4 Reasons To Choose A UK Based CRM Provider

You’re shopping around for a new CRM system for your business. The shelves are heaving with choices, and your wish list is a good length — but have you considered where your CRM provider is actually based? It probably hasn’t crossed your mind, but keeping your provider within the UK is a bigger deal than it sounds. Here are four reasons why.

UK Support

We’ve all been there: you call a service provider with an issue and you’re on hold for an hour, listening to hundreds of other callers in the background over a barely audible line. Most of the time, that’s the direct result of a provider outsourcing its support overseas.

The fix is simple — look for a UK-based CRM with UK support. With OpenCRM, you won’t be on hold for long (we aim to keep hold times under a minute), and you’ll get the undivided attention of a support tech whose first language is English and who also speaks fluent “tech”.

UK Centric Platform

Rolling out a new system only works if your team can actually adopt it — and small regional mismatches are a surprisingly common barrier. If your users enter 02/09/2021, you need the system to read that as the 2nd of September, not the 9th of February. You don’t want to fight the default currency back to GBP, or find activity timestamps thrown off by time zone quirks.

These are all real reasons we’ve heard from clients as to why an imported CRM solution didn’t work for a UK business. A platform that’s UK-centric by default removes that friction before it starts.

UK Data

This is the big one. How well do you know the California Consumer Privacy Act? Or the EU-US Privacy Shield ruling? Probably about as well as most of us — which is exactly the problem. Do you actually know where your CRM data is stored, and whether your provider is upfront about it?

Only a fraction of the roughly 195 countries worldwide have implemented meaningful data protection and privacy regulations. That means it’s entirely possible your data could end up stored somewhere with no protection at all.

With UK-held data, you can point to the UK’s data protection act directly, explain the government’s access rules, and talk your customers through their “right to be forgotten” — without needing to translate rules from a dozen other jurisdictions.

Supporting the UK’s Economy

It’s probably not top of your CRM wish list, but it’s worth a mention: research suggests that £10 spent with a local independent business can put up to an additional £50 back into the local economy, while also helping to keep someone in the UK employed.

If you’re weighing up a UK supplier against one overseas, this might just be the detail that tips the decision — supporting UK entrepreneurs and, in turn, the businesses and ideas that follow from them.

So that’s the top four reasons to choose a UK-based CRM provider. If you’d like to know more about data storage in the UK, or want to chat about anything covered here, get in touch — we’re always happy to talk CRM.