There’s a lot to do from generating a lead to closing a deal, even better if you can get the customer to repeatedly buy from you. Just imagine how much easier the life of your sales and marketing staff could be if you could automate workflows for marketing, sales, and service but without coding AND with as much freedom as you could like.
That’s why Creatio started as bpm’online. BPM as in business process management. Creatio’s first product in 2011 was bpm’online CRM and it was great for people without prior tech knowledge to create a process that can be applied to sales or marketing functions or even across the entire organisation.
In the meantime, it rebranded itself to Creatio and has added more products to its suite of BPM applications. Depending on what your business needs, you can pick and choose marketing, sales, and service automation tools to automate the entire customer journey.
- Marketing Creatio helps to take the load off your shoulders for marketing campaigns and lead management workflows
- Sales Creatio helps you create and automate sales processes of any type
- Use Service Creatio if you plan to offer multichannel customer service of any complexity
There’s also Creatio Studio, which is designed specifically to streamline, automate, and orchestrate business management processes. You’ll find that Creatio places a strong emphasis on automation without coding, UI customisation, and AI for predictive analysis and recommendations.
Pros and cons of Creatio
Creatio main offering consists of marketing, sales, and service automation products for you to automate the entire customer journey of your business. You can get them all bundled together or as a standalone to cover your business needs.
You can use it to manage and streamline B2B sales, e-commerce, partner relationship management, customer service, a combination, or all of the above. Taking a peek at its pricing as well as considering its huge range of tools and features, it’s clear that Creatio is targeting larger organisations.
Pros
- High degree of customisation and flexibility
- Easy to use interface even with its huge feature set
- 14 days free trial is not limited to a subset of features
Cons
- Pricy
- Convoluted pricing structure
- Separate plans for support
Who is Creatio for?
Any type or size of business that wants to get a grip on its processes can benefit from using Creatio. Its no-code environment is versatile and makes it easy for non-techies to develop a process that works in the entire business.
The no-code environment doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have a learning curve. Also, it has a wide selection of tools and features. Once mastered though, you can do all sorts of customisation, great if your business has more specific needs.
This level of flexibility means that it’s not really for the novice and may be too complex for small business owners – as can be seen expressed in the prices. You can use Creatio’s products in the cloud as well as on-prem – another sign that it’s aiming for larger businesses.
How easy is Creatio to use?
When you first create your account, Creatio goes ahead and populates it with sample data so that you have something to play with and get used to its work environment. The interface itself is well designed. Everything is grouped into sections that belong together making the application easy to get to grips with and to navigate. It lets you do everything with just a few mouse clicks.
The learning curve is coming from the fact that it has such a huge number of features and functions. You’ll have to invest time to learn about all of them. But once you do, it can give you and your business wings. Hence why it’s not for novices or people who don’t have the time to learn all about the available features.
Key features
Creatio CRM is made up of the modules for marketing, sales, and service. Then it’s complemented by Studio with which you can automate about any process in your business. Each of the applications in the suite come with its distinctly different set of features.
Marketing
With its built-in workflows, templates, and connectors, Marketing Creatio helps you generate leads, increase conversions, and improve your efficacy. You can identify what your contacts want and when you get them what they want turn them into paying (and repeat) customers.
Of course, there are features that you’d want in marketing automations such as
- Email marketing
- Marketing campaign management
- Synchronization and import
- Event management
Sales
Once you’ve identified an opportunity, you’ll want to work and turn them into a customer. Out of the gates, Sales Creatio comes with workflows and tools based on industry best practices to take the guesswork out and help you get results in the shortest possible period.
You can track and automate sales processes of about any kind and complexity from a quick ecommerce buy to convoluted B2B sales. Its interface also shows you clearly the relationship between marketing campaigns, customer service, and eventually sales.
Customer service
Just like with the other two modules, Service Creatio also comes with a wide selection of predefined processes and solutions for you to manage and if possible automate customer service. You’re not limited to just servicing via chat but can deliver services across multiple communication channels. And, you can see every interaction no matter if it’s via phone, email(opens in new tab), live chat, or social media all within its interface.
Creatio integrations
Creatio has a great degree of flexibility to integrate into your organisation’s eco system. It not only lets you customise and create dashboards for your needs, it also has a large “zoo” of third party integrations. Its integrations fall into (not an exhaustive list):
- Document management
- Analytics & reporting
- HR management
- Development
- Productivity
- Collaboration
- Accounting
Creatio customer support
You’ll find you also need to choose a plan for support. Of course, the more options and the higher level of support you need, the more Creatio will tug on your purse strings.
Creatio pricing
As you’ve seen, the four different modules each offer their own set of features. This means you may have to subscribe to more than just one plan to get all the tools you need.
Not only that, the different modules each have a different basis for their pricing with the only constant of how many users need to use it.
Is Creatio the right tool for you?
As a no-code tool, Creatio is giving you options on how you want to set up not only your CRM but your entire IT infrastructure. It helps you manage, automate and orchestrate all of your business processes.
If you can afford it, all of its 4 modules or a combination thereof will (most probably) help you grow your business or at least help you save costs in that it improves your efficiency. It not only automates tasks but also gives you suggestions, predicting what the next best step should be.
If you find its huge feature list daunting or just starting on your CRM journey, you may want to take a peek at Pipedrive or Onepage CRM.
Original post here: Creatio review
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