What Is a CRM System, What Are the Options, What Does It Cost, and How Does It Work with LINE OA?

What is a CRM system?

A CRM (customer relationship management) system is one shared record of every customer and every deal: who they are, what they asked for, what you quoted, who on your team is handling them, and what should happen next. Its job is to make sure no lead is forgotten and no customer has to repeat themselves because a different salesperson picked up.

In a Thai business that looks concrete. A factory buyer messages your LINE OA asking for a price on 500 units. The CRM creates a deal, assigns it to a salesperson, and records the chat. The salesperson sends a quotation from the same record, and the system reminds them to follow up in three days if the buyer goes quiet. Six months later, when the same buyer calls back, anyone on the team can see the whole history in one screen.

A CRM is not accounting or inventory. It covers the part before the sale closes and the relationship after it. If what you actually need is stock, invoices and purchasing on one database, that is an ERP question, covered in our guide to ERP and accounting software.

What does a CRM include?

Products differ in depth, but almost every CRM is built around the same six parts. If a product lacks the first three, it is a contact list, not a CRM.

• Customer and contact records: companies, the people at each one, and every conversation logged against them
• A sales pipeline: each deal as a card moving through stages you define, such as new enquiry, quoted, negotiating, won or lost
• Tasks and follow-up reminders, so a promised call-back is on someone's list rather than in their memory
• Quotations generated from the deal, with the customer's details already filled in
• Chat and email history, ideally including LINE, attached to the customer record
• Reports: deals by stage, win rate, and expected revenue by month, per salesperson

When have Excel and LINE chats stopped working?

A spreadsheet of customers plus a LINE group for the sales team is how most Thai SMEs start, and it works longer than vendors admit. It stops working when the information you need is spread across people's phones rather than in one place. These are the usual signs.

• A customer says they already told someone, and nobody can find the conversation because it is in one salesperson's personal LINE
• When a salesperson leaves, their customers and deal history leave with their phone
• Nobody can say how many deals are open this month or how much they are worth without asking each person
• Follow-ups slip because the reminder was a sticky note or a message to self
• The same customer exists three times in the sheet, spelled three ways
• Quotations are copied from an old Word file and the prices in them are sometimes out of date

What are the ways to get a CRM?

There are four, and the right one is the cheapest that removes the problems above.

A better spreadsheet. A shared Google Sheet with one row per deal, a status column and a follow-up date column, filtered each morning, costs nothing. It suits a team of two or three people who all sit together. It does not solve the LINE problem, because chats still live on personal phones.

An off-the-shelf SaaS CRM. You pay per user per month and start the same day. International products such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho have mature pipelines and mobile apps. Thai products such as Venio and Readyplanet R-CRM are built around how Thai sales teams work and mention LINE on their own pricing and product pages.

Odoo CRM. Odoo is open source. Its CRM app handles leads and a pipeline, and when you add the Sales app, quotations come straight from the deal. What makes Odoo different is that the same system can later add invoicing, inventory and purchasing without moving your data again.

A custom CRM. Worth it when the way you sell is itself specific: a pricing formula no product supports, an approval chain, a dealer network, or a tight link to a system you already run. You own the code and pay no per-seat fee, but you pay once to build it and need someone to maintain it.

Which CRM is best? Well-known options compared

No CRM is best for everyone, so this table compares what each vendor publishes rather than ranking them. Prices change often and some are shown in different currencies depending on where you browse from, so check the vendor's page before deciding. Everything here was checked on the vendors' own sites in September 2026. The last two rows are SyncEdge's own routes, added for comparison: a CRM we build for you, and Odoo CRM set up by our engineers.

Read the LINE column carefully. Several products connect to LINE through a separate chat product, a specific plan, or a third-party app, which affects both price and what you can actually do.

Which CRM fits a business like mine? Four example scenarios

The four businesses below are illustrative composites of common situations, not our clients. Each row shows where the business starts and the route that usually fits. Find the one closest to yours, then read the matching sections of this guide for the detail.

An off-the-shelf CRM or a CRM built by SyncEdge: what is the difference?

A subscription CRM is running today, and the vendor looks after it. A CRM we build costs more up front and takes longer, but it follows how your team sells, issues your own Thai documents, and connects to your LINE OA and the systems you already run. If a free or low-priced plan already covers how you work, start there. Building pays off only when the products do not fit the way you sell, or cannot connect to what you need them to.

There is a middle route too. If invoicing and stock are coming soon, we can set up Odoo CRM and write the missing pieces as Odoo modules instead of building everything from scratch. We are not an official Odoo partner and sell no licences.

See how we build custom software

How does a CRM work with LINE OA?

Connecting LINE OA to a CRM means every chat lands on a customer record instead of on one person's phone, and your team replies from the CRM. This runs on LINE's Messaging API, and knowing what that API allows saves you from being oversold.

LINE does not give you the customer's phone number or name. What your system receives is a user ID, sent to it when the customer adds your account as a friend or messages it. The ID is different for every LINE provider, so a customer has one ID with your business and a different one with anyone else. To connect that ID to an existing customer, LINE offers an account-linking flow: the customer taps a link in the chat, logs in or identifies themselves on your side, and your system stores the pairing. After that, a LINE chat and the right customer record match automatically.

Then there are two kinds of sending. One-to-one messages go to a single customer, such as a quotation or a delivery update. Broadcast goes to every friend of the account at once, and narrowcast to a segment. Replies to a customer who has just messaged you are free. Messages your business starts, whether one-to-one push, broadcast or narrowcast, count against the monthly message quota of your LINE OA package, and each recipient counts as one message. Package prices and quotas are set per country and change, so check LINE for Business Thailand for the current ones.

One legal point before you broadcast. A CRM makes marketing messages easy, and PDPA still applies to them. Ask for consent with a clearly stated purpose, keep a record of when and how the customer gave it, and give an easy way to opt out, because people have the right to object to direct marketing. Have your legal adviser check the wording once.

LINE OA chatbots: built-in, LINE AI chatbot, or your own

How much does a CRM cost?

A CRM is paid for in one of two ways. A subscription charges per user per month for as long as you use it. A custom build costs a one-off sum up front, plus a smaller yearly cost for hosting and maintenance. Which is cheaper depends on how many people use it and for how many years.

An illustration with made-up round numbers, not a quote. Suppose a plan costs 1,000 baht per user per month and you have 10 users. That is 120,000 baht a year, every year, before VAT. At 30 users it is 360,000 baht a year. Per-seat cost scales with your headcount, which is why a growing sales team is the usual reason people look at a one-off build.

A custom CRM for one clear function with little integration usually lands in the low hundreds of thousands of baht. Connecting it to LINE, your accounting system or an existing ERP pushes it higher. Our guide to custom software cost explains the ranges, and our SaaS versus custom guide works through a five-year comparison.

Whichever route you take, budget for three things that are not on the price page: moving your existing customer data in, setting up the pipeline stages and quotation template, and a paid LINE OA package if you will send more messages than the free quota covers.

Is there a free CRM, and what is the catch?

Yes. HubSpot and Salesforce both offer free plans for up to 2 users, Zoho for up to 3, and Odoo lets you run one app, such as CRM, free with unlimited users on its own cloud. For a small team testing whether a pipeline helps, a free plan is a sensible place to start.

The limits are consistent. The user count is small, contacts or records are capped, and features like automation and detailed reports sit in paid plans. In Odoo's case, issuing quotations from a deal needs the Sales app as well, which makes two apps and takes you off the free plan.

The question to ask before putting customer data into any free plan: can you export all of it, including notes and deal history, to a file yourself? If the answer is no, the price of free is being stuck there.

How do you roll out a CRM so salespeople actually use it?

Most CRMs fail because salespeople stop entering data, not because the software was wrong. The rule that fixes this: the CRM has to save the salesperson time from the first week, not just give management a report.

Start with the pipeline only. Customers, deals, stages and follow-up reminders. Leave marketing automation and scoring for later. Import the existing customer list before launch, cleaned of duplicates, so nobody starts with an empty screen.

Make the CRM the only place where things happen. Quotations are issued from the CRM, LINE OA chats land in the CRM, and the weekly sales meeting reads the pipeline on screen instead of asking each person. Once the meeting runs off the CRM, entering data stops being optional.

Keep the stages few and clearly defined, five or six at most, and write down what moves a deal from one to the next. Review after one month: which fields nobody fills in? Remove them.