Put My Customer Information in a Cloud based Online CRM? Are you Crazy?
“Move it to the Cloud” is the mantra in all the CRM trade press. However, there are no shortage of businesses that are still using 5 or 10 year old versions of ACT CRM and other contact managers because they aren’t willing to believe that their valuable customer information is safe “out there” on the Internet.
It really is a rational fear. Especially for a business that’s accumulated years and years of customer relationship information, it’s a strategic asset and letting it fall into the wrong hands or just not having access to it temporarily could have dire consequences.
However, my life in sales, both before the cloud and “in the cloud” has taught me that managing customer information inside your own four walls is actually less safe.
4 Reasons Online CRM is Safer than Your Office Network
How can that be? Well, here are 4 reasons customer relationship information is safer and more secure with online CRM vs. ACT software or any other contact management system you could run on your own server.
Most data theft is committed by internal employees. (source: Data Monitor) In this case, it’s your sales people we’re talking about. If a sales person knows they’ll be let go soon or have taken a job with an industry competitor, are they likely to consider making a copy of their customer information? You bet. In fact, if you customer database is on your local area network, they can probably make a copy of the entire thing!
A competitor that attempts to steal your customer information is far more likely to success penetrating your company network than those of reputable online CRM providers. You might have a fire wall but, most any hacker can get past that. Most online CRM providers have multiple layers of security in place including state of the art intrusion detection systems.
You are more likely to have a failure of your internal network, servers or computers that disrupts the use of your contact management system than for the Internet to fail or your online CRM provider to have unscheduled down time. Most sizable online CRM vendors have redundancy built in so they are highly tolerant of hardware or software failures as well as Internet outages.
Finally, a lot of this is driven by the profit motive and economies of scale. The costs of redundancy and top notch security is probably beyond most businesses even if they had the expertise to implement and maintain it. Online CRM providers have their entire businesses depending on their ability to provide reliable access to customer information to their customers. They have thousands of customers paying them for it which allows them to invest in the security and redundancy required.
More Control, Not Less, with Online CRM
We’ve all heard the stories about sales people that walk out the door with a business’ customer list and go straight to the competition. With most online CRM solutions, no one has that type of access. In fact, most online CRMs allow the business to control the rights of each user to see only certain customers or territories and their ability to export or save any data at all.