CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
A GUIDE TO CRM FOR THE TITLE INDUSRY
Customer relationship management, (CRM) refers to platform that helps companies track, manage and analyze interactions with contacts, whether they’re prospective or current customers. A catchall term for the software as a whole, CRM software is generally designed to compile information across the organization and is a critical tool to help users gain insight into what drives business.
For the title industry in particular, the technology helps you keep track of contacts, orders, marketing events, customer service request and more. Because CRMs provide a relational database, you have flexibility in looking at what channels drive your business.
Why we set out to solve title industry CRM problems
TitleInsight was born out of our client’s frustration with existing technology. The title industry is all about relationships, so why couldn’t we find an existing customer relationship management (CRM) system that fit our needs?
We ran through the gamut of existing products, but nothing was right; either the application was too bulky, needed constant administration internally or was too expensive. The functionality and design we needed seemed to be something any CRM should have.
What we wanted in a CRE CRM
Flexibility. No boxed CRM fit our business process. What we realized was that while there were numerous generic examples in the marketplace, none were laser focused on our issues.
Simplicity and design. There is clearly a trend toward simplicity in the software world, which is to be expected after a decade of software design in which aesthetics and ease of use were overlooked in favor of over-the-top bells and whistles, most of which added little value to overall functionality. The title industry CRM space fared no differently.
Mobility. We knew desktop tools were becoming obsolete. We are a mobile society and mobility is a must.
CRM and pipeline management. What do you do about customer focus prior to an order? Are you spending 80% of your sales focus on 20% of those customers actually bringing you an order? Most CRMs aren’t designed for this specific sales cycle. Other examples abound. How about tracking your pipeline, sales expenses and your client’s requests? Spreadsheets, sticky notes, legal pads? We used them all. The existing options in the marketplace were too limited.
Niche product type. Let’s face it, CRM software for the title industry is a narrow vertical, specialty product. Without major software companies designing products in the space, the technology has been in many cases difficult to implement, clumsy, admin-heavy and short-lived.
How Do You Solve the Issues?
We started by researching a platform to leverage. There are plenty of options —Zoho, Sugar, Google Apps—but we decided to create our platform from scratch for a variety of reasons solving a list of deficiencies.
The result is a simple yet functional CRM specifically for the title industry that solved the market problems. And after using it ourselves and hearing great feedback from our industry development partners, we realized what a game changer TitleInsight was.