Prototyping in Software Development

by CRMDigital

 

Prototyping in Software Development:

Prototyping in software development is an important step as it involves creating the initial stage of a primary version of a software application. It evaluates the functionality and design before creating the final product. This is similar to how an architect plans the layout of a house, sketches it on rough paper, and then drafts a blueprint after making necessary changes. The prototype version allows designers to find and fix problems early in the design process, leading to a better-finished product. This is an initial step to ensure that the software meets the requirements of the user as intended.

 

Types of Prototyping in Software Development:

There are different types of prototypes, such as low-fidelity prototypes that focus on the overall functionality of the software and high-fidelity prototypes that are more detailed and closely resemble the final product.

  1. Throwaway Prototyping: This is also known as low-fidelity modeling or rapid prototyping because once the required data has been gathered, it is quick and easy to build a model that can be quickly discarded. It is useful in the early stages of development when design specifications are continually modified according to the requirements of the application. Throwaway prototyping makes creating models that can be thrown away after using simple and fast.
  2. Evolutionary Prototyping: Evolutionary prototyping is a way of creating a prototype that involves making changes and improvements over time as more information becomes available. This method allows flexibility for the team to make changes and improvements to the prototype as the project progresses ensuring that the final product meets the requirements of the stakeholders. In other words, the prototype evolves over time.
  3. Incremental Prototyping: This is a process for creating products that call for building several usable prototypes that are gradually integrated to create the final product. With each iteration, the team meets specific requirements and improves the previous version, providing flexibility and adaptability throughout the development process. Instead of making changes all at once, this approach allows for incremental adjustments for a more refined final product
  4. User Interface Prototyping: User interface prototyping is a type of prototyping that specifically focuses on creating a graphical user interface (GUI) for software. This strategy’s primary goal is to produce a design that is user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and simple to use. Designers and developers can better comprehend how users will interact with the software and spot potential problems or areas for improvement by building an interface prototype. This kind of prototyping can guarantee that the finished product has an easy-to-use user interface, improving the user experience in general.
  5. Simulation Prototyping: This technique entails building a model of the software that replicates its performance and behavior in an actual setting. Before the software is released, this kind of prototype helps test its functionality and find any possible problems. Deliver it in an easy-to-understand tone.
  6. Exploratory Prototyping: This type of prototyping is an experimental approach that involves creating a prototype without a specific end goal in mind. This technique can result in unexpected findings that can be incorporated into the finished product and are useful for exploring new ideas and concepts.

 

0101 Experts will Take Care of It:

 

0101 DigitAll lab offers top-notch prototyping services that are customized to your requirements, whether you need a proof of concept or a fully functional prototype. Our team of experts excels at providing tailored solutions that suit your unique needs while addressing complicated issues and workflow bottlenecks. We’re dedicated to offering efficient, trustworthy, and reasonably priced services that produce excellent outcomes. We shall help you turn your ideas into reality. Get in touch with us to discover how we can assist you in making your vision a reality.

CRM Automation for Efficient Business Operations in 2023

by CRMUncategorized


CRM Automation: Strategize Business Operations:

Efficiency is often the biggest obstacle for companies trying to flourish in the market. By increasing efficiency, companies can streamline their procedures and cut down on wasted time. Thus, the quicker the production, the greater will be the efficiency and reliability, which in turn can provide them with a competitive advantage and help grab the market faster. Ultimately leading to greater success for the company.

Businesses can save time by automating marketing, sales, and customer support duties so they can concentrate on more crucial jobs that need human attention. CRM automation is one of the approaches to automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. This increases productivity and enables businesses to make better use of their resources.

According to a report by Markets and Markets, the adoption of CRM automation by businesses is on the rise due to the benefits it offers, such as simplifying sales, marketing, and customer service processes, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth. The report predicts that the global CRM automation market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4% during the forecast period, reaching a value of USD 23.1 billion by 2026.

 

CRM Automation Project Strategy:

  1. Identify your business needs and goals: Before implementing CRM automation in your business, it is important to identify your specific business needs and goals. This will enable you to understand how CRM automation can benefit your business and what you aim to achieve through its implementation.
  2. Select the right CRM system for your needs: To select the appropriate CRM system, evaluate the available options and choose a platform that matches your company’s needs, scope, and budget. Consider researching and comparing CRM software to find the best fit for your business, and look for options designed specifically for service businesses. Here is a list of the best CRMs that are available in the market for service businesses.
  3. Define your processes, workflows, and data requirements: Establishing the procedures for gathering, managing, and utilizing customer data in the CRM system is essential. This involves defining your business processes, workflows, and data requirements to ensure that the CRM system is optimized for your specific needs.
  4. Set up and automate your sales funnel, lead nurturing, and lead acquisition: To streamline lead management and customer interactions, it is important to set up and automate your sales funnel, lead nurturing, and lead acquisition processes. This can be achieved by utilizing custom fields, templates, and automated workflows within the CRM system.
  5. Train your team and continuously review and refine your setup: To ensure your staff is utilizing the CRM system to its fullest potential, provide them with training and support. Continuously evaluate the CRM automation configuration to ensure it is meeting the specific requirements of your company.

Streamline your CRM Automation with 0101:

As a certified Salesforce partner, 0101, is equipped with the knowledge and experience to streamline your sales and marketing procedures, ultimately leading to a better customer experience. We excel in lead generation, deal closing, and revenue growth through our proven lead nurturing procedures and sales funnels. With our guidance, you can gain valuable insights into your target market’s behavior, preferences, and demands, enabling you to make informed marketing and sales decisions. To ensure your success, do refer to the Dos and Don’ts of CRM for additional guidance on optimizing your customer relationship management strategies. Our approach will elevate your business to the next level.

Why do businesses need CRM and what are its benefits?

by CRM

Why do businesses need CRM and what are its benefits?

CRM can be a way to stay in constant touch with customers while reducing the manual efforts that a business has to put in. There are a lot of reasons why a business needs CRM. Being a cloud based system, you can access it via the internet from anywhere and any device in the world. The kind of organization it brings in, you might forget your best friend’s birthday but it will remind you of the tasks and important things needed doing. CRM is not just for handling customers but also to automate and streamline various repetitive processes. Partnering with 0101 offers a lot on table in including CRM for your business and here we list some of them:

Sales, marketing, service and commerce teams have never been so closely knitted before. CRM allows this fostering of inter-departmental teams which is crucial for the success of any business. Information and updates from all the teams are stored in a centralized database which makes it easier to share between the teams and work as a single unit. As a result, customers will go through a seamless and consistent customer experience while the business thrives.

As we said before, CRMs are not just for better customer experience. They also enable the automation of monotonous and error-prone tasks and puts them on a speed track. This will also help shift your staff’s focus on other important work. To name a few automation tools: Workflow Rules, Chatbots, Macros, Lead and Case Assignments, Routing, Flows and Follow-up comms.

  • Sales Automation: Various CRM Sales automation tools provide features like Workflows to streamline sales processes, Email scheduling, Proposal Reminders to push a sale through to the finish line, Lead Management to manage the influx of leads, automated creation of leads and tasks, CPQ to configure price and quote, Lead forecasting.
  • Marketing Automation: CRM Marketing automation tools provide features like Automated Email/Digital/Social media marketing, Marketing cloud intelligence to action on marketing data and KPIs, Account engagement to unite marketing and sales for B2B marketing, Advertising automation, Content Management, Loyalty Management.
  • Service Automation: CRM Service automation tools provide features like dedicated console to boost agent productivity, live agent to enable customers chat with a representative through any channel, Knowledge articles which is embedded into the console, Omni Routing enables the automatic routing of cases, leads or other works to the most appropriate and available agent, streamline feedback in one connected system.

 

CRM platforms are ever evolving and they enable businesses to interact with customers on various channels. To overcome the customer-facing challenges, they integrate with other services through which current and potential leads and customers can engage. For example, Salesforce offers Virtual Remote Assistant which helps the agents walk the customers through the process and Hubspot offers Video integrations Vidyard to send memorable and personalized sales and and marketing videos to track engagement.

Best CRMs offer you the tools necessary to build reports and dashboards and report on the metrics and KPIs that matter the most to the business. With all the data that is pulled in by CRM, it doesn’t make sense if you can’t analyze it and fetch insights, does it? These insights can help a business identify the key areas of impact and make data-driven decisions, identify areas of opportunity and growth and create better customer experiences. From a customer's point of view, this data can give them personalized preferences as well as give them a nudge to decide whether or not to go with the purchase.

Because of a pool of automation tools CRM provides, routine tasks are expedited and handled automatically which frees up agents’ time who can utilize this time to attend to other tasks. This makes sure that there won’t be any errors in handling those tasks. Businesses can deeply understand the needs of their customers, purchase patterns using a process that is more streamlined and automated like Workflows. This will also help in optimizing the human resources more efficiently. Join hands with 0101 and unleash all these benefits that a CRM offers. We would realize it for your business, for you.

What is the ROI of a CRM system?

by CRM

What is the ROI of a CRM system?

There’s a statistical report prepared by a non-profit organization that every penny you spend on CRM, you get x9 returns. According to a study by Nucleus Research, a research firm, return on investment (ROI) of using a Customer Relationship Management system is a whopping 700%. In simple words, for every dollar you spend, CRM will give you the ROI of $8.71. This ROI is on track to grow more in recent years.

Going by the history, CRMs have been expensive, difficult to implement and not business friendly. In recent years, the advancement of the internet and software has paved the way for user friendly and practically priced CRMs. Now, CRM systems are being built with industry specificity in mind, they are more customizable tailoring the needs of every business and much easier to use. Ever increasing consumer demand has propelled the need for CRM even more.

Customer Engagement and Success is a game changer for every business. For customer success, CRM is a game changer. A proper CRM is an absolute necessity when trying to keep up with the modern day customer.

If something is improving your customers’ experience multifold and at the same time giving a huge ROI to your business, then why look anywhere else? In the early 2000s, the CRM market was very scratchy and in a toddler stage with very few competitors, but it has gained a lot of momentum in recent years. As the market continues to grow, CRMs are only becoming more cost effective. In the early 2010s, CRMs paid back maybe a dollar or three in return for every dollar spent. According to the 2016’s forecast, it is set to triple the previous measured ROI by early 2020s.

Calculating the exact ROI can be quite complex as it involves a lot of factors. It’s not just limited to cost factor but extends beyond that. Overall revenue, cost per lead, time saved, resource utilization, effective use of a CRM system, sales/marketing/service metrics, collaboration and productivity can be some factors. Let’s say your business is generating a revenue of $50,000 but your overhead costs like software and hardware, IT support, wages are costing you $45,000 in which case your profit is just $5,000. The CRM implementation in your business can not only cut these costs by almost half but also increase the revenue and gather everything at one place.

How to leverage CRM to increase the business?

by CRM

How to leverage CRM to increase the business?

There are multiple reasons for why you need to leverage the CRM in the right way. Some of them are: better productivity, higher revenue, enhanced user engagement, time and cost saving. Of course, stepping into the world of CRM for the first time and making it work isn’t always easy, that is unless you leverage the power of CRM rightly. Here are some of the ways:

Time when you used to predict whether the customer was interested in your product(s) based on your gut feeling is long gone. Time when you used to know if someone was interested in your service because they called your sales agent to enquire about it is also gone. Today, it’s all about the data. What pages did they visit? What articles did they read? What did they recently purchase? What promotion emails did they click on? What is the frequency of their visit to a particular website? These are the stats that drive your business.

Getting this customer data and turning it into actionable insights… it’s not creepy, it’s smart. It means that you care about your customers, “Let us help you on your journey of buying and lead you to make a smart choice”. This is especially important for growing business. CRM helps you collect all the information at a place acting as one source of truth. Having access to this doesn’t hand you a golden ticket to overnight revenue increment. This data should be continuously used and monitored to improve sales and marketing methods to improve deal close rates and increase customer value.

Accessing the data is one thing and sharing it across platforms is another. Both should go hand-in-hand. All the departments like sales, marketing, commerce and service must be able to collaborate and work on the data collected. CRM usually gives you the ability to create domain specific processes like Sales Process, Service Process, Workflows and other integrated processes as well. These processes can span the entire customer journey, even if you have multiple platforms. This can help automate most of the processes and you can free up your resources who can then work on the growth prospects and avoid waste

For instance, a Sales Process is special and aligns the goals of customers with their customer journey. This is about what your prospects need, what they prefer, when and how they want it. Then helping them make a safe choice. The existing process can be repeated for other prospects and scaled accordingly

Analytics is something that acts as an underlying force that every business runs on. One commonality between sales and marketing is that analytics revolve around lead generation in marketing whereas it’s deal closure in sales. Though a typical high end CRM provides you with a full fledged analytical functionality, it will also let you integrate third party analytical tools.

Plethora of organizations do manage to collect the data but fail to use it to the full extent. Tools provided by CRM will help you overcome this. They aren’t important just because they provide analytics, but also because they validate the data and analyses done by conducting statistical checks to verify that they are valid.

Whether you are not using a CRM or you already have a little bit of CRM implemented in your business, it’s worth investigating if the existing tools and software are holding you back. Since it is cloud based, scaling is one of the most important features offered by most CRMs. Whether you need a CRM for 50 users or 5000 users, with few selectable features or a full set of features, it can adapt with moments. This is the kind of flexibility that CRM brings to your business.

Like software development, running a business can get tricky due to the changing aspects to accommodate the current scenario. Thanks to cloud based CRMs, you can upscale or downscale at any given time depending on the business requirement. Running a business smoothly requires close to 100% uptime. An optimal CRM solution will have nearly 0 downtime and ensures consistent uptime all round the clock and provides seamless performance and feature upgrades.

 

Which CRM to choose?​

by CRM

Which CRM to choose?

Considering market as a driving factor, CRM Systems are categorized into 4 types:

  • Strategic CRM – It is mostly customer-centric, with primary focus on acquiring new and maintaining profitable customers.
  • Operational CRM – It is based on customer oriented processes such as marketing, selling and customer services.
  • Analytical CRM – It involves capturing, screening, interpreting, segregating, processing and analyzing customer related data. It is based on the intelligent mining of customer data.
  • Collaborative CRM – It is the collaboration of different resources and domains with a view to optimize the organization and customers.

Now that we have an overview of CRM types, we get back to the main concern. Which CRM product should I go for? Before moving to decide anything, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

  • What is your budget?
  • What is the size of your business?
  • Which department is it for?
  • How much of an easy-to-use system do you need?
  • What are your primary communication channels?
  • What key features, processes, security policies and integrations does your business need?
  • To what extent do you need the process automation?
  • How much data and business analyses would you need?
  • Is there an internal IT team who can implement and customize the CRM?

By now, you would have realized that there’s no one size fits all. Different CRMs come with different pros and cons with different features and pricing models. It all depends on your business needs. Below we have discussed some of the best CRMs currently in the market.