10+ Cons of Built-in CRM: Why Businesses Should Think Twice

CRM is a technology that helps your company interact with potential clients, existing customers, and past clients. Essentially, CRM has become a vital tool for businesses of all sizes, helping in managing customer interactions and information.

Customer Relationship Management is the backbone of your business. It helps your business track clients’ purchase history, improve customer experience, and build long-term relationships. By incorporating customer data, CRM helps you to build stronger customer relationships and promote overall productivity.

Despite all these pros, there are still cons that your business can face because of Built-in CRMs.

In this essay, we will go through the cons of built-in CRMs, letting you decide whether it’ll be beneficial for your business or not.

A Quick Look at the Cons of Built-in CRM

While CRM offers many advantages, there are underlying disadvantages to it

Limited Features and Capabilities

Your business’s Built-in CRMs only offer basic features and may not offer the specific or more advanced attributes.

Many Built-in CRMs only offer:

• Storing customer information
• Only recording limited interactions

It helps you work with all the features already incorporated, but doesn’t have the capacity for the features that may be introduced later, like predictive analytics or an automated system. The later introduced traits have to be incorporated after the update, but the built-in CRMs fail to update.

Shopify’s built-in CRM provides basic customer data but lacks automated lead scoring, in-depth reporting, and omnichannel communication.

Less Scalability for Growing Businesses

Scalability is an important factor for a business, but some CRMs are built only for a small scale. These CRMs often buckle under pressure when the customer base grows, and there is no scalability option for the CRMs.

Your growing business may require

• Diversity of users from different departments
• Custom workflow according to the needs
• Tackling large datasets
• Consolidation of multiple third-party applications

Built-in CRMs fail to fulfill these demands, which may lead you to migrate to standalone CRMs, which are expensive and super complex to implement.

Limited Integration Options

Another limitation of the Built-in CRM is a lack of flexibility, leading to integration problems. Standalone CRMs are designed to connect to a wide range of tools effortlessly, like

• Email marketing platforms
• Finance and accounting
• E-commerce platforms

Your Built-in CRMs are only locked into their parent software and don’t have free access to the external devices. The common failures due to limited integration options, your Built-in CRM can face are

• Issues with data quality and inconsistency
• Limited resources for development
• Cost associated with integration.

Less customization

Built-in CRMs are created for your wide audience, making them generic and causing users to overlook customization options.

Your built-in CRM is unable to provide more customization options as it totally relies on the already integrated system. There are no chances of an update or customization according to what your business needs later on. The fewer flexibility factors make built-in CRMs more deficient in customization.

Whereas the standalone CRM introduces you to the attributes of personalizing your business according to its analysis of customer experience.  It has tailored workflows and dashboards.

CRM Security Issues

As the built-in CRM stores the contact details of your customers, it is very crucial for your business security. Built-in CRM also lacks backup options. Any breach in customer data can lead to severe results like legal action from your clients or damage to your company’s reputation.

The concerns may include,

• Unsanctioned access
• Data violation
• Malware attacks
• Resistance to regulations like GDPR

When your business relies on built-in CRMS, you are basically handing over your client’s personal details, their transaction credentials to the parent platform provider. If your business’s main platform suffers an outage, it will result in CRM being inaccessible.

Vendor Lock-in

If your company has a built-in CRM, there are many chances you’ll be confined to the vendor, and so your customers are also ought to be bound to your business. This may happen due to a restriction issue, a deep integration issue, high switching costs, and also due to contractual demands.

Vendor lock-in makes your business less flexible, paralyzing your chances of growth and forever depending on the vendor. This is the reason your clients also become dependent on your business.

CRM Adoption Issues

Users prefer systems that are easy to use, customizable according to their needs, and instinctive. Standalone CRM invests more in being user-friendly, making itself tailored according to business needs. Whereas built-in CRMs lack at providing such features.

The Built-in CRM’s outdated designs may frustrate your employees, lowering adoption rates. When users don’t find the system more accessible or lack the option for personalization, they may resist the adoption. This resistance can threaten your business in many ways like, lack of engagement, lowered productivity, and giving a competitive disadvantage.

CRM Updates limitations

As discussed previously, the built-in CRM lacks flexibility. This rigidity is due to less compatibility, a lowered update rate, and insufficient capacity. Integrating Built-in CRM deprives your business of updates according to ongoing trends. Many vendors tend to improve the primary tools like ERP while ignoring the CRMs.

The advanced updates, like AI-driven analytics or multi-channel automations, are usually missing, which makes your company less effective for in-depth analysis.

This deprivation can lead your business to lower productivity, less customer engagement, and overall, make your company fail in many aspects.

Over-dependence on CRM

Although CRM is a very helpful system, completely relying on it may induce many difficulties for your company. The major issues it may develop are,

• lack of cooperation towards the customer
• Low consumer interaction
• Missing out important details
• Reduction of the human element in customer relationships

Such issues can make your business suffer from a lack of genuine human connection, which will result in less customer satisfaction, and your business may suffer revenue loss.

Long-term inefficiency

Built-in CRM can result in long-term inefficiency for several reasons, like an imperfect strategic approach, low response from customers, poor management of data, and failure to integrate with other systems.

Integrating a CRM without any clear goals and knowledge can also cause long-term inefficiency, and by then your business would have already experienced damages like wastage of time, hidden finance, and poor customer experience.  A CRM is not only software, but is a strategic tool; if not suitable for a certain business, it won’t be integrated effectively.

Hidden cost

Overall, built-in CRM may seem cost-effective, suitable for your financial budget. But the expenses that your business has to face after its implementation might not be visible at the start. The expenses may include upgrading costs, migration costs, wages for hiring developers to make the system custom, and loss of productivity.

The system that apparently seems so “fair” and “cheap” dwells on such hidden finance greatly.

Accumulated Data

Your CRM system can generate an overwhelming amount of data by collecting from various sources, like your customer credentials or details, interactions of your customers across different platforms, like social media, emails, and other web pages. This overwhelming amount of data remains unsorted as it is time-consuming and difficult to manage.

Built-in CRMs don’t have such right tools, which makes it difficult to interpret the data.

Complexity and Learning Curve

As mentioned before, the Built-in CRMs your business is employing may seem clunky and hard to understand for the employees. The employees may not adjust to the complexities of your CRMs, which can result in poor performance from employees. It can take time for your employees to learn the complexities and the unclear concepts of CRM.

This change in learning curve can have a negative impact on your employees, resulting in less efficiency.

Conclusion

To put the thoughts in conclusion, although built-in CRM has pros like improving customer retention, enhancing sales forecasting. They are attractive for small businesses or businesses with low investment.  However, the drawbacks like long-term inefficiency and limited features outweigh the short-term pros that your business can face.

The drawbacks may include fewer connectivity options to different tools, a limited range of features, and fewer opportunities for personalization. Built-in CRM also consumes a lot of hidden charges, which may seem insignificant, but are major. Your business may experience lock-in with its vendor, as they may be bound to the parent system. Moreover, the built-in CRM has outdated technology, which won’t let your business connect to your customers in real time according to updates. The complexity of the system makes your employees unable to perform well, leading to poor results.

In today’s competitive environment, where customer satisfaction is the top priority, implementing built-in CRMs may hold your business back. A business that aims to grow, scale well should keenly focus on the CRM they are choosing. Choosing the right CRM isn’t a technology tool but is a strategic approach that can make your business perform well.