Creatio Review - formerly bpm'Online CRM

Creatio is a powerful, multi-award winning software solution for marketing, sales, and service automation, available both in cloud and on-premise. It features out-of-the-box processes that help to guide its users through a series of effective actions that contribute to improving and hastening results.The social look and feel, as well as the engaging interface, is among the features that make the platform highly preferred among its users. The clutter-free approach in the design of the bpm’online platform keeps it simple and easy to manoeuver even for the first-time users.

Creatio – At a Glance

You can choose the whole bundle or a specific module of Creatio according to your business needs

• Free Trial: Yes
• Mobile friendly design: Yes
• Ideal for: financial services, retail, wholesale, and distribution teams among others
• Training required: Yes. Online, Webinars, In person, Live Online.
• Email marketing: Yes
• Mass import/export: Yes (export with MS Excel, websites and other sources)

Who is it for?

Creatio is a platform that is built for all types and sizes of businesses. It is, however, ideal for SME’s and even large scale businesses who have complex sales processes and need an all-in-one software suite to manage everything from marketing to customer support and everything in between.

Organizations in Finance, Real Estate, Professional services and in the Telecom fields will particularly benefit from the features of Creatio. The intelligent build of the platform allows it to mesh into virtually any business platform. It is particularly ideal for companies and firms that have direct sales teams like in Real Estate.

Who it’s Not for?

While Creatio is a handy tool for most businesses, it might not be economically viable for small start-ups to invest in Creatio. This does not mean that it would not work. But without established processes and customer relations protocol, there wouldn’t be much the Creatio could be able to do for such a business.

How Popular is it?

Creatio has over 6,500 customers among them Heinz, Allianz, Virgin Connect and Yandex to mention a few. Over 400 partners and a hoard of awards like Top 15 CRM 2015/2016, CRM Excellence 2015, Gartner Magic Quadrant for LM 2016 and also the Gartner Magic Qaudrant for SFA, Customer Engagement center for LM 2016, Creatio seems well positioned to be among the top BPM and CRM platforms in the market. Its constant growth and effectiveness of its customer support have seen it steadily grow in revenue and popularity.

It has also been mentioned in a couple of highly authoritative magazines like CRM Magazine which named the product a leader in the Sales Force Automation and Midmarket CRM categories of the 2016 CRM market Awards. It only goes to show that the best is yet to come despite enjoying a lot of good publicity and high quality deliverance.

Overall user experience

Even though the CRM might be a little overwhelming for the first-timers, once you get the hang of it, it’ll become second nature to you. There is always a learning curve with CRM’s!

From signing up to importing data to customizing the whole software, everything is simply a breeze. In fact, it is a sheer surprise that such a comprehensive CRM can be this intuitive and fast.

The way you can do everything with a few mouse clicks is simply impressive. Although we faced a couple of minor snags while importing data. The issues that we must mention are first, it only accepts data in .xlxs format, and second, one of the fields must be the “Full Name”, if you’re importing contacts. We had a huge mock data which had first names and last names instead of full name. However, there are no deal breakers at all, and the overall process was so simple and fast, and custom fields plus automatic data deduplication are a godsend.

The menus have been laid out in a well-thought-out manner, and everything makes sense. A quick add button, a universal search bar, a mechanism for alerts, and a social media-like feed where you can post updates as well as activities are some little but quirky menus that can make life easy.

Another impressive thing is that you can add virtually all the details about a contact, even their social profiles for a deeper insight into their needs and problems.

Last but not the least, Creatio is not only one of the most comprehensive CRM suites but is also one of the most customizable ones, which allows every user to tailor the software according to their very needs. This can immensely increase productivity and efficiency of the business.

Creatio Products

Creatio is a parent to a couple of other smaller products that work in tandem for the greater good of the company. Even though such products can be easily identified on their own, they each play a significant role in presenting the benefits that Creatio as a whole has to offer.

Marketing Creatio

This aspect features a modern, streamlined user interface that helps to keep the user focused on what matters. It’s a robust marketing automation software that helps to develop demand generation by identifying the needs of customers and working in their interests to turn them into opportunities for your business.

The platform allows the user to easily manage each stage of customer demand generation. This is done through a process that is pre-defined that walks you through the entire process from the lead right through to the sales.

The analytics tool embedded in the aspect also helps to track new leads and evaluate the level of engagement. The tool is also crucial in gauging the efficiency of different channels. With the marketing aspect of Marketing Creatio, users can also build their target audience and send bulk emails using just a couple of mouse clicks.

Other great features that are part and parcel of the  product include;

• System designer
• Synchronization and import
• Productivity tools
• Event management
• Email marketing
• Marketing campaign management
• All round customer view
• Lead management

Sales Creatio

The sales edition of Creatio is a great addition for small and medium teams, for e-commerce websites and also for medium and large enterprises that run multiple sales channels.




The sales edition comes with many features including:

• Business process management
• Collaboration tools
• Opportunity management
• Field sales management
• Contract management
• Product management
• Document flow automation
• Synchronization and Integration
• Mobile sales
• Project management

Service Creatio

Lastly, there is the service edition ofCreatio. It is a cloud-based application that offers processes for complete service management.

Under this edition, there is the customer center. This is a great addition that targets companies that would want to manage their omnichannel communications. There is also the Service Enterprise package which is ideal for medium and large companies that are looking to deliver quality service across multiple communication channels.

The best part about Service Creatio is its vast collection of features. These include:

• Omnichannel communication
• Case management
• Contact center
• Request management
• Change management
• Service catalogue
• Service level management

It is also worth noting that this also comes with some of the features that are pertinent to the other editions. These include the system designer, synchronization, and integration among others.

Creatio Features

The features highlighted above are those of individual products under the Creatio umbrella.

For users that would love to enjoy the entire nine yards of a comprehensive product, there are additional features and functions that they stand to benefit from. These include:

• Comprehensive contact and company management
• Lead management with export function
• Time management and communications that’s capable of syncing with Google Calendar and MS Outlook.
• Document management compatible with MS Word
• Sales management
• Customer data management integrated with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
• Analytics with real-time diagrams
• Marketing management for multiple channels
• Administrative tools complete with wizards
• Creatio mobile apps for Android and iOS devices

Bpm’online’s intelligent process-driven CRM is built for marketing, sales, and service. Its ability to change processes in a highly volatile marketing makes it adaptable and highly efficient even with the difficult nature of the business world.

Advantages

• Features one solution that allows users gain access to both BPM and CRM functions
• It is quite easy to customize with a complete set of tools to help with the customization process without the need to code.
• It integrates flawlessly with an open configuration allowing developers to rebuild, tweak or extend the CRM modules or the business logic of Creatio.
• Features an agile deployment with even greater flexibility to adapt to changing trends.
• Out-of-the-box best practices
• Offers a complete view of the journey the customer makes from lead to contract
• An intuitive and engaging interface that users have come to love.
• Allows the user to align sales, marketing and service on one CRM platform.
• Highly responsive customer support team

Weaknesses

• You need to buy an extended support package to be able to enjoy technical support via telephone
• Lacks an app store where users can find other sites and systems that can work with BPM products.
• The fourteen-day free trial period is quite short
• For larger projects, customization and changes are almost inevitable (luckily, the platform allows for extensive customization).
• The advanced features are somewhat complex to understand. They could be made slightly easier. But still, there’s a reason why they’re referred to as ‘advanced features.’

How Does It Stack Up Against Competition?

Here’s how it fares against its two most fierce competitors in the same field.

Creatio vs Salesforce

Bpm’online and Salesforce have one thing in common. Both focus heavily on automated workflow. While Creatio, on one hand, has revolutionized the direction in which CRM companies are headed with the products that they’re offering on the market, it is able to carry out the workflows, and also initiate them on any CRM platform.

Salesforce, on the other hand, prides itself in their lightning fast CRM interface which also happens to be among the latest. But, this is not the only area where these two differ or share similarities. Creatio is available both in cloud and on premise, while Salesforce is only available in cloud.

Features

The first distinct difference between Salesforce and Creatio is the features they offer. Creatio boasts a long list of features that include multi-channel marketing, Newsletter management, product catalog and referral tracking. Salesforce does not currently support any of these functions.

However, the two do have some similar features that include social media integration, Mailing list management, email marketing, campaign dashboard and campaign management.

As for the sale automation functions, Salesforce supports territory management but Creatio doesn’t. To make up for this, Creatio offers contract management instead.

Pricing

It might be somewhat difficult to comprehensively analyze the difference or similarity in price between the two companies. This is largely because of the difference in the pricing structure. However, they each do start at $25 per month. The difference is in the set of features that the customer receives for the price, but Creatio offers considerably better value-for-money.

Specifications

Creatio goes all out on its specifications and can be used on-premises, online and even on mobile. Even though Salesforce users can also access the software on their mobile and online, the platform is not available on premise.

Operating systems

Salesforce is a software that is built for Android and iOS. It flourishes magnificently on these two platforms. But, it is not available on most of the other platforms, at least not directly. Creatio, on the other hand, is available on Windows, Mac, Windows phone, iOS and on Android.

Creatio va MS Dynamics

MS Dynamics CRM is a platform that features a robust integration with Outlook. This allows users on the platform to keep tabs on emails, appointments, tasks and contacts. These can also be shared with others on the same platform. Its simple and straightforward user interface is one of its largest benefits. It is relatively easy to see why it is one of the biggest competitors of Creatio. Here’s a closer look at how the two compare against each other.

Features

Both softwares are feature-rich and offer a vast collection of highly functional additions and tools. While MS Dynamics does not seem to have a social integration on its customer platform yet, it does have a variety of other features that are toe-to-toe with what BPM offers. These include knowledge base management, sales management as well as analytics.

While most of the features are common on either platform, Creatio has the edge with customization on most of its features as well as analytics. This is a feature that is widely lacking in MS Dynamics.

Pricing

With regards to pricing, just as in the former case, it is hard to compare apples with apples, but Creatio is more liberal with their pricing through packaging. MS Dynamics, on the other hand, has fully customizable prices. This could be advantageous since users can only pay for what they would want to use. The downside is that it is more costly to go down this route. On average, bpm’online is considerably more cost friendly compared to both Salesforce and MS Dynamics.

Specifications

With regards to how each of the software can be deployed, the metrics are just the same. MS Dynamics is available on-cloud, On-premises and also in a hybrid combination. Creatio is available on Mobile, on-cloud, and on-premises. The diversity and mobility of the two products are what makes them highly preferred by their users.

Operating systems

Creatio supports quite a number of operating systems. Among them include the Windows platform, Mac, Android, Web-based, iPhone and iPad. MS Dynamics is only supports Windows and Android. Perhaps in future they might also be able to run on a variety of other operating systems.

Customer support

Both platforms take great pride in how they relate and respond to their customers’ questions and concerns. They’re readily available for help on a variety of channels. These channels include on phone, live support, tickets and on training.

Countries available

Both Softwares are available in English. They also happen to be available in multiple countries other than the United States. MS Dynamics is available in UK, Canada, Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Germany, China, and Australia. Creatio is available in the same countries with the addition of South Africa, India, and Japan.

Conclusion

The biggest fear that any business big or small has when using something new is the learning curve, which might be too lengthy and complex that it costs the business money and time. Luckily, this is not the case with Creatio, which is not only a product that will enhance business processes and make customer interaction more effective, but it has also been made simple and straightforward.

It features a simple and easy to use user interface, a collection of well-balanced and well thought out features and an unending list of satisfied customers. It comes highly recommended by pundits and experts in different fields not to mention in countless user reviews. It might please you to know, other than the features and the product itself; the customer support has also been greatly lauded for its speed to respond and helpful nature. That makes it much easier to get help in case you run into glitches at any time when using their CRM solution.

It’s a great product that is built to help good businesses, companies and organizations become even better without having to invest too much time, money or effort into improving their systems. Creatio really impressed us and comes recommended.