Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM that is built and priced for small and micro businesses. Coming from the family of Zoho's customer relationship platform, Bigin is designed to help small businesses move away from spreadsheets and legacy sales tools to manage their customer relationships. The vendor presents its simple interface as easy to use even if for users who don't have a lot of CRM experience, with a feature set is flexible enough to fit any business model, priced for small business.
Because Bigin by Zoho CRM focuses more on individualized customer interactions and join that result in relationship prospect growth and sales, it is a good fit for smaller companies of all stripes. It provides you with a taste of Zoho's mass CRM as well. The beginning of your CRM journey
I believe GoldMine is well suited to keep track of customer contact automatically, so your customers needs are met. I also like keeping track of my emails and customer contact notes, this way I always know what they need quickly. I like to keep reminders on certain customer request or pricing for certain items. We use GoldMine in unison with Traverse for placing orders . I would love GoldMine more if they had the abilities to place orders through the app , rather than using an additional tool.
Of course, there are always areas that could be improved, in my view the Report generation tool, hasn't really changed in the last 10 years at least, whilst other CRM products have more powerful and easy to use and customise Reporting tools, although there are plenty of Reports to choose from
The Database schema has stood the test of time but is quite restrictive in certain areas and what you can do with it
Integration with other system unless you are a developer is not easy as there are only one or two areas to show/bring in information
If there were a product that would mean less on-site support/maintenance with comparable or not much more cost, I would seriously consider switching. Furthermore, going to a more mobile, paper-less application process would tip the scales in the favor of a competitor. I'd also like something that integrates web forms so that data entry is more stream-lined as is response time
A solid 8 from my perspective, a tool all small businesses should try out before venturing into the world of larger CRM solutions as this gives you the best entry point into the CRM solution world with ideas about all the modules that are required the most. It can be made a bit more intermediate user friendly by adding a bit more mass approach style features
Personally, perhaps I should give it a higher rating, but I do genuinely think it was very easy to pick up and run with, but I did have a full training session and of course was keen on using it. In my previous marketing role many years ago, I 'd tried to create an MS Access database and this has taken ages, so being introduced to the power of GoldMine really impressed. People have comments on it, but my opinion is its still fast and a great workhorse
For me, its always been there, no worries here about downtime or the internet being down or switched off. Having it on a laptop as well with Goldsync means I'm always able to updated my notes and then synchronise. This to me is one of the benefits of purchased on-premise software, it cant simply be turned off!.
Pretty good, Yes, there are occasions when i may think there should be an easier way to do things, but over the years, I've always found a way to get the information out that i want, sometimes just needing a bit of help from the technical team. Day to day,. it works for me very well.
Their customer support is spot on! We never feel like we're being made to wait, and when we email, they respond and offer assistance very quickly. It's the same response I'd expect from an in-house IT team down the corridor. Some support teams you know you're talking to the first line support chap who probably doesn't know how to resolve your issue, and you have to wait until they give up and pass it, but GM support people seem very knowledgable
I was originally trained by the UK distributor and then subsequently trained my self and had access to GoldMine consultants. In the long run, this saved me a lot of time really since I knew the product on an advanced/administrator basis and able to perform day to day tasks. Some things, still needed the consultants. The trick was with the training, I knew when I was out of my depth
As I said earlier, to me now with all this experience, it is ensuring that you focus on two things:- 1/ Ensure core customisations only are required until you get users started and embedded in using the system. 2/ Ensuring users get some good level of dedicated training time, internal or external, but I feel this is best done in a group rather than at your own speed. Afterall, no one really customises their MS Word or MS Excel each time, they just ignore the bits they don't need or ask if they do need them
Bigin by Zoho CRM captures opportunities, and gives the company ways to tap and work towards making them more effective. Also, Bigin integrates/connect with the customers emails, making it friendly or simple to communicate with them immediately. Bigin introduced the single sign on procedure, which boosts the security of the entire system and ensure no attacks in any form.
GoldMine is a better overall product based on scalability, ease of use and cost effectiveness. All of the customization in GoldMine was beyond the other applications we tested and considered. Overall we believe we made the right choice based on how quickly we saw results. Our sales staff has used this tool extensively to become more agile.
GoldMine, when maintained well has always been pretty reliable and in over 10 years, I don't think we've ever lost a day or more than an hour or so when we cant use it. Occasional a 'blip' will happen and you will have to log out, the only thing to bear in mind, which I'm not good at is ensuring you keep the mailbox to less than 2000 mails in your inbound box, I hover around 1800 and need to streamline this to get rid of my junk or notifications from LinkedIn groups for example when i mean to read, but never get round to it
Our company prides itself on its responsiveness to customer requests. As a consequence of that, we need to be able to follow up consistently on issues until they are solved and goldmine helps us do that.
Because of its ease of use and wealth of information, it allows us to react to customer queries quickly and with a familiarity that instills confidence in our customers.
The lag on the other hand, since we have kind of choked it with too much information, slows us down. I understand we're using it for more than it was designed for, but as businesses grow and customer demands increase we need our technology to improve at the same rate.
