Be Nimble with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
December 05, 2017
Be Nimble with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Nimble
Nimble is the hub for CRM in my organization. Although Nimble can support other CRM systems such as Salesforce, in my organization Nimble is the primary CRM system. It is used mainly for Contact Management and email tracking. Although it has features for tracking the progress of sales leads and reminders to follow up etc. they are hardly used in my organization. Contact Management consists of adding contacts to the CRM database and Nimble makes this a breeze by automagically adding fully populated contact records from either an email address or a contact found in a web browser. Email tracking is the process of matching the Contact's email addresses (plural) with the organization's email addresses (plural) so that there is one place to see all interactions with Contacts. The system also allows ad-hoc notes to be added to Contact records such as telephone conversations or snippets of data that may get lost in an email system. Nimble also tracks Tweets in a similar fashion to tracking emails and this adds a social dimension to Contact records.
- Organizations (or individuals) can connect multiple email addresses to Nimble, which is possibly unique but certainly useful. As an individual, you could, therefore, manage your business and private life in one database and you could manage additional organizations as well, if required. This saves having multiple databases to manage.
- The database can be segmented in many ways but Tags are the most powerful. Adding a Tag to a contact record enables that contact to belong to that group or segment. Any Contact can belong to multiple groups. Using the built-in synchronization engine, Contacts can be added to mailing lists in separate systems such as MailChimp simply by adding the appropriate Tag to the record in Nimble.
- Using Nimble's widget means that if you see a Contact mentioned online or you receive an email from a Contact, you can simply hit "add to Nimble". But in the process, you can build a complete record such as the name, address, phone number, email, website etc. which saves a huge amount of time and is the reason why the data in CRM's that don't provide that functionality is generally not up to date.
- Nimble has a built-in Group Messaging capability used for Mailmerged emails but Nimble management have chosen to throttle the use of that facility to so many emails per day which are fully tracked. That means that any large email shots have to be undertaken using a 3rd party system such as MailChimp. Fortunately Nimble fully supports 3rd party email systems but it would be more convenient to just use Nimble.
- Nimble has a powerful email signature which is applied to all emails by default. The problem is that there is currently only one signature so you must choose your default email to use for that and delete it when using any of the other emails. It would be better if the system allowed a different email signature per email address.
- List management within Nimble is not as flexible as with some databases but perfectly adequate for most users. Power Users can export the data and use tools like Excel to do anything that cannot be accomplished within Nimble itself.
- Nimble has a system for "Keeping in touch" with your Contacts but if you have a very large database this becomes overwhelming. For smaller databases it is a nice feature but I would prefer if it could be turned off.
- Nimble is the only CRM that I have felt happy to pay for because it makes me so much more productive by saving time in terms of keeping the data up to date.
- Nimble has enabled me to use a single system to support multiple organizations, thereby saving time and money.
- Nimble makes managing data in connected systems like iCloud Contacts or MailChimp effortless.
ACT!, SageCRM, Outlook, Google Contacts, Zoho CRM, SugarSync, Vtiger, Salesforce, iCloud Contacts (iPhone)plus many others. Most of these systems don't do a good job of connecting with email let alone social media and in today's world, you need both. Nimble does things that none of the others are capable of but most of all it makes people more productive and better able to monitor Customer Relationships.