From Excel Sheets to a Scalable In‑House CRM: Our Evolution Story

Background

After three years of operation, the business expanded to millions of users and established a basic ecosystem covering order processing, employee management, credit terms, wallets, and invoicing. With this foundation in place, the team began exploring how to further extend capabilities and unlock greater profit potential.

What is CRM?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a set of strategies and tools aimed at improving customer satisfaction and loyalty to generate more revenue.

Why the Enterprise Needs a CRM

Understanding customers—their demands, behavior, and business focus—is essential for extracting value. This insight drove the creation of an internal enterprise CRM system.

Historical Phases

Stone Age: Excel‑Based CRM

Early on, limited and fragmented information forced operators to rely on raw Excel files, causing significant pain as the business grew.

Bronze Age: External CRM Solutions

To cope with increasing workload, external CRM platforms were adopted, but they suffered from missing capabilities, low efficiency due to data silos, and inadequate value mining, leading to high customer churn.

Why Build a Self‑Developed CRM?

Pain Points Capability gaps: No unified platform for millions of corporate customers. Operational inefficiency: Narrow lead channels and low conversion. Maintenance difficulty: Low depth of value mining and high churn.

Solution Overview

Address the three pain points by creating a custom CRM that provides comprehensive customer control, streamlined processes, and scalable architecture.

Future Direction

Goals Expand the user base continuously. Deeply understand customer needs for refined services and higher stickiness. Build a professional operations system to achieve a closed‑loop business.

Steam Era → Online

Pain Points Few lead sources with low conversion. Unstandardized, chaotic processes. Multiple platforms requiring manual operations.

Solutions Integrate multiple lead channels to increase conversion base. Standardize core data workflows and abstract strategies. Consolidate existing platform data (customers, orders, etc.).

Electrical Era → Intelligent

New Challenges As the self‑built CRM stabilizes and business grows, data volume and segmentation complexity increase, leading to massive manual effort in assigning customers to frontline staff.

Automation Flow Complex business rules cause high error rates in manual operations. Human latency and low efficiency due to repetitive tasks.

Automation Goals Atomic rule decomposition for flexible composition. Build automated workflows. Close the loop for continuous cycle rotation.

Digital Management

Pain Points Frontline execution efficiency is invisible; quality cannot be measured. Customer dynamics are hard to track precisely.

Goals Standardize sales actions. Visualize execution quality. Enable real‑time customer follow‑up.

Business Chain Exploration

Based on existing capabilities—customer filtering, data allocation, outbound calls, SMS—combined with current business pain points, a complete chain from task creation, execution, distribution, outreach, to feedback was designed.

Value Creation

Value Mining : Full‑scope customer insight to boost stickiness. Real‑Time Service : Immediate response to events. Assistive Enhancements : Alerts and dashboards to aid sales staff.

Scenario Cases

Order Dispatch Failure : Real‑time alerts enable immediate follow‑up, improving customer experience. Invoice Overdue : Daily reminders reduce overdue rates. Drop‑off Warning : Monitoring GTV decline triggers proactive engagement.

Results

After extensive development and optimization, the new CRM delivered measurable improvements:

GTV increased by 10%.

Labor cost reduced by 30%.

Process cycle shortened by 60%.

Customer complaints dropped to zero.

Overdue rate decreased by 20%.

Conclusion

By keeping technology in service of business and letting business drive technical evolution, the CRM team continuously explores and adapts, pushing enterprise operations to new heights while embracing change to create greater value.