What are the main features of a CRM?

What are the must-have features for CRM software? What are the “nice-to-have” features? In this article, we present 8 key features common to all commercial CRM software on the market, and 4 bonus features that allow you to get the most out of your software.

#1 Contact and account management

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is above all a tool that allows you to gather in one place all the interactions with your customers, prospects, and partners.

Some B2C-oriented CRM software does not allow this, but in B2B the distinction between a contact and a company account (the customer is a company) is fundamental.

The main features of contact and account management are summarised below:

• Customer account management: The solution allows the creation of company accounts to store company profile information. It provides a unified view of account details and associated objects: contacts, opportunities, notes, billing information, communication history, etc.
• Hierarchy in customer account management: The solution provides a hierarchy in corporate account management by linking accounts to a parent account. It allows child account information to be displayed directly from the parent account page, helping to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
• Appointmentscheduling: The solution allows you to create an appointment scheduling module and include calendar links in individual emails to send to customers and allow them to choose a date and time.
• Management of grouped appointments: The solution allows you to create an appointment scheduling module capable of managing the agendas of several sales representatives. The prospect can make an appointment at the first availability of one of the sales representatives.
• Email address validation & suggestion: The solution allows you to validate the email addresses entered and find valid email addresses using a contact’s first name, last name and website.
• Contact mapping: The solution integrates mapping services such as Google Maps, Maps Badger, etc. to help locate contacts and filter them by city, region, and country.
• Flowcharts: The solution provides interactive flowcharts to visualise the relationships between contacts.
• Contact recommendations: The solution automatically suggests lists of leads to contact based on parameters such as job title, company or areas of interest.
• Recommendations by artificial intelligence: The solution uses artificial intelligence to promote retention and present upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the right time
• Territory management: The solution allows territories to be set up and customer accounts (and associated revenue) to be assigned to territories, both automatically and manually.
• Territory management by user: The solution allows an unlimited number of salespeople to be assigned to a territory and a salesperson can be assigned to an unlimited number of territories.
• Hierarchy in territory management: The solution allows for a territory hierarchy with nested levels and presents a visual representation of parent-child relationships between territories.

#2 Management of commercial actions and customer communications

But theCRM tool is also the reference tool for all your sales teams, and more generally for all the teams that are called “customer facing” – i.e. with customer interaction.

Today’s commercial CRM software is therefore equipped with a host of features to facilitate, centralise and standardise all customer communications across the company:

• Incoming and outgoingemail management: The solution provides a standard email configuration for sending and receiving emails directly from the solution itself.
• Email Client Integration: The solution allows you to integrate popular email clients such as Gmail and Outlook to send and receive emails directly from the email client itself.
• Received and sent email log: The solution automatically associates all incoming and outgoing emails with the corresponding contact and allows you to instantly reply to emails, share quotes, add automatic reminders and take notes.
• Email scheduling: The solution allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a specified date and time. It also allows you to define time slots for sending and to edit or modify a scheduled email before it is sent.
• Email templates: The solution offers pre-built email templates or helps to create a template from scratch to send email campaigns.
• Email Analytics : The solution provides real-time notifications for emails sent whenever a prospect opens an email. It also allows you to schedule automatic follow-ups based on recorded events
• Email response templates: The solution automatically suggests response elements to sales agents to quickly respond.
• Mass emailing: The solution allows you to send mass cold mail campaigns
• Artificial intelligence in email management: The solution uses artificial intelligence to analyse email text in real time and suggest tasks and response elements. It also customises the time each email is sent to maximise open and response rates
• Reminders for calls: The solution allows you to set reminders for upcoming calls and sends alerts for missed calls.
• Call categorisation: The solution allows each call to be assigned a custom label to sort calls into categories or identify call types.
• Call planning: The solution allows you to schedule phone calls at a later date, and provides a summary view of the calls scheduled for a given sales agent
• Popup during call: The solution provides a popup during a call to add notes, create follow-up tasks or assign the contact to another sales representative
• Record of calls received and made: The solution automatically records all incoming and outgoing calls. It also has provisions to manually record a call and map it to an existing contact or create a new contact.
• Call recording: The solution allows important calls to be recorded at any time for playback
• Click to call: The solution provides an integration allowing to click directly in the software to call a contact without leaving the application.
• Automated voice messaging: The solution helps sales representatives record and configure automated voice messages. It allows for the downloading and saving of pre-recorded audio files.
• SMS management: The solution allows you to send personalised SMS messages using the data stored in the CRM.
• SMS Templates: The solution allows you to create SMS templates and save them for later use.
• SMS scheduling: The solution allows you to schedule SMS messages according to the time zone of the recipients
• SMS Analytics: The solution provides reports on SMS performance, including the model that received the most responses.

#3 Reporting and planning capabilities

With all this data, CRM software also provides a clear view of your sales pipeline, the status of all sales opportunities and proposals.

Sales data is at the heart of performance reporting in all companies, and software packages include more or less advanced reporting features for all stakeholders who consume this data: sales teams, of course, but also marketing, finance, etc.

• Home page or user dashboard: The solution offers a user dashboard, displaying a customisable summary view of leads, opportunities, tasks, alerts, recent activities, recommendations, visualisations, etc.
• Sales reports: The solution helps to generate detailed reports such as sales closed in the current month, daily revenues, sales milestones, etc.
• Charts and data-visualisation: The solution generates interactive charts with segmentation capabilities, customized to visualize large volumes of data simply. It offers several types of visualisations such as histograms, line charts, funnels, tables, pie charts, area maps, heat maps, etc.
• Activity Reports: The solution provides customisable off-line reports to display emails, phone calls, tasks and appointments associated with team members.
• Reporting on email communications: The solution provides reports to analyse email performance (bounces, open rates, click-through rates, etc.).
• Call Analytics: The solution provides reports on the performance of the sales teams’ telephone calls
• Pre-built dashboards: The solution provides pre-built dashboards to get information on sales data and team performance quickly.
• Pre-built reports: The solution provides a range of pre-built report templates to provide a snapshot of sales performance. It is also possible to set up reusable templates with KPIs for future use.
• Customized reports: The solution provides a drag-and-drop interface to create customizable reports with graphs and tables to analyze data and apply filters
• Report preview: The solution allows you to preview the report before publishing to check or modify the data and see how it is represented.
• Customisable dashboard: The solution provides a visual drag and drop editor to customise the dashboard with graphs, reports or engagement analysis.
• Report sharing: The solution allows you to export reports as PDF, XLSX or CSV files, or to automate report creation on a regular basis
• Dashboard sharing: The solution allows users to share their dashboards with others, export as a PDF or set schedules to send by email.
• Integration of charts into other tools: The solution facilitates the use of unique codes to incorporate custom reports into third-party dashboards.
• API Usage Dashboard: The solution provides dashboards to track API usage and get information about API consumers, API usage pattern, average daily usage, usage access points and API methods used.

#4 Lead management

Modern CRM software also includes a range of features to facilitate the tracking and prioritisation of sales opportunities, from creation with lead capture tools, validation rules, etc. to closing.

• Form and capture tools: The solution provides tools to capture leads from different sources and to manually add leads from different sources into a single database.
• Capture leads from Linkedin: The solution provides a widget to capture contact or company information from a LinkedIn search and import the data into the CRM.
• Business card scanner: The solution offers a business card scanner application
• Email parser: The solution creates a new lead or updates an existing lead when an email is received or forwarded by parsing the email.
• Detection of data formats: The solution can automatically identify email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles and other valuable information about a lead, company or contacts from their social and public information.
• Lead scoringThe solution calculates and assigns a score to each lead and/or opportunity based on customisable scoring rules using data, activities, interactions, etc.
• Automatic lead distribution: The solution allows sales representatives to be automatically assigned to leads based on various criteria such as geography, product, department, lead scoring, etc.
• Sales pipeline analytics: The solution provides reports on the proportion of leads won and lost, the sales cycle, time to lead, etc.
• Artificial intelligence in lead management: The solution uses artificial intelligence to suggest next steps to better qualify a lead, content to send, etc.
• Artificial intelligence for conversion support: The solution uses artificial intelligence to capture information from all business activities and build a probability of closing for each opportunity

#5 Managing the sales pipeline

The heart of CRM is the sales pipeline. CRM software offers a range of functions to optimise pipeline management, formalise sales cycles, detect blocked opportunities, etc.

• Sales Pipeline / Kanban Opportunity View: The solution organizes opportunities in a Kanban view and provides visibility of opportunities at all stages of sales
• Business activity management: The solution provides visibility of all communications and activities associated with an opportunity and notifies updates in real time (sending emails, making phone calls, appointments, reminders, notes, etc.).
• Multiple sales pipelines: The solution allows you to create multiple sales pipelines, customize settings and views
• Buying journey design: The solution provides a drag-and-drop interface to create buying journeys with automated business sequences and integrated workflows.
• Opportunity management: The solution allows you to create new opportunities, sort and filter them using various fields, and manage the flow of opportunities through the sales cycle.
• Opportunity probability: The solution allows you to assign a conversion probability to each opportunity at each stage of the pipeline
• Detection of blocked opportunities: The solution highlights opportunities when configurable criteria are met.
• Artificial Intelligence in Opportunity Management: The solution uses artificial intelligence to present the best next steps to advance the pipeline in real time.

#6 Document Management

As in any information process, a number of important documents are generated in the course of a customer’s journey: contracts, quotations, commercial proposals, order forms, invoices, etc.

CRM software incorporates features to facilitate storage, indexing, and access to each of these documents.

• Attachments: The solution allows you to attach files to various CRM records: prospect, company, opportunity, product, etc.
• Document sharing: The solution allows you to share a file with internal and external users by generating an encrypted link and sending it by email.
• Document storage: The solution provides a central, indexable storage space for storing documents, attachments etc. with access rules
• Versioning: The solution automatically saves multiple versions of documents based on their revision history.
• Document conversion: The solution can convert offline documents into a web version for online viewing.
• Advanced search capabilities: The solution provides advanced search capabilities and supports various features such as file tree, keyword search, document attributes etc.
• Playbooks: The solution provides users with the ability to generate interactive training content for newcomers or other colleagues.
• Quote generation: The solution allows you to generate quotes by including product and customer information directly from the opportunity.
• Contract creation: The solution allows you to create contracts manually or to use templates by automatically filling in all the necessary fields from a quote, a purchase order or an opportunity.
• Contract management: The solution facilitates the management of contracts, associated specifications and supplementary agreements. It allows the attachment of electronic versions of contracts and keeps track of contract details and changes.
• Invoice Management: The solution allows invoices to be issued using customisable invoice templates and alerts assigned sales representatives when the payment due date is approaching.
• Order generation: The solution allows you to create orders using standard templates, adding products and tracking.
• Automatic order creation: The solution allows you to set up order registration on the website and automatically create order records.
• Order History: The solution keeps track of the complete chronology of activities, documents and communications associated with each order.
• Order segmentation: The solution allows orders to be grouped by contact, company account, stage, budget, product or service, person in charge, etc.
• Procurement and Payment Scheduling: The solution facilitates the planning of a procurement and payment schedule in accordance with customer agreements. It allows you to create and modify supply planning templates, group products according to supply, and issue invoices or contracts according to the supply schedule.

#7 Sales performance monitoring and sales management

Motivation, coaching, training, and sales team objectives are all fundamental elements of performance. CRM software has developed many features to make the life of sales managers easier, and to help them exploit these performance levers.

• Sales forecasting: The solution provides a real-time comparative view of assigned sales targets, achieved revenues and revenue forecasts. Revenue forecasts for future sales are probabilised and provide a best case and worst case scenario based on the data available in the pipeline
• Goal achievement: The solution allows you to set goals based on various KPIs and then view the percentage of completion. It is possible to define company-wide sales targets, team targets or targets based on individual team members.
• Goal management: The solution allows you to define goals and sales targets for each team member or for a team with progress monitoring
• Sales campaigns: The solution allows you to create targeted prospecting sequences of different types (email, telephone, referrals, advertising, webinars, social media, etc.). It also allows you to analyse the effectiveness of the campaign using reports and campaign statistics.
• Gamification: The solution allows you to set up a points or ranking system based on business objectives to encourage healthy competition within the team.
• AI-based anomaly detector: The solution uses artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in real time and predict future anomalies based on past performance
• AI-based coaching actions: The solution provides real-time coaching ideas in real-time such as success prediction, estimated quota results, recommendations to meet goals and other predictions and recommendations.

#8 Sales automation

The systematisation of commercial processes and the centralisation of commercial data make it possible to add a layer of automation. This is one of the great advantages of CRM software. In functional terms, this translates into:

• Sales automationThe solution allows you to define customised workflows to automate processes that do not require any user interaction. It automatically triggers these predefined actions when certain conditions are met.
• Data validation rules: The solution allows validation rules to be defined on multiple criteria to prevent inaccurate data from entering the CRM. This includes an error message to be displayed when the user enters an invalid value.
• Approval rules: The solution allows you to set up and automate the approval process for business requests, e.g. transaction approval, travel and expense reports, contract review, document approvals, etc.
• Sales process editor: The solution provides a visual drag-and-drop editor to design multiple sales processes, define sequences, edit steps and properties, and specify conditions and actions to be fulfilled to move from one step to another
• Predefined templates: The solution provides templates for common business actions such as creating a reminder, a task, a note, an email, etc.

#9 Managing a product catalogue

This type of functionality is not suitable for all companies, but some companies have a relatively fixed catalogue of products or services. In its simplest form, the product catalogue allows you to build purchase orders, quotes, or invoices more quickly, and to set up automated rules, for example on product-based promotions (and associated margins).

But some companies can even go so far as to provide their customers with a portal for direct ordering. Think of your bookseller, for example, who logs on to a somewhat obscure platform to place an order. The bookseller is actually using a feature of the distributor’s CRM.

• Product Catalogue: The solution facilitates the configuration of a product catalogue that lists the products offered by a company, including pricing information. Includes a taxonomy to create a classification of products.
• Product groups: The solution allows products to be grouped on the basis of custom or predefined attributes, such as brand, category, etc., which allow the product catalogue to be structured and organised.
• Customised products: The solution allows the generation of customised products with various product codes, costs, special notes, etc. These products can be filtered using unique filters and linked to offers and contacts. These products can be filtered using unique filters and linked to offers and contacts.
• Customer portal: The solution allows you to create customer portals in the colours of their brand. Allows you to create views to display records with images, tags, colour codes, etc.

#10 Managing partners and distributors

Whether they are business introducers, distributors, or even suppliers in some cases, some CRMs offer a suite of tools to easily share the right business data with your partner network.

• Partner Relationship Management: The solution contains a partner management module for indirect sales. It allows for campaign development with reporting, marketing budget management and provides access to relevant content for partners.
• Automated sharing: The solution allows partners to register a new lead and have it easily approved. The partner manager can then share marketing collateral, records, contacts, accounts and organisations with partners.
• Partner Portal: The solution gives partners access to a portal. It allows partners to add new prospects to the sales pipeline, add information, view their contact list, place orders, access the product catalogue and even generate quotes and/or invoices.
• Supplier Portal: The solution provides access to suppliers via a dedicated portal. It gives suppliers a consolidated view of all open orders and allows them to leave comments if there are changes to the order.
• Partner Scorecard: The solution offers grids to obtain statistics on partner contributions. It helps to formalise the evaluation of partners to understand their performance and their impact on sales
• Portal permissions: The solution offers password protection and allows to define different access permissions (read, write, modify, comment) for users of the supplier & partner portals

#11 External integrations

In this article, CRM software was conceived as a central software that would work on its own. But the reality is very different. To derive maximum value, CRM must be interfaced with all the tools in the company.

• Data export: The solution allows you to export CRM data in various formats such as XLS, CSV, PDFS, etc.
• Data import: The solution allows you to import CRM data into CSV or Excel files.
• Integration of no-code data flow management tools: The solution integrates with popular data integration tools such as Zapier, integromat, etc.
• G-Suite integration: The solution integrates with G-Suite to attach documents from Google Drive, export events to Google Calendar, add contacts from Google Contacts, create and publish forms, and configure Gmail directly from the CRM.
• Office 365 Integration: The solution integrates with Microsoft Office 365 to synchronise contacts, tasks, calendar events and chat conversations. It is possible to customise data mapping, add contacts and leads directly from Outlook emails
• Calendar integration: The solution integrates with Google, Office 365 and Apple calendars to synchronise all CRM events such as appointments, contacts, meetings, etc. It helps to keep track of important events and deadlines.
• VOIP System Integration: The solution integrates with VOIP telephony systems, such as Aircall, Ringover, Ringcentral, etc. to make and attend calls from the CRM and attach call records & logs to the CRM
• Integration with appointment scheduling tools: The solution integrates with appointment scheduling tools, such as Calendly, MeetingBird, etc. These tools can be connected to any existing calendar application.
• Integration with video conferencing tools: The solution integrates with video conferencing tools such as Zoom and MS Teams
• Integration with electronic signature solutions: The solution integrates with electronic signature tools such as Docusign, Yousign, etc.
• Project management system integration: The solution integrates with project management tools such as JIRA, Trello, Asana, Monday, etc.
• Integration of ticketing systems: The solution integrates ticketing platforms such as Zendesk, Jira, etc. to create and display the history of each ticket
• ERP system integration: The solution integrates with popular ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
• BI software integration: The solution integrates with business reporting tools such as Tableau, Power Bi, Oracle Bi, etc.
• External database integration: The solution integrates with B2B databases such as clearbit, apollo, zoominfo, etc. to enrich your contact and company data
• Accounting system integration: The solution integrates with accounting software such as Stripe, QuickBooks, etc. to streamline the management of payments, invoices, customer subscription information, etc.
• CPQ integration: The solution integrates with CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) platforms such as Conga or Oracle CPQ, etc. to build commercial proposals based on a catalogue
• Cloud storage integration: The solution integrates with popular storage and synchronisation systems such as Dropbox, etc.
• Emailing software integration: The solution integrates with various emailing platforms such as Sendinblue, Mailchimp, etc. to create, manage and segment OPT-IN email lists and send targeted newsletters to large groups of contacts.
• Marketing automation software integration: The solution integrates with various marketing automation tools such as Pardot, Hubspot, etc. to synchronise sales and marketing data
• Messaging platform integration: The solution integrates with popular messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc.
• Forms software integration: The solution integrates with online forms platforms such as Jotform, TypeForm, etc. to capture and send new leads or feedback forms from website contacts or accounts to the CRM
• Landing page software integration: The solution integrates with landing page builders like Unbounce to design landing pages and synchronise lead capture.
• Open API: The solution provides open APIs for retrieving, creating, updating or deleting custom data, modules and views or for creating custom integrations with third-party systems.
• Webhooks: The solution allows the use of webhooks to trigger actions in third party applications whenever an event occurs in the CRM.
• Widgets: The solution provides SDK to create widgets that help integrate a third party service and create interface components in the CRM. Widgets can synchronise data between the solution and other third party applications
• Enterprise collaboration platform integration: The solution integrates with popular enterprise collaboration platforms such as Slack, MS Teams, etc.
• E-commerce software integration: The solution integrates with the main e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, Prestashop, etc.

#12 Quality of the user experience

We’re leaving the field of pure functionality for a moment to tackle a subject that is fundamental to all CRM projects: adoption. The user experience offered by the software you choose is one of the first determining factors for the success (or failure) of your CRM project, whether you are looking to equip a very small company with 3 workstations or a large group with several hundred licences.

There are several very simple features that ensure a successful user experience, so don’t neglect them when building your CRM specification.

• Custom fields: The solution allows you to create custom fields to collect specific information about prospects, contacts, opportunities, products, etc.
• Reminders: The solution allows you to set reminders or generate automated emails to be sent at a scheduled time.
• Notes: The solution allows you to add text or audio notes to different records (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc.)
• Real-time notifications: The solution provides tools to provide and filter real-time notifications for all customer interactions
• Customised branding: The solution allows the integration of the company logo, default colours and company information into landing pages, emails, live chat windows etc.
• Colour-coded: The solution allows you to set colour-coded icons to check scheduled and overdue tasks in the Sales Pipeline view or the next follow-up activity for leads, contacts and offers in the List view.
• Custom views and filters: The solution allows you to create custom views and then use advanced filtering options to filter CRM records.
• Custom modules: The solution allows for the addition and export of custom modules to collect custom data sets and organise subsets of information. Packages can be generated to accommodate multiple modules of different types.
• Customised layouts: The solution allows you to customise the design of the prospect sheet, product sheets, etc.
• Multilingual: The solution supports multiple languages and provides language packs to change the language of the user interface in the CRM application.
• Multi-currency: The solution allows you to set the default currency, define exchange rates against the default currency and generate invoices for international customers in their currencies.
• Customised applications: The solution allows to create custom applications (validation rules, standard and custom objects, calculated fields, workflow automation)
• Table view: The solution provides a way to convert the CRM into a spreadsheet view to make mass changes
• Case management: The solution allows you to create cases, assign users and track requests, questions, problems or comments from customers, suppliers and partners.
• Test environments: The solution allows you to create new test environments, clone existing environments and update environments to match production configurations.
• Deploying new configurations: The solution can deploy customisations and configurations from a test environment to a production environment.

#13 Mobile Access

Mobile CRM is not always necessary, but when it is, there are generally three levels of mobile access to CRM software:

• Responsive design: The solution provides users with a consistent experience on any device with a fully responsive web platform or mobile and tablet application.
• Offline access: The software provides offline access and support for creating, playing, updating and deleting records. It automatically synchronises data when an Internet connection is available.
• Native mobile applications: The solution provides native applications for iOS and Android devices with features such as access and update of CRM data, meeting planning, …

#14 Integration of social networks

Sales are becoming more and more social, no one is teaching you anything. The ability of CRM software to facilitate exchanges and visibility on what is happening is not to be overlooked either. On the functional side, this generally translates into:

• Social media integration: The solution allows you to publish, reply, follow hashtags or posts on the main social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It also allows to enrich CRM data with publications or information present on these networks
• Triggers: The solution allows you to set up triggers to create a new entry automatically when an action is performed on social networks. For example, when someone sends a DM to the company on Twitter
• Widgets: The solution provides widgets to engage prospects in conversation on social networks
• Social interaction and follow-up: The solution records all information and activities on social networks and adds them to the corresponding records in the CRM.
• Automated monitoring: The solution allows companies to monitor certain keywords (brand names of major accounts or competitors for example) to find out what is being said on social networks or in the press.

#15 Collaboration and teamwork features

As the CRM is the preferred work tool for sales teams, some offer internal communication features to facilitate the exchange of documents and information, and generally simplify and accelerate internal conversations.

• Clustering: The solution allows you to categorise records from social networks using keywords. For example to separate recommendations, customer reviews and support requests on twitter.
• User groups: The solution allows the creation of multiple user groups based on shared characteristics to manage access rights
• Private chat: The solution provides private chat functionality to collaborate and share sales updates and records internally.
• @Mention: The solution offers the possibility to tag team members in notes / posts.
• Geolocation: The solution allows field representatives to record their geolocation for customer meetings to keep other team members informed.

#16 Non-functional CRM needs

#16.1. Customer support

In customer support, the following six elements are generally considered:

• Forums and user community: Does the product have a forum to find answers or ask questions to the user community?
• Chat and instant messaging: Does the provider offer live chat customer support solutions?
• Telephone and email support: Does the supplier offer customer support solutions by email and telephone?
• 24×7 technical support: Does the supplier offer 24×7 customer support solutions?
• SLA: Is a service level agreement (SLA) available?
• Penalties: Does the vendor accept penalties if SLAs are not met?

#16.2. Training and onboarding

• In-app help and contextual suggestions: Does the provider offer in-app help and contextual suggestions to assist with onboarding?
• Training materials: Does the supplier offer training materials to help configure and use various product features?
• Free live training: Does the vendor provide free live training?
• Certifications: Does the supplier offer training and certification programmes for product users?

#16.3. Security

We don’t need to tell you how important it is to protect your customer file

• Compliance with applicable regulations: The solution is compliant with various applicable regulations such as GDPR, Can-Spam, etc.
• Role-based permissions: The solution allows you to assign roles for users, define module and access level permissions for different roles and control access to data with different sharing levels.
• Two-factor authentication: The solution allows you to set up two-factor authentication for all users or for a specific group of users
• SSO: The solution allows you to set up SSO (Single Sign On) and provide automatic access to users without prompting them to log in separately if they have already authenticated in the enterprise identity management system.
• Activity logging: The solution records all administrative and user actions and generates a report on these activities.
• Data encryption: The solution encrypts all types of unused data, such as relational databases, stored files, database backups, etc. using various encryption technologies.

#16.4. Maintenance

Maintenance contracts Does the supplier offer maintenance contracts to ensure that updates, upgrades and maintenance services are carried out regularly?

• Maintenance contracts: Does the supplier offer maintenance contracts to ensure that updates, upgrades and maintenance services are carried out regularly?
• Deployment services: Does the supplier offer installation and integration services to minimise the on-site expertise required to deploy the solution?
• Deployment services: Does the supplier offer installation and integration services to minimise the on-site expertise required to deploy the solution?
• On-site maintenance: Does the supplier provide an on-site maintenance service?
• Capping of integration costs: Can implementation costs be capped and/or fixed in advance?

#16.5. Deployment options, availability, and performance

• SaaS option: Does the solution have a SaaS offering?
• Cloud hosting: Is the solution hosted in the cloud?
• High availability: The system allows for high availability through means such as redundant backups, cloud nodes or other methods.
• Error tolerance: The solution is built to recover automatically from a single point of failure.
• Scalability: The solution must be scalable horizontally and vertically.
• Dynamic scalability: The solution can handle a variable load and adapt to peaks in usage