If you want to build a stable and profitable business, it’s important to have solid relationships with your customers. Establishing and nurturing these relationships can be bumpy. To create a truly customer-centric experience, you have to know your customers’ preferences and the context in which they engage with your organisation. Having a customer relationship management software (CRM) is evident:
You have all historical data stored in one place so that you can streamline and optimise your workflow when interacting with your clients. This makes it easier to manage customer relationships.
Most companies use some kind of CRM system. It can be cobbled together from various different applications and services such as Excel sheet, your address book, and email programme.
In the corporate world, most of the marketing and sales work is done collectively and across multiple departments. This means if you want to really build a stable and successful business, you need a serious CRM.
Having a CRM means collaboration across multiple departments is easier and all get to work with the same data. This is how you can create a customer-centric experience.
And, this is where Bitrix24 comes in. For Bitrix 24, it’s all about communication. Hence it’s a CRM combined with company communication tools, project management, file sharing, website builder including shopping cart, and human resource management tools.
Pros and cons of Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a CRM that also serves as a social networking tool. Its suite of tools that makes communication for small and medium-size enterprises a piece of cake. It gives you tools to manage leads and pipelines, segment customers, and run your ecommerce business.
Its unified communication and collaboration platform comes with project management, contact centre, and website builder modules. Thus it eliminates the need to use different software for each task which can be costly as well as inefficient.
It can be used as software as a service where everything is taken care of for you or you can host it yourself. Despite its extensive feature list, it’s affordable. You can use at least 90% of its tools for free.
Pros
- Extensive feature list while being budget-friendly
- Multilingual support including French, Polish, Japanese, traditional and simplified Chinese, Thai, and more
- A ton of integrations
- Mobile app to manage your tasks on the go
- Powerful search function
- Almost everything can be customised on the hosted version
- You can host the open source version and bend it to your will (if you have the development skills)
- Forever free plan where you can use all of its basic features
Cons
- Even though the interface is well-designed, with its vast feature set, it might take some time to get used to
Who is Bitrix24 for?
If you’re looking to “professionalise” your Excel sheet, Bitrix24 is a good place to start. It offers solid CRM functionality to SMEs and startups.
If you’re looking for a tool to centralise internal communication and collaboration, look no further. This feature works well for organisations of any size.
It’s particularly well-suited for SMEs with remote employees or who have offices in different locations. It’s also a good choice if you offer project-oriented services to your clients, then you can manage your projects, clients, and employees from a unified single interface.
What is Bitrix24 used for?
Its vast feature set means that anyone can use Bitrix24. Most commonly it’s used by sales and marketing teams for managing leads and customers. This is a quick overview of what you can do
- Create leads
- Generate quotes and invoices
- Close deals
- Record information
- Assign tasks
- Share information with the team
- Sort records
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Organise and manage appointments
- Create and manage campaigns
Other departments will also find Bitrix useful:
- Management can schedule tasks and improve the productivity of different teams
- HR can manage employee information, generate and analyse performance reports
- Legal can streamline legal processes
- Customer support has different channels such as phone, chat, mail, and more where they can help customers
How easy is Bitrix24 to use?
Creating a free account is embarrassingly simple. Just enter your email and voila, all is done. No endless questions, no lengthy forms, no credit card.
Bitrix24 has put a lot of brain power into designing a modern, well-thought-out workspace. But with its vast feature set, it might still feel a wee bit overwhelming when you start. Each time you open a new tab, quick hints show you what you can do. Still, it’s one of the more intuitive CRMs to use.
In the unified workspace, you can complete complex tasks without jumping to and fro. You can do everything from communication to telemarketing to contact management to time tracking to filesharing easily, all from one place.
It’s certainly a boon that you can customise almost anything. You can change what you see in the left side menu. You can set the collaboration feed as the homepage for all your team members. Or you set the access permissions for different access levels and workgroups.
That said, for some, it can be a two-edged sword. It can make the learning curve steeper.
Key features
You’ll find that Bitrix24 has split its features into communications, tasks and projects, CRM, contact centre, and websites.
Communication hub
Its communication tools mean that it serves as a hub for all your internal communications, similar to Microsoft Teams. It’s a bit like social networking with its news feed where you can see updates about projects and leads. You can also chat via video, chat room, workspaces, and get it all in one place.
All plans include cloud storage so that you can easily share and store documents similar to Google Drive with document editing. And as an added boon you see the changelogs and dynamic search.
For HR, there’s the HR tool that manages attendance, reports, workflow, payroll, and employee directories.
This leads seamlessly not its support for calendars. It integrates with iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, Exchange, and CalDAV so that your team can share calendars and it allows easy calendar sync.
Tasks
Working in a team means that you need to plan and assign tasks. With Bitrix24, you can make sure that everything stays on track and on time. With the group task manager, you can track how much time was spent on projects and who is working on what at any point in time. Probably the most important is that you can hold your team members accountable.
At the same time, it ties in neatly with the communication hub so that all your coworkers can share their thoughts, issues, and successes with you.
CRM
The CRM is included with all plans for unlimited contacts. You can manage and keep track of the interactions with your potential and existing clients, partners, agents, and other contacts.
You get funnel management tools, pipeline management, sales reports, support for repeat customers, and sales automation tools.
You get to see how your current pipeline looks, who is in what stage of the funnel, and who is not moving at all. You can track all the marketing costs so that you can calculate your return. This gives you insight into what campaigns you should double down and which ones you should close.
You also get different tools to promote your brand and products. The different channels you can use are
- Email marketing
- SMS
- Phone
- Voice broadcasting,
- Social ads
- Retargeting
- And then some
This alone would require using different services and tools that you need to cobble together and somehow make them work together. With Bitrix24, you’ll find it works seamlessly to capture leads, track them, manage the project, and keep track of your team.
Contact centre
The communication centre serves as the Helpdesk for your customers with email ticketing, live chat, and phone support. It supports an unlimited number of incoming and outgoing calls, automatic call distribution, and call queuing. In short, it has an excellent intelligent call routing system.
The telephony features are completely integrated into its CRM and you don’t need any special IP-telephony equipment. You just need a reliable internet connection. You can record the conversation, with the audio files appended to the clients’ record.
The contact centre does analytics and reporting. This means you can see stats on channel activity, based on date or time, or client satisfaction.
You can also use the contact centre with email marketing, social network audience targeting, and sales automation.
Websites
You can create a website with Bitrix24’s point and click website builder. It’s so convenient to have this tool for your communication projects. You can build landing pages, simple websites, and even online stores without a single line of code.
What makes Bitrix stand out from your run of the mill website builder is that it has website templates, pre-built building blocks, a secure site with an SSL certificate, a free image library, and much more. And, it seamlessly ties in with the CRM as well as the live chat.
It’s a very promising proposal to also run an online store in Bitrix, seeing how it ties in neatly with the CRM and contact centre. You get the essentials for your store with a catalogue to display your products and tools for managing inventories. Of course, you can manage the orders, and you can even set up discounts and promotions.
Bitrix24 integrations
Since Bitrix24 is a CRM, you’d want to use it with other services. So it comes with more than 400 integrations.
Bitrix24 customer support
For people who want quick answers, you can find the majority of common questions in the FAQ section. It’s split into topics for
- Feed
- Tasks
- Telephony
- Settings
- And so on
Only paid subscription gives you access to chat with the tech support.
Bitrix24 pricing
Did I mention that 90% or more of the features can be used in the free plan? This includes the CRM, collaboration and task management tools as well as the contact centre and website builder.
All five together make not only a power CRM but an entire enterprise management system.
If you need more storage, access to the support team, and in general just more advanced options, you have to subscribe to a paid plan.
Is Bitrix24 the right tool for you?
Whether you know it or not, if you running a business, you’re using some sort of a CRM system, even if it’s just an excel sheet. If you’re just starting out or running an SME, Bitrix24 will help you improve your communication internally in your company and externally with your clients.
With the help of the CRM, you can track leads, push them through the funnels, and close them. You can also talk with your clients quickly relay any necessary information.
Bitrix also helps with your document sharing, organising your team, and managing tasks. The suit of HR tools helps you keep track of your employees and keep communications open with them.
If you look at the communication hub, tasks management, CRM, contact centre, and websites and how they work seamlessly together, you find it’s not only a powerful CRM but an entire enterprise management system.
And did I mention it’s a lot of the features are free? So, yes Bitrix24 is worth it. No feature is locked away in the free plan so you can try out everything.
When you need more options, it’s easy to upgrade. If you’re more advanced, you can take the open source software and tweak it to anything you need.
Original post here: Bitrix24 review
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