In the modern business landscape, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is essential. Having a CRM means you have a central hub for managing customer interactions, streamlining processes and fostering relationships with your customers.
Having a CRM means you can make informed, data-driven decisions that keep your customers at the centre of everything you do. CRM is an integral part of any business strategy that responds to current trends and challenges. Using a CRM is not just a nice to have, it’s an essential tool for any organisation to thrive and stay competitive.
That’s where Vtiger comes in. It is designed to help you manage and maintain relationships not only with your customers, but also with partners and suppliers. It provides contact and lead management, sales automation, project management, inventory management and customer support functionality.
There are two ways to use Vtiger – you can go all out and install, host and configure the open source CRM or subscribe to the cloud-based paid version. For this review, I’m going to write about the paid hosted version.
Pros and cons of Vtiger
When you use Vtiger, you can store customer data, track interactions and manage communications all in one place. It includes tools for automating tasks, tracking deals and analysing sales performance.
It also has project management capabilities so you can coordinate and monitor projects within the CRM. In other words, you can do everything from lead prospecting to post-sales engagement.
With its customisation options, you can tailor it to your specific needs. To make it work with your existing business tools, Vtiger offers integrations with third party applications.
Pros
- GDPR conform
- Email and phone integration included in all plans
- Forever free plan for up to 10 users but with limited file storage and smaller feature set
- Submit ticket via email included in all plans
- Extensive feature list minimises the need to use extensions and third party integrations
- Supports multiple currencies
- Stellar customer care
- Mobile app to manage your contacts on the go
Cons
- The 15 days free trial period might be a bit short to really experience all of Vtigers features
- Needs a pristine internet connection
Who is Vtiger for?
If you’re looking for a way to centralise and keep track of all your marketing and sales efforts, Vtiger is a good choice. It works best for
- small businesses facing challenges around sales and after sales
- small businesses aiming to centralise and doing digital marketing
- midsized business looking to have one tool for sales, marking and support teams to collaborate and close deals
- startups to get their sales and marketing efforts rolling
- sales teams in all kinds of organisations thanks to its lead scoring, segmentation, and the task and deal management tools
The pricing also indicates that these groups are the ideal customers for Vtiger.
How easy is Vtiger to use?
In contrast to other CRMs such as Salesforce, Vtiger doesn’t unnecessarily make the process but it can complicated, but it can take a while for Vtiger to set everything up for you.
A lot of thought has gone into designing a clean user interface. But let’s face the facts: you’re going to need to invest a bit of time to get to grips with Vtiger. That’s all due to the fact that Vtiger is an all-in-one CRM with a ton of features.
Having a minimal and clean user interface means that Vtiger puts its long list of features into a nested menu interface. The nested menu means that you don’t get a crowded and cluttered menu where you can get frustrated or confused. But it’s also easy to forget where the information is hidden.
That’s the trade-off you’ll always have: Do you want a comprehensive feature set, or do you want convenience and ease of use? It’s a shame that Vtiger doesn’t pre-populate your CRM with sample data to guide you.
Key features
Vtiger’s is an all-in-one CRM, hence the large feature set. The core feature, of course, is contact management. It’s where you store, organise and track contact information along with interaction history. Contact management gives you a holistic view of your customer and allows you to contact them with the right information when they want it.
You can then use it to build your sales pipeline and segment your contacts for marketing campaigns.
Sales Automation
Use Vtiger CRM’s sales automation to reduce tedious and repetitive tasks such as capturing leads from multiple sources such as website forms, emails and social media. What’s not to like when you can set up workflows in minutes and then save time and effort by not having to remember to follow up with a customer next week? With Vtiger, you can set it up to send proactive alerts and notifications to help you stay on top of leads – a nice low-tech way to ensure the pipeline stays active.
Deal Management
Vtiger allows you to efficiently organise, monitor and progress your sales pipeline. It allows you to set deal parameters, customise deal stages and create custom fields to track data such as estimated close dates and key contacts.
A visual representation of the sales pipeline allows you to track the progress of deals and identify potential bottlenecks or areas of focus. This enables you to gain insight into your deal pipeline and make data-driven decisions to drive growth.
Forecasting
Speaking of data-driven decisions, because Vtiger gives you a holistic view of your customer interactions, it shows you whether you’re on track to meet your sales targets. Based on historical data, Vtiger predicts future sales so you can allocate resources effectively and prioritise your sales efforts.
Calculus AI
As AI advances by leaps and bounds, Vtiger’s AI assistant, Calculus AI, can recommend your next best action. Based on conversation analysis, Calculus AI can determine the best time to contact customers, suggest email subject lines and assist live agents in crafting the ideal response message. Calculus AI can also track and analyse sentiment, score deals and predict sales.
Reporting
Vtiger constantly monitors and analyses your data and comes up with a load of reports for sales, marketing, employee performance, and more. It lets you keep a close eye on your metrics such as
Leads by source
Monthly activities
Sales insights
Invoice reports
Activity trends
Contacts emailed
Help desk
Vtiger is not only a useful tool for marketing and sales but also for your post sales activities. Your support agents can see all historic interactions and collaborate with your marketing and sales team so that your business can provide context-aware assistance.
Inventory management
You can also use Vtiger to manage the supply side of your business. It allows you to manage all information about your products and services, including serial numbers, images, descriptions, prices and quantities. With centralised stock management, you can monitor stock movements, track purchases and sales, and generate accurate stock reports. In other words, you can avoid overstocking or understocking.
Integrations
The comprehensive feature list reduces the need to find and use integrations and plug-ins. If you still need something more, you can browse the built-in add-ons and integrations (see below).
You can find and add paid or free integrations. Vtiger offers integrations to popular services like Quickbooks, Mailchimp or Magneto.
Vtiger customer support
Vtiger is popular because of its excellent and responsive support. You can get help through their chat support and submit a ticket via email regardless of your subscription. You can also take advantage of their training resources, webinars and online community forums.
Vtiger pricing
At first glance, Vtiger’s pricing structure looks confusing and you need to dig deeper. Vtiger generally offers a free plan and two paid plans, but the two paid plans are further divided into standard and single application.
The standard price means you have full access to all modules, including sales, tagging and service. The Single App price gives you full access to only one aspect and all the others are read-only.
The paid plans include a 15-day free trial period. It’s good to see that you can take Vtiger for a spin without handing over your credit card details.
In summary, you get
- A Pilot, the forever free plan for up to 10 users
- One Professional Standard at $42 per month per user
- One Professional single application at $28 per month per user
- One Enterprise Standard at $58 per user per month
- One Enterprise single application at $42 per month per user
As you can see from the pricing, Vtiger is aimed at small and medium sized businesses as well as start-ups.
Is Vtiger the right tool for you?
Choose Vtiger if you want an affordable, full-featured CRM with excellent customer support.
Vtiger isn’t for you if you’re a marketing or creative agency. Although its marketing features are solid and you won’t lose money, you may get more out of a CRM that specialises in this sector. Similarly, large organisations and businesses won’t get what they need because they have complex needs. In both cases, you might want to look at Creatio or Hubspot.
Original post here: Vtiger review
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