GreenRope vs. Kustomer

There's no such thing as a CRM that doesn't have its complications and headaches. I have tried a lot of them and ultimately like GreenRope heads and shoulders above the rest. GreenRope is particularly suited for small to medium sized businesses who do not have the budget or need for a SalesForce install, or the engineers necessary to make other CRM software work. If you want a more sophisticated system than an email responder like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you need to have a CRM. So ask yourself what you are looking to automate in your business and then go for a solution that has the ability to scale with you. A CRM is a commitment to long term growth and automation, and you should see it as an investment -- both in cash and in time. I don't have a programmer and have managed to get a lot of functionality out of GreenRope (all DIY). And I'm always adding to it with no limits in sight.

I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!

Incentivized

• GreenRope provides a full-featured application at ALL pricing levels. You don't have to 'upgrade' to get better features - you've got them all right away. I really appreciated this!
• GreenRope doesn't charge per user (i.e., administrator of the system). Other systems require additional fees when adding administrators to your account. GreenRope makes it easy for me to get help with the CRM by adding more of my people, without adding multiple fees.
• Customer Service at GreenRope rocks! They really want to help you get started well. The training and set-up calls are fantastic. For any support issues that have come up (usually newbie questions!) I've always received a prompt response. I can't say enough about their support.
• There are many ways for me to customize my data sets, for management and segmentation of contacts, specific to my industry and business needs.
• Dashboard customization - as a visual learner, the presentation of information on my screen is important to me, and GreenRope allows me the ability to customize colours, icons, and sizes of things in my dashboard. This is helpful for my creativity and productivity.

• All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
• The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
• We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.

Incentivized

• The project management software - while usable in its current form - can still benefit from further development. But I've noticed that they are working on it, so it seems they are aware of this area of opportunity.
• This is a little thing, but I'd like the ability to drill into specific tasks from more areas, and mark them complete quickly or make notes on them.
• I honestly don't have many suggestions. I use their ticket system to make suggestions when they occur to me, and they tend to incorporate suggestions very quickly into subsequent builds.

• For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
• Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
• Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
• I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.

Incentivized

They have monthly renewals, so at any time you can cancel and not feel like they are holding your money. Their customer support is easy to work with. Their ticketing system to communicate with you about service issues is fantastic(which is included in the monthly fee) allows you to track issues. We use the ticketing system and add it to our website. This gives people the ability to communicate with us 24/7.

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

It takes time to learn this system. It is not going to happen over night, but once you master it it will be worth it. I am already seeing some great results, all I have to do is keep learning.

There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.

Incentivized

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

Many times I have to repeat the issue several times before the person understands correctly. There was also an instant where support was not available when help was needed, had to wait for a response and it was a business day.

I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

I think there are some cheat sheets and best practises lists that could be created that would save a business a lot of time and frustration. BUT, even as it is, the frustrations and challenges disappear as things start working. I am going to be offering up a few of the tricks I have learned to the team at GreenRope to share with other users because when customers offer valuable work arounds that they find helpful to others, we accomplish a few things. The coders get an idea of things that aren't working quite as expected so they can look into fixes, other customers get benefit and we all win

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

We chose GreenRope.com because they were the best fit. We already had a marketing email strategy with Constant Contact so choosing a CRM with those capabilities was very important when making our decision. Everything we were already doing could be in 1 place instead of needing to login to several different outlets to reach our goals and objectives. For example, email marketing (Constant Contact), website tracking (our Host), client tracking (spreadsheets), Calendars (Outlook), etc. Now we do everything, email marketing, track leads, have a work flow, track website visitors, post events and forecast all with 1 login. It's great!!

Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.

Incentivized

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

• It has helped us from an efficiency standpoint to organize, keep track off, and communicate with our contacts.
• We have high functionality and great features for a great cost.
• People with varying levels of computer experience can use GreenRope and many of its features.

Incentivized

• We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
• Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.

Incentivized