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CRM ReviewsReview Of Big Contacts Web Based CRM Solution(CRM Review conducted by Contenta)
BigContacts – CRM on the Web In today's competitive world, two activities which are critical for survival of your business are acquiring new customers and keeping existing ones happy through proactive customer retention initiatives. One of the critical tools of technology that helps you achieve this efficiently is CRM (customer relationship management). Traditionally, CRM came into existence as applications that could be installed on client side after paying license fees and bearing costs for implementation of the solution. Today, even small and medium enterprises can avail of CRM solutions through the Software as a Solution (SaaS) model. This model has immense benefits of pay-as-you-use, instant implementation, and zero initial capital costs. We explore BigContacts, a hosted customer contact management solution that claims to help organizations of any scale, manage their customer interactions with great ease. In their words, BigContacts is designed for small businesses that have outgrown basic solutions like Excel, Outlook, or ACT! but don't want the cost and complexity of high-end CRM solutions. Getting started with BigContacts: You can sign up with BigContacts and set up a fully functional customer management system almost immediately. All you need to do is logon to www.bigcontacts.com and select the number of users you need and make the payment. When we tried logging on to the site, we found it to be fast in its response. The first thing that caught our eye on the homepage itself was an enticing 30 day no-commitment, free trial offer, where in you could just provide your basic details and get a complete feel of the fully functional product. The features of the product and its performance over an average speed Internet connection are convincing enough to make it an application for small and medium businesses. Once you are convinced with the trial, you can sign up for extended usage of the solution, and for as many users as you need. Pricing of BigContacts is on per user basis for a defined period of time, beginning one month. Pricing begins at $24.95 per user in case you wish to go for a monthly billing per user. The rate falls to $14.95 per user, per month, if you prepay for a complete year. There are intermediate plans for quarterly and half yearly billing too. Adorable features of BigContacts Service
Service features of BigContacts: All of the features provided by Big Contacts can be classified in three categories.
The fundamental presentation of information within BigContacts can be set to either Contact Centric mode or Account Centric mode. Contact Centric mode will be more relevant, if your business involves clients which are more individual in nature, where the proprietor or a single individual at the client side is completely responsible for purchase decisions. However, if your clients are more institutional in nature where decisions as well as delivery happen across multiple departments, the account centric mode will prove to be useful. This is one of the unique data organization features of BigContacts that we have not spotted prominently so far in other hosted CRM packages. Product walkthrough Much to our delight, there is a fully 50 contact loaded, live and functional testing account of the application available on www.bigcontacts.com. Within the BigContacts Product Overview section, you will find “Live Account” button prominently placed to gain access to this test account. We now look at a simple process of creating a new contact and assigning a to-do task to it through BigContacts. Contacts Page:
The page also enables you to do a quick search for contacts to add details to the same. The left-hand side bar will also show you a set of buttons that allow certain important actions pertaining to the contact. These buttons allow you to log interactions, send out emails, flag sales opportunities, or assign tasks or create to-do item pertaining to the client. To create a new contact you need to click on the New Contact button that opens up a popup menu similar to the one in the screenshot below.
Once the contact is ready it is important for you to note what you would like to do next with the contact. This is where the key feature of To Do list helps. The To Do list can be accessed by opening the contact and clicking on the “Assign Task / To do” button in the left-hand side bar. The feature allows you to assign a required action to the contact, and further assign the action to a member of your sales team to complete. On clicking the To Do list button a pop-up box appears, as seen in the screenshot below.
Once assigned, the task appears in the to-do list with the status of other assigned tasks. You can see the to-do list displayed in the screenshot of the contacts page of the task recipient, below
As seen in the steps above, creating as well as managing contacts and associated tasks can be very easy. The system ensures no tasks are left undone, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and conversion efficiency of the sales team. Reports Section The reports section, seen in the screenshot below, provides a host of customized as well as standard reports that helps you track personal as well as team productivity.
Standard sales reports based on different periods can be quite handy for immediate sales management presentations and as inputs for budgeting. Marketing Section The marketing section helps you conduct direct marketing campaigns over email and even snail-mailed postcards. Campaign-wise conversion reports can be generated to measure effectiveness of every marketing buck spent. Support Section The support section gives you access to a knowledgebase of troubleshooters as well as feature descriptions. The support section also grants you access to live chat support for certain working hours. Tickets can also be raised for tracking and resolving issues that you may face during the course of usage of the solution. Conclusion All in all, during the review we found BigContacts just right for small and medium enterprises to manage their customer contacts better. With a simple browser-based interface, BigContacts works with satisfactory levels of performance even on a dial-up speed account. The support and availability of the CRM solution as a hosted product makes it attractive with zero time to go live. The neatly arranged product features made available through an intuitive user interface makes this a great potential replacement for Salesforce CRM and other comparatively expensive CRM implementations.
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