Custom CRM Development

QPSoftware is a CRM development company founded in 2009 and based in Shanghai. We build custom CRMs for companies that sell in China, when a standard tool does not fit their sales process, their brands or their data rules. For LVMH Watches & Jewelry, we built MYKE, a CRM deployed in more than 30 stores in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

As a company, your main objective is to increase your revenue. Your salespeople should spend their time selling, not fighting with disorganized spreadsheets, chaotic inboxes or awkward tools that slow them down. Custom CRM development gives them one tool built around the way they sell.

Custom CRM or off-the-shelf software?

Knowing that you need a CRM is already a good start. Knowing exactly what you need in a CRM is something else. According to your budget and needs, there are two paths: we customize and improve an existing CRM, or we build a brand-new one from a detailed list of requirements. Our guide on how to choose the right CRM to operate in China compares the tools used in China.

A custom CRM is worth it when a standard tool cannot follow your organization. LVMH’s request started from its concerns about how its stores collected customer data, and from the need to improve traceability. MYKE shares customer information between three houses, Zenith, Hublot and TAG Heuer, in three markets, with access rights set by store, brand and market.

What a custom CRM can do for your sales team

Every business needs a CRM, but not for the same reasons. The general needs are a forward view of your business, growth, duplicating your best practices, doing more by doing less, risk management and closer relationships with your customers. Your sales team’s needs are more specific:

• Manage your pipeline
• Log every activity automatically
• See everything about a contact in one place
• Chat with prospects and customers in real time
• Send personalized emails, and create and rate your email templates
• Get real-time notifications
• Enrich your contact records automatically
• Improve the segmentation and targeting of your real customers
• Manage leads to find the high-quality ones
• Distribute tasks among your team
• Forecast your sales
• Store CRM data and files
• Follow dashboards and reports with analytics

Our CRM solutions give you a detailed picture of who your customers are, what they do and what they want, so you never have to guess what to offer them, and you can plan your marketing on real data. For deeper analysis, we connect the CRM to BI dashboards and data integration. To train the salespeople who use it, the AI Sales Coach, our sales training software, simulates customer conversations and scores each answer.

Connecting your CRM to WeChat, WeCom and your other systems

• WeCom. When your salespeople talk to customers on WeChat, the WeCom customer contact API lets them add customers’ WeChat accounts as contacts, and lets the CRM read those contacts with the tags and notes your team adds.
• WeChat Mini Programs. Customers can log in with WeChat, and the Mini Program server APIs give your systems access to login, messaging and order data.
• Loyalty programs. For Montagut, we built a mobile loyalty program app with a store locator, purchase history, a points tracker, social login and WeChat account verification, on CEGID’s Business Retail software.
• ERP and business tools. For Schneider Electric, we automated the imports from SAP into ZEST, the productivity tool we built. Our third-party integration (ERP, CRM, logistics) connects your CRM to the rest of your systems.

Customer data in China: PIPL and hosting

A CRM stores personal information. China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) applies to the data of individuals in China, including processing done abroad to provide them with products or services (Article 3).

• Processing needs a legal basis, such as the customer’s consent or a contract with them (Article 13).
• Sending personal information abroad requires one of the conditions of Article 38, such as a security assessment, a certification or a standard contract, and the individual’s separate consent (Article 39).
• The 2024 provisions on cross-border data flows exempt some transfers from the security assessment, the standard contract and the certification: transfers needed to perform a contract with the individual and, for companies that are not critical information infrastructure operators, transfers of the personal information of fewer than 100,000 people since January 1 of the year, sensitive information excluded. Informing individuals and obtaining their separate consent still apply.

We design the CRM with these rules in mind: access rights by role, like the permission levels of MYKE, and a hosting location chosen with your legal advisers. Our China PIPL compliance guide explains the law in detail.

How our CRM software development works

Each project follows our agile methodology, in sprints you review:

1. Requirements. We define your requirements and turn them into specifications.
2. Performance indicators. The KPIs the CRM must measure and report.
3. UX and UI design. Screens your salespeople will want to use every day.
4. Database design. The structure of your customer, sales and product data.
5. Development and integration. The CRM and its connections to WeChat, WeCom, your ERP or your online store.
6. Deployment, training and maintenance. Server configuration, user training, a user guide kept up to date, and ongoing maintenance, as for MYKE.