning to a bespoke software solution, your competitors are already taking advantage of these 7 benefits listed above.

The need for optimizing for the mobile-first index in Google grows apparent from day to day as more and more people use mobile devices to browse the Internet. That is why when it comes to having a decent ranking factor, we can’t stress enough to our customers the importance of having a beautiful mobile friendly website with a responsive design. Wondering which impact does that the mobile-first index have on your app?

Undeniably, with the Google’s mobile-first index, to remain competitive within Google search engine, your internet resource has to be ready for mobile-first indexing. So, do you need to make some serious changes to your site to accommodate the new ways customers are engaging with your online business? Of course, from the first glance, it’s easy to get distracted with everything mobile-first index features. But don’t panic, this post will teach you how to prepare your business for that.

In short, in this article, we will cover the following: 

So, let’s dive in. 

What Is “Mobile-First Indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing means that the mobile content is indexed and used for showing listings to both desktop and mobile users. To put it simpler, Google uses the mobile version of the web as the primary search engine index. So, we have to admit that mobile rankings do matter. Surprisingly, but it’s a fact: today a smooth mobile experience is critical even for desktop sites.  

How Will Your Business Benefit From “Mobile-First Indexing”?

In fact, being in the Google’s mobile-first index will bring a huge number of advantages to your business, with the most important ones: 

• You are shown first in the mobile search results: your mobile pages site is shown prior to those ones, which are not in the mobile-first index.
• Increased traffic: the bigger numbers of people see your service, the greater traffic you may count on.
• Increased time on page: if your site is well optimized and a fun to use, your customers will likely to spend more time on it.
• The reduced bounce rate of both web and mobile users: responsive mobile sites deliver an optimized browsing experience and a two-for-one value. Indeed, since the design of the sites with a great, responsive web design has been changed to perfectly fit the size of the mobile user’s screen, such sites do rank well on both mobile and desktop.  So, users adore your site, no matter whether they are visiting it via mobile device or a Mac.
• Boost on sales: the more happy customers you’ve got, the bigger sales you might count on.
• It might be said without exaggeration, if your website is not ready for mobile-first index, remember: another potential customer giving money to your progressive web competitor.
• Mobile-first indexing: How to find out whether your site is in?
• To check if your mobile app or a desktop version app is now in the Google mobile first index, you will need to do several things, not to mention:
• First of all, scan your internet resource for flaws. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, for instance, will help you reveal all of your site’s red flags for concern. If your mobile and desktop versions are green, it’s ok. If any of them is red, consider optimizing it.
• Second, have a look at your log files. If you see that there is an increase in smartphone Googlebot activity, your product is in.
• Mobile-first index: How to implement and what should your technical team know?
• Getting your websites ready for the mobile-first index is not that easy. There are several things your team should do to rank well on Google with the mobile-first index.

Mobile-First Index: How To Implement And What Should Your Technical Team Know?

Unicrew has handpicked the basic steps for your technical team to follow:

1. Get started with performing Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and checking Google’s recommendations on how to improve your site.
2. Get all of your content ready for mobile viewing. Just for the record, the Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a great developers tool, which can also help you visualize what your mobile version of the site looks like and what your customers view.
3. Add only relevant (related to your product) high quality content to your site and make sure that you have the same content on a page-by-page basis from your desktop to your mobile site.
4. Ensure your internet resource has a responsive web design. If not, consider switching over to a responsive theme. Luckily, today, there are numerous open source responsive themes for popular CMS, such as WordPress, for example. You can also ask for professional Unicrew custom development help. We will find the best suiting theme for your business and will help you transfer everything from your irresponsive site.
5. Structure all your data in a beautiful, comprehensive way. Ensure that metadata is present on both versions of the site and your site’s mobile content and desktop content is the same and the URLs within the structured data are updated to your mobile version on the mobile pages. 
6. Improve the mobile page load speeds. Currently, the page load speed should be 1-2 seconds (yes, the lower, the better). Note that even when some of your mobile pages fail to load fast due to heavy graphics, you should make them speed optimized as possible.
7. Eliminate Flash. Instead of Flash, which takes a lot of time to render, consider using HTML5 and JavaScript.
8. Find a good hosting. Indeed, it’s critical to make sure that you have a decent hosting provider who can easily cope with the potentially increased crawl rate.

The Bottom Line

Anyway, to gain a competitive advantage among modern technology businesses, applying “mobile-first indexing” techniques to your internet service, whether it’s a mobile-friendly site or a desktop app, is of paramount importance. So, make sure that your application is in the Google mobile first index. Should your ultimate site already have a responsive design, you just need to focus on your user experience. And we kindly remind you, Unicrew is a great customer-centric application development company, which can deliver A-level apps which will be ready for the mobile-first index regardless of the version of your site.

To seize the opportunities ahead, businesses must go beyond sensors. Definitely, they need all-in-one marketing automation software including Big Data, in-built reporting and analytics capabilities, artificial intelligence, and social media. This article will tell why marketing automation is important. We will reveal major benefits and possible pitfalls an automated marketing campaigns platform features.

But before we jump into today’s post, let’s hit the basics first: What is automated marketing? 

Introduction To Marketing Automation

Marketing automation programs are special programs, which can automate your regular activities, such as sending emails, managing leads, social media activities, and what is very important, they allow to collect various marketing data along with the new information about your customers, in other words, to get proper analytical data. For example, you can automate not only email sending but also the whole process of email marketing . There are a number of other everyday activities, which you can automate, saving you both time and money. In fact, you can even include a live chat or an AI-driven chatbot into your software.

While marketing automation software helps to automate specific steps out of your routine, the all-in-one marketing solution usually offers a combination of marketing functionality in one holistic solution.

Marketing Automation Software Comparison

Today, there are dozens of both open source marketing automation systems and their paid versions. Typically, the open source solution comes with a defined set of basic features while the paid one includes customization and some industry-leading functionality.

Looking for the best marketing automation software for small business? HubSpot, Marketo, ConnectWise, Autotask, and Salesforce are some of the big names in the sales and marketing automation software industry.  

Don’t want to use the already-made solutions? Have a need in a custom tool, which is integrated with different API integrations? Consider developing your ultimate inbound marketing product by specialists.

Why To Use All-In-One Marketing Automation: Pros And Cons

Without doubts, marketing automation software certainly opens the doors to a lot of opportunities but also to many challenges. Below, we will closer regard both of them. So, let’s get started.

Key Benefits Of A Marketing Automation System:

• Enhanced productivity – you can get more done in less time. Automate common activities, spend less efforts on performing regular tasks.
• Consolidated data –  single source for all your reports, analytics, social media engagement, planning campaigns, and other valuable data. Easily compare all your data from multiple platforms and benefit from data-driven decisions.
• Solid time savings – arrange your time in a proper way, simultaneously plan and launch several campaigns, both web and mobile marketing.
• Accurate customer relationship management  – the majority of modern all-in-one marketing platforms have a convenient way to keep track of a contact’s behavior through multiple marketing channels. Never lose sight of your leads again. Keep all data about your customers in a well-structured manner, analyze your customers and their needs in a snap.  
• Cost efficiency for big companies  save money you spend by managing your campaigns in a fast manner, optimizing your staff, and making changes.

And now once we have talked about benefits the all-in-one marketing automation software can bring, it is of vital importance to take a closer look at all possible cons it might feature.

Top Cons Against Your all-in-one Marketing Software Automation:

• Too complicated. Yes, that’s the first thing we have to mention. Indeed, even when it comes to the best marketing automation platforms, there’s always a risk of setting up too many automated campaigns.
• Time-consuming. Yes, you read this right: marketing automation takes time to set up and to manage. In other words, it’s not just send and forget.
• Too expensive. Major sales and marketing automation tools have rather high mandatory kickstart fees. And very often you have to pay for a functionality you do not need.
• Needs customization. Each solid automated marketing platform needs customization and assistance of professional developers. Needless to add, if your marketing software automation platform has been customized for your business needs or better, created from scratch in a proper way in the long run, it won’t be too expensive, too complicated or too time-consuming for you. On the contrary, you are likely to embrace your company’s potential.

The Bottom Line

Thus, these are the most widespread pros and cons of all automated marketing tools. Still, after weighing the above four criteria against using automated marketing platforms, it becomes obvious that a good, feature-packed yet elegant digital marketing automation tool still can bring you more benefits than harm, especially if you find a good IT partner that could greatly customize it according to your needs. In fact, using a well-crafted automated marketing platform has become a necessity both for a small business, and big one. That’s not hype. It’s the new business reality.

Still not convinced? Here is one more reason to get a robust, customizable all-in-one marketing platform: your competitor has probably already started using it. So, don’t stay behind, contact Unicrew and benefit from all advantages a smart automated marketing platform tailored to your business needs has to offer.

Still having doubts? Take a peek at our case studies to better comprehend how we have already helped other businesses.