BlueCamroo CRM Review

Who is it for:

BlueCamroo is a powerful solution for SMBs that offer virtual products, web development, and virtual services.

Who is it not for:

Although most of its features can be useful for virtually any SMB, it won’t be an ideal option if you need to manage physical inventory.

Expert Review 

BlueCamroo is one of the most comprehensive business management suites for SMBs that bundle CRM, customer support, project management, time tracking, invoicing, billing, website builder and more – all wrapped in automation. The simple, social-media like interface makes using BlueCamroo almost as simple as checking your Facebook feed.

When we first reviewed it, BlueCamroo offered just one option, but now they have changed their pricing plans. You can now choose the plan that lets you use only the features that you will need. Their plans include a Free CRM, Sales and Marketing, Support, Projects and Complete. We tested the Complete in more depth. The reason that Complete stood out was that while packed with features, its interface is still intuitive and not too overwhelming.

CRM is the core of BlueCamroo, which is designed to support the modern business work and build and grow business relationships with people from a variety of backgrounds. Unlike legacy CRMs, it comes with all the features you need to manage your business; from capturing and nurturing leads to converting them into projects and then moving them through the pipeline to convert them into customers. Moreover, if customers need after-sales support, they can open support cases.

New contacts can be added automatically via a web form, manually or someone simply shooting an email to a special email address e.g., signup@yourcompany.com. This is where automation kicks in and auto lead nurturing ensures nothing falls through the cracks. Once a lead is added, you can send marketing emails, while your sales team gets alerted, and even tasks get created and assigned. Note that leads have a special snapshot to give you a holistic overview and all the related activities can be viewed in the calendar also.

The lead can be added to email marketing campaigns, and you can either buy email credits or integrate your SMTP server. Your sales team can track and create opportunities, and nurture and convert leads into opportunities and deals – which can be turned into a project. Each project can be as simple as one task to a multi-stage, fine-grained project. You can use the visual workbench to see the projects in diagrammatic form.

One of our favorite BlueCamroo features is the social scout. It’s an intelligent feature that monitors social feeds for general buzz or sales opportunity and brings you insightful information. What’s more, once you add someone as lead, the social scout pulls all the information from their publicly available social profile to help you know your leads better. You can then reply to their posts and even send tweets without having to leave the BlueCamroo interface.

In addition to the traditional support, BlueCamroo can also create cases reported by customers on Twitter and Facebook to give you an edge with proactive customer support.

BlueCamroo can connect the customer to the correct contact and suggest knowledge articles to the support team by scanning the customer’s email. It sends email alerts to the concerned members and they can communicate with the customer, or privately with the internal teams. The ticketing system might not be as comprehensive as a full-scale customer support system, but it has some great, innovative features and is included with your CRM – which not only makes it affordable but also allows you to work on multiple systems from one screen.

Third party integrations:

In addition to offering most features you’d want to see in a business management suite, BlueCamroo also offers integration with a host of 3rd party apps. For accounting, it integrates with Intuit, Xero, FreshBooks. For payment gateways you can leverage Moneris, PayPal, and Chase. It also integrates with Gmail and Google Calendar, Exchange/Imap, Dropbox, OneDrive, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Slack and HubSpot. On top of that, they have their API to let other custom applications interact and get data from BlueCamroo.

Update Stream 

Yet another nifty feature that lets you save private notes, share updates and keep the entire team in the loop. The social media like interface makes keeping everyone on your team updated a breeze.

Visual Workbench

Just as the name suggests, the Visual Workbench gives you a representation of your projects. In other words, it’s a network map of the current state of things. It also fills out info automatically to help you keep an eye on things that are pending and causing delays. If you like things the old-fashioned way, you can print the workbench and post it in your office.

Workflow rules 

Workflow rules are the core of BlueCamroo automation. Basically, they are actions triggered when certain events occur. For example, when a user fills in a web form, a rule can trigger to create a task, assign the task to the sales team with an SLA to respond to the customer. You can have workflow rules for virtually anything e.g., when a task is due, you can get an email alert, and you can set up notifications when a task is past its due date.

Pros:

• All in one makes it affordable
• Intuitive interface
• Intelligent automations
• Auto interactions with social media via social scout
• Integration with 3rd-party apps
• Automation flattens the learning curve which otherwise could be fairly steep
• Gives you a lot of control on what should be displayed. For example, tasks assigned to users when in draft mode aren’t visible until they’re published. Once published, users will get an email and the task will be visible to them.
• Unlike most other CRMS, BlueCamroo keeps the previous information. For instance, lead or opportunity is still available in the system after it’s been converted to a project or sales order.

Cons:

• No phone app
• When we reviewed BlueCamroo, most of the social scout features were only working with Twitter. Their team later confirmed that this happened due to several changes in the APIs of other social platforms
• SLA tracking for customer support cases isn’t the best

Major changes since last review…

When we reviewed BlueCamroo the last time, it was an all-in-one package deal but now they have split it so you can use and pay for only what you need. This not only makes the CRM cheaper but also simpler and easier to use.

Another major change we noticed were the double columns for adding leads instead of a single one. The widget is also extremely customizable where you have the ability to customize the form with custom fields, hide fields, make certain fields mandatory and more.

Bottomline:

The odds of any SMB using all of the features offered by BlueCamroo are very slim. And while, in case of CRMs, less is usually more, most businesses tend to grow, evolve and change over time. If your business needs change down the line, and you want to take advantage of more features, you can simply enable one of the available options instead of dealing with the nightmare of switching to a completely new CRM. 

What’s more, the software is reasonably priced on a per-user basis. This could still be a challenge for some new small businesses that have budget constraints. But in the end, there aren’t many competitors that offer all the features that are bundled with BlueCamroo.