CRM Reviews
InTouch CRM Review
It comes as no surprise that web based CRM solution - InTouch CRM, made the shortlist for The 2010 Software Satisfaction Awards. Developed by Customers Really Matter Ltd., this UK based CRM vendor (but trades globally) has built up a prestigious base of clients. InTouch CRM is a new member of our Top 10 CRM List. Read our review of InTouch CRM below.
InTouch CRM – Making the most of your customer data
Managing customer data is a critical element of today's business, where information is the key to the existence of any business today. Day-by-day customers are turning elusive with the immense choice they have pertaining to any product or service they seek. They may find very little reason to continue being your patrons, unless, as a business, you find ways to stay in personal touch with the customer. As a company with hundreds of customers, you may wonder, how can you make each and every interaction of the customer with your company seamlessly personal? Moreover, personal regardless of whoever calls from within your organization to the client.
Like many other challenges, even the one of constant customer contact is addressed effectively by tools of technology, through a suite of products and applications that are provided by the name of CRM – Customer Relationship Management tools. These tools help you as a company, save each and every bit of information regarding each of your clients, so that any person interacting from the organization with the client will have all the information needed about the client. Knowledge of client history can greatly help any representative have personal conversation with the client during each of his contact points.
InTouch CRM helps you maintain records of each and every customer interaction from the lead stage till their repeat sales. Importantly, the application helps you retrieve information regarding the client, conduct targeted marketing activities, and monitor each and every activity through smart reports.
About InTouch CRM
InTouch CRM takes you beyond the offerings of a conventional CRM package. Our first glance at the product revealed that apart from helping manage customer data, the package allows you to do targeted email and SMS-based campaigns and measure its results.
InTouch offers a great deal of features and functionalities to acquire and retain customers, and increase sales per customer. These features help you:
- Conduct targeted email and SMS based campaigns that can be directed at new prospects to get them into your clientele. The campaign can also be selectively targeted at a group derived from your existing customer, for goodwill communication, product upgrades, and even cross selling them some of your other products
- Gather responses generated through the campaign, and respond immediately to the same.
- Maintain records of each and every interaction for all customers big and small in the system
- Generate reports that can help management take quick decision about the effectiveness of marketing efforts, and fine tune it further.
- Also integrates to award-winning small business accounting system, KashFlow.
What appears as a CRM tool at the first glance, comes as a complete package of a Customer management system, Direct Marketing communication tool, and a Sales automation application, that empowers your organization to take sales and business acquisition to a new level.
Getting Started with InTouch CRM
Unlike traditional software solutions, InTouch CRM doesn't require a single installation on your computer. The solution also does not require expensive hardware requirements like web servers. InTouch is offered as a completely hosted solution. All you need is a web browser with a reasonable speed Internet connection to help you connect to the service.
What's more? To get started with InTouch doesn't even cost a dime, and you can get started in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is:
- Log on to InTouch CRM website and fill out their Trial form
- Fill in the sign up form for the free version of the service, which doesn't require any credit card or payment mode details
- Confirm your subscription through the return email on the email address you provided during registration
- All features except the email-marketing feature would be made available to you. This provides you with ample opportunity to evaluate the product.
We found the effort required to get enrolled minimal, with the forms etc designed to be very quick and simple.
The First glance
When you first login, you get to see the dashboard, labeled in the system as “InTouch Homepage”.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the homepage consists of widgets, which can be added or removed as per user's requirement by the user himself. By default there are three widgets, one for Introductory content, second for the top 5 events drawing close as per the schedule, latest 5 documents stored through the id on your InTouch account. The button labeled “Add more to this page” is conspicuously visible and helps to custom design the homepage of the application.
We now walk through each section of InTouch to get a feel of the details of the system and its features
All the features are neatly arranged and made accessible through the top menu.
Contacts
Every process in a CRM system revolves around the core of the offering – Customer Information. Each customer in the system is stored as a Contact. Beginning with the basic feature of viewing a contact and all their details, there are more functions such as Adding a new contact, Batch updation of contacts, and even Import of contacts from other data forms such as an Outlook Data file, or even a generic Microsoft Excel or Access Database.
Further, contacts can be grouped together based on the organization, which can again be defined and clearly denoted in the system. Apart from organization, contacts can also be arranged as arbitrary groups based on any parameter you would like to use.
What we found interesting during the review was the ability the contact module gives you to treat the customer as an isolated individual, or as a member of a larger organization or a group depending on the campaign requirement.
Workflows
A very crucial element of any business today is Business Process, or what’s also known as Workflow. This involves a set of logical activities that need to be done in the regular conduct of business. Managing customers has its own set of workflows, and InTouch CRM gives you tools to manage those with much ease.
We reviewed some of the workflow tools as under:
- Calendar: For each user, there is a private as well as a public calendar, through which he can keep a tab of his own activities for himself, and also collaborate with his team members by sharing a public calendar with his appointments on it.
The way the calendar works is very similar to any of the existing business suites like MS Outlook appointments or even Google Calendar.
- Taskpads – Taskpad is nothing but a To Do list, which is a very simple yet powerful tool to help you manage time and tasks around a busy schedule, without missing a single item. Task Pads can also be worked on a collaborative basis, where tasks can be assigned and passed on to a subordinate without anything getting missed out.
- Contact history – As the name suggests, this feature helps you see all the client interactions of a particular contact at a single glance.
- Documents – The system helps you ensure that your entire sales and marketing team uses the same set of collaterals such as brochures, application forms, and any other such printed material or forms required from time to time.
- Customer Service – This feature groups together all the functions needed by a customer service team that helps them keep track of customer requests, or grievances and promptly address those.
Sales Module
The sales module helps an organization to consolidate all campaigns and existing customer loyalty to real revenue. When we checked the module, we found functions that take care of a lead across the entire sales cycle. A small drawback we found was that in most CRMs we find an Add Contact or an Add Lead button prominently in the homepage. In case of InTouch, the link is available within the top menu through the Sales link.
 Within the sales module there is also a section named “Product” that helps you keep a tab on various products that are available for sale, along with the available inventory for each product.
Marketing
In our experience of reviewing CRM solutions from across the world, we find that effective campaign management is provided by only few of them. The marketing module has distinctive sections that allow you to interact with prospects or even existing customers and induce sales.
Among the CRM solutions that we have spotted so far, it is good to note that InTouch goes beyond providing just email or SMS campaigning ability, It also allows you to create survey forms and gather first hand feedback from your customers.
It was also good to find during the CRM review, that creating a graphically appealing email does not require HTML programming anymore. The email campaign page gives you a choice to upload an HTML file or even create a mailer through online editing tools.
Reports
Generating reports such as sales funnel, Cost per lead trends, and many such information that directly concerns the management is an essential function. This is easily taken care of by the reports function of InTouch CRM.
The application has a set of few standard reports used generally by organization. Apart from the standard reports, InTouch CRM gives an option of creating customized report formats, based on which repetitive reports can be drawn.
Pricing structure
InTouch CRM is offered through SaaS (software as a service) model, where you pay as per your usage, on a monthly basis. The pricing structure is fairly simple since apart from the free version, there is only one Paid plan at GBP 17.99 per month.
The free version allows you to store contact details of all your customers, though without the ability to send them email communication from the system itself.
To Conclude our InTouch CRM review:
InTouch CRM is a genius product that offers CRM and Campaign Management as a single service. Users can expect a great deal of free to use features, which is otherwise available only through expensive licensed software counterparts. Upon satisfactory performance of the product, upgrading to the paid version is fairly simple, and works on a monthly fee thereafter.
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