It takes more than a calendar, a phone book and maybe a spreadsheet to effectively manage customer data. Today, customer interactions span multiple channels and manual management can be overwhelming.
Building and maintaining strong customer relationships is paramount. But manual methods, handwritten notes, spreadsheets and disjointed systems won’t cut it when customer relationships are key to a business’s success.
Any business, regardless of size or industry, will find CRM essential to navigating the complex landscape of customer relationships. Agile CRM is a step up in the way you manage and organise your customer interactions. It’s customer relationship management (CRM) software designed to help you manage various aspects of your customer relationships and sales processes.
The pros and cons of Agile
Agile is an all-in-one CRM. It integrates and automates sales, marketing and customer service functions in a single platform. It includes tools for lead management, email marketing, social media engagement and more. You won’t miss out on analytics and reporting, so you can make informed, data-driven decisions to improve your overall operations.
It’s a hosted solution. Because it’s cloud-based, you can access it from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. Agile also manages updates and maintenance, so you don’t have to worry about your own infrastructure, security and updates.
Pros
- GDPR conform
- Easy to use
- Free forever for up to 10 users albeit with limited feature list
Cons
- Asks for your phone number at signup
- A minor niggle is that the sales pipeline columns have fixed names and can’t be customised
Who is Agile for?
Agile is particularly well suited to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and start-ups. It’s an all-in-one CRM, so you can use it across your marketing, sales and service teams. This makes it easy to manage your marketing efforts, deals, contacts and tickets.
There’s a free plan for up to 10 seats, making it a no-brainer for startups and teams or businesses with up to 10 members. Granted, you will have access to a limited set of features.
If you are a sales team and want a CRM with social media integration, Agile has you covered with its social monitoring and integrations with popular social media such as Facebook.
How easy is Agile to use?
Anyone can create an account and get started for free. Agile is so confident in its features and service that it doesn’t ask for credit card details, although it does ask for your phone number.
Once your account has been created, you’ll see your dashboard. The dashboard shows you your tasks and activities for the day. It’s a shame that Agile doesn’t prepare a fresh account with sample data to show you the ropes. But even without the sample data, it’s well laid out.
In the top navigation you’ll find search, calendar, tasks and a Getting Started guide. You can switch between sales, marketing and service views. Each view has a slightly different side menu.
In Sales, you’ll find your contacts, deals, automation, reports and other important pages in the left-hand side menu. All in all, it’s easy to find what you need without getting frustrated or confused.
Key features
At the heart of Agile is contact management. It pulls contacts from many sources. It can keep up to date with your contacts’ social profile information: It updates in real time when a contact makes a change on LinkedIn. It builds a history of your interactions with a customer, giving you a 360 view. The history covers all interactions across all channels, including telephony.
Note that social monitoring is only available for paid accounts.
Deals and opportunities
The Sales Pipeline is a simple yet effective way to visualise your deals. You’ll find your sales pipeline under the Deals tab in the left hand menu. The Sales Pipeline is easy to understand and use.
You drag and drop your leads into the next column as they progress through your sales funnel.
Automation
Automate repetitive sales, marketing and service tasks. Each view offers a different set of automations that work with specific sales, marketing and service tasks.
Email marketing
The Marketing view gives you lots of useful features to help you increase your reach. For email marketing, you get a small set of templates and a solid email builder tool for customisation. When your recipients click or engage with your emails, you can track them. Agile hasn’t forgotten to add email tracking and campaign analytics either.
You can set conditions that trigger an action, such as sending a campaign. You can record and send personalised videos in your emails or use them on your landing pages.
Web engagement
Agile gives you several ways to engage with your audience. You can display targeted pop-ups to new visitors to your site. Agile recognises returning visitors and greets them with a personalised message. You can engage your audience with push notifications and grow your list with landing pages and forms.
Social engagement
Agile not only helps you schedule content for social media. It also monitors social media and automates tasks. What’s more, it’s a social CRM that integrates with popular social media sites such as Facebook. So it can pull social media posts and contact information to enrich contact data.
Calendar and scheduling
Agile includes an online calendar and other time management tools that sync with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Nice feature is that you can allow your contacts to schedule appointments with you using the time slot tool.
Service help desk
The Service View is a comprehensive help desk tool for managing customer requests and support tickets. You can assign, track and prioritise support tickets. You can unify all after-sales activities, even if your customers contact you from different channels. You can set up a support workflow and a knowledge base.
Reporting
Of course, Agile gives you analytics and statistics for marketing, sales and service. You can measure and analyse your performance in all areas. Reports help you identify areas for improvement.
Integrations
The first integration mentioned was with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to enable email and calendar synchronisation. The second is integration with popular social media.
In addition to these two groups, you’ll find
- Support software
- Telephony
- Email and email gateway
- SMS gateway
- Billing
- Ecommerce
- CMS (such as WordPress)
- Web forms and landing pages
- Automation (such as Zapier)
If you have IT capacity, use Agile’s API to create your own integrations.
Agile customer support
When you’re logged into your account, you’ll see a blue “Online” button in the bottom right corner. This indicates that chat support is online. Depending on your subscription, you may also have access to email and phone support.
Agile pricing
Agile offers 4 plans. You can start for free and upgrade to a paid account whenever you need to. The feature set and pricing allows you to scale up to the highest plan (Enterprise). Its pricing is competitive.
The paid subscriptions are Starter for $8.99, Regular for $29.99 and Enterprise for $47.99. All prices are per user per month at the highest discount. If you pay monthly you’ll lose the 40% discount.
Is Agile right for you?
Agile CRM is a comprehensive, all-in-one solution that combines sales, marketing and customer service functionality. If you’re a startup or small business and don’t already have a CRM, it’s a no-brainer. It’s packed full of features and you can use it free for up to 10 users.
Of course, as your business grows, you may need to look at other options, but again, Agile offers a growing feature list with its higher plans. It’s worth noting that the drawbacks are negligible.
If you’re an enterprise or have complex, advanced needs, you may be happier with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or an ERP solution.
Original post here: Agile review
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