Agile CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software built to make the entire marketing and sales lifecycles more efficient, built around features like sales enablement, marketing automation, social suite, and web engagement.
$8.99
*per user per month
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
Agile CRM is well suited if an existing customer business process is defined or drafted thoroughly. Agile allowed automating workflows and marketing to improve lead management and suppress tedious tasks so users can focus on more important matters. However, Agile CRM costs can increase significantly if you want additional features and customizations. If you know what you're doing with CRMs and marketing automation or customer contracts and management then AgileCRM is worth a try.
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
The email template building tool is inflexible although it is simple to use and looks nice if you can work within its parameters.
Customer Support is not committed to finding answers and providing the best solutions. Many times each support person has a different answer or fixing a bug will take up to 2 weeks to address. They do not seem to understand that they are an online marketing platform that requires solutions within hours (or maybe days) and not weeks.
At some point in mid-2021, the process for sending out emails to 10s of thousands of contacts stopped functioning as simply and effectively as it had in the past. My staff (which I use as test cases) was no longer receiving emails, even though it showed in the system that they had received it (and no, it wasn't in spam). The bandaids that they provided me would work for one or two mailings and then stop working again. I was regularly trying to get customer support to find my answers but they were never able to solve my problem. The basic functionality that I appreciated - sending out nicely formatted email newsletters - is now completely gone and the platform is useless for our needs.
The reporting tools are awful and poorly configured. Querying on groups of people is inconsistent and inaccurate. There is no segmentation feature that I found that was actually effective.
In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
There was a little bit of a learning curve and some bumps along the way to managing this platform, but AgileCRM appears to be responsive to any challenges that arise, which I consider to be of vital importance.
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
Until the email issues are resolved I cannot recommend agile for any function. The email delivery rate has halved in the last six months and halved again in the last two with no resolution in sight. The customer service discussions start from zero information anytime suggesting agile are not writing notes or using a ticketing system to track customers' complaints. This results in our staff having to send emails manually and defeating the purpose of the system.
The training sessions are very helpful, because you have specialist that is available to answer any questions, guide you and coach you on how to dominate a certain feature of the platform. That being said,Whenever I have an issue that needs to be resolved, I can send email or call a support line. I usually use the support line.
The performance of AgileCRM has been acceptable to date. I'm pleased with the ability to modify leads in the system and search for them and add groups to campaigns.
The technical support of this software I liked a lot because whenever we need help to solve any problem or even to answer any questions about the software, Agile CRM's support was quick and efficient and guided us on the best solution to solve the problem. I admire and respect that a lot.
Each section of the AgileCRM platform has an instructional video that describes in detail all of the features of that section. I found this to be very instructional way to learn about each section. Whenever I had more questions, I could always schedule a conference call with a tutor..
It was able to do most of the functions needed but was the most cost-effective to get us started. If you are a new company and looking to get started with a CRM start here for a year or two and when you have the money you can pay for one of the bigger players. This platform will give you all you need to be successful. We have been using it for 2 years and we profited more each year.
Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
This products Starts with a free Limited version. You can upgradeTo an affordable paid version with minimal features. There's also an enterprise version which is what I have. It's much more expensive, however it allows me to access the full range of features available.
It may be me but I spent a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to derive more ROI from Agile CRM. The functionality and facilities were there but I eventually gave up as it was taking too much time and attention.
