What are hidden costs for hosted CRM?

We are probably going to go with a hosted CRM system, but I wanted to get some feedback on potential hidden costs before we pull the trigger. We don’t want to get caught with unexpected costs after we have purchased a system.

Topics

Information Technology

Sales

CRM

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Ian Webb

asked on Oct. 19, 2009

Seth Koshgarian

Vantage Communications

Posted on Oct. 21, 2009

Hi Ian,

I'm a sales rep for a company that features CRM, so if you're looking for a web based solution I would highly suggest checking ours out. We clock in at $40 per month for software comparable in features to Salesforce's enterprise edition.

Unless you've been given a quote, you probably haven't seen the implementation fee yet. This is just a 1 time fee and is charged per user in most situations.

Secondly, some hosted CRMs charge a fee for customizing the software to your business. If you take it as is, this isn't an issue, and with some software (such as ours) you can customize it yourself anyway.

Most hosted CRMs also have some form of fee for support. Support is usually purchased in 1-2 hour blocks and can set you back quite a bit. Support is a broad term here, but this generally consists of training or the correction of user errors.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions or would like to discuss, feel free to call me or email me.

(866)353-8357 x 2028
skoshgarian@vantage.com

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Jonathan Rowley

Director, Dynamics CRM, Avanade UK

Posted on Nov. 16, 2009

Integration with third party solutions and customisation costs are more difficuly to get to with Hosted solutions.

Certain levels of customisation and integration are not possible withe certain hosted solutions, down to server side coding and applicaion security.

Bandwidth and Storage are the other two obvious items - unless these are estimated correctly they can soon balloon and end up costing big time depending on your business metrics, users, contacts etc. A sliding scale usually applies so ask the question well.

Tech support also springs to mind - most hosted companies offer only basic support.

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M Scott Schaffernoth

Chief Tech Coach, Winnovative Technology Consulting, LLC

Posted on Jan. 2, 2010

What happens when you want to pull your data out? No business uses the same system indefinitely...

How will it affect your organization when there is an outage - either due to your company's internet connection (it does happen!) or the vendor bungles a system upgrade or the like and goes offline?

What is the impact on your people when they are not able to be online? Does the hosted solution's 'offline' version have all of the features of the online version (many do not).

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Luke Tan

CEO, Borneosoft

Posted on Jan. 3, 2010

Ian,

Most users find out that the CRM system is not what they want after paying all the initial cost. There are some hosted CRM that offers trial edition.

We, at borneosoft, understand this. We'd like our users not just try but to use it before committing to anything. That's why we are offering Free Edition and not time limit. It's fully functional and the difference with Paid Edition is that we need to protect the application from abuse. We limit to 10 recipients for each email sent in Free Edition. There is no limit in Paid Edition.

Storage is something that you need to be aware before you commit yourself to CRM package. Some hosted CRMs become too expensive if you need more storage.

Our Free Edition comes with generous 100MB for each user up to 2 users per company. Paid Edition gives 10 times more, at 1GB per user!

You can always start with Free Edition to evaluate the functionalities and later on upgrade to Paid Edition.

Check out: http://www.borneosoft.com