Groove CRM Review

Groove – The Trendy CRM For Real Estate Agents & Realty Companies

Groove is a simple, fast and intuitive real estate CRM that helps you interact with your leads, past clients, and sphere of influence in a timely manner. While most other real estate CRMs, such as Ixact Contact and RealtyJuggler, focus primarily on contact management and marketing, Groove is more of a personal assistant that ensures you don’t drop behind on your important dealings.

Omitting the unnecessary bells and whistles, Groove features a handful of modules that help you manage your contacts and day-to-day tasks, send drip email campaigns, and create follow-up rules. Other highlights include automatic call logging, pre-built email marketing messages, email integration, and social integration (which also allows you to automatically enrich your contact details).

Overview

•     Overall rating: 66/100 (  OR   6.6/10)
•     Free trial: Yes (30 days)
•     Ideal for: Real estate professionals
•     Training required: No
•     Users limit: No
•     Mass import/export: Yes
•     Email marketing: Yes
•     Lead capturing: No (expected soon)
•     Social media integration: Yes
•     Mobile support: Yes

Why Groove is different?

Groove is a fresh, progressive CRM application developed by ex-Google employees. “Our goal is to build the best relationship management system.  We want to build one that saves people time and helps them focus on talking with people rather than managing a database”, commented Co-founder and CEO Chris Rothstein.

 

What really separates Groove from other real estate CRMs is its ability to integrate with your email. Once connected, Groove can pull in your emails without you having to open up your CRM. It automatically generates leads from your contacts and also updates the last contacted date for all your contacts so you can create your own rules such as “I want to contact my ‘Hot Leads’ every 10 days”. And in case you fall behind the schedule, you’ll get an email reminder. The best thing is that all of this happens without any manual input.

Some missing features

Several basic features e.g. lead capturing, calendar, reporting etc. are missing, but as Groove is still in its development phase, new features are being added continuously. A Mobile App and Automatic Lead Capturing are the two major updates expected to be rolled out pretty soon.

Getting started (5/5)

Sign up process is pretty straightforward and so is importing your contacts, either from different email services or as a .CSV file.

When you sign in for the first time, you’ll see handy tooltips which explain the basic details about the particular menu.

Workspace (10/20)

There are some positives and some negatives about the work area.

We really liked the way you can update any entry by simply clicking on it. Most important buttons are right there under the main menus so you don’t have to waste time drilling deep into the submenus. Contact list is as good as it gets, you can perform all the contact-specific activities from the same window. SmartList, another handy utility, is actually an enhanced to-do list which allows you to quickly call or email your contacts.

On the other hand, we hope some radical changes are made to the work area to make it more standardized.  For example, you have to hold down the shift key to select multiple contacts; aren’t check boxes a bit more convenient? Some menus are rather incomplete, e.g. if you open email campaigns, you can only view/edit campaigns but can’t send any email directly from the same tab. Also email campaigns do not support HTML, so you have to write full URL if you want to embed links inside your email.

Drip campaign menu needs to be improved

User interface (8/10)

The user interface is unfussy and beautiful. There are a handful of features and just a couple of pages so you can master Groove in an hour or less.

Price (8/10)

Groove offers three different plans from which  you can choose:

Integration with 3rd-party apps (6/10)

Currently, Groove connects with some email services, Google Apps, Facebook and Twitter. It can automatically pull in contact details from these two social portals, which is immensely useful for real agents in making quick decisions and timely offers. Chris also divulged that their team is currently considering LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox, lead sources (Trulia, Zillow, etc.) and a few other apps to integrate into Groove.

Customization (2/10)

Currently you can’t customize Groove’s interface or add any custom fields. You can, however, tailor the pre-written email messages and follow-up rules according to your needs.

Mobile support (4/5)

You can browse Groove on most smartphones and tablets, while an exclusive mobile application is in the pipeline.

Scalability (7/10)

For real estate professionals, scalability might not be a major concern, but luckily there is no limit on adding users to your team. But if you are using the Rainmaker plan, Groove gets costlier as you add more users.

Customer support (9/10)

Groove offers an excellent customer support. You can chat with the support team right from your dashboard during the office hours, or send them an email and rest assured you’ll get a quick, comprehensive response.

Backup and security (7/10)

The data is hosted on secure servers, and is backed up every day. The backup is stored on a different geographical location.

Features of Groove

• SmartList

Groove’s SmartList is your virtual personal assistant that keeps track of all your relationships and also features a list of today’s top priority follow-up items. The interface is very beautiful and user-friendly, just click on any of the contacts and you can write an email, choose an email from any of the pre-built templates, or call a contact.

SmartList makes managing your tasks very easy, but as the list grows, it can become rather confusing because instead of showing the tasks due for a specific date, it shows the contacts name and you have to open the tab to view the task.  So if you have more than one task related to the same contact, you will have to open all of them to find a specific task. Also, it only shows overdue tasks or today’s task, all the tasks scheduled for the future are not shown.

• Contacts

Just by checking the “automatically enrich contact” option, you’ll automatically get the basic details about your contacts, pulled in from social media

We were impressed the way Groove allows you to manage your contacts. You can perform almost all the activities (i.e. sending email, adding contacts to drip-campaign list, making a phone call, adding a new task, viewing social profiles, viewing history etc.) form the same tab and with just a couple of clicks.

• Settings

User:  here you can set your personal details i.e. name, phone, email etc.

• Team

It allows you to add more users to your team.

• Phone

Enables you to add and verify your phone number to place calls directly from Groove. Calls from Groove will look like they are coming from your phone and will be automatically logged in the contact history.

• Campaign

Here you can add and customize your email drip campaigns. Adding, modifying and sending drip campaigns is as easy as pie, however, currently email messages only support plain text.

Contact:  Select how often you would like to follow-up with your different contact types. Click the blue numbers or names to edit the values or checkbox to turn off that follow-up reminder. Through this menu, you can also create new contact types or export your contacts.




Account/Billing:  Add your billing details here if you wish to purchase monthly subscription.

Pros

• Simple, intuitive, user-friendly interface with most activities requiring just two clicks i.e. click, edit and save
• Offers a personal assistant, a contact management system, a to-do manager and an email marketing system, all in one
• Allows you to connect your phone with the CRM so you can make calls from your dashboard while complete call history is automatically maintained in the CRM database
• Powerful integration with email digs up your old/forgotten contacts so you get several leads instantly without having to raise a finger
• Fair bit of automation takes most of the burden off your shoulders, moreover you’ll be reminded if a task is overdue or if you need to contact with certain hot leads
• Daily email reminder about your pending tasks ensures you never miss out on a deal
• Some other notable benefits of groove are instant support via chat, automatic follow-up tracking, and several pre-built campaigns to help you keep in touch with your past and new clients

Cons

At present, Groove is still under development and needs quite a bit of work. Though we are informed by the vendor that auto lead capturing and mobile app are in the pipeline, several other features must also be added in order to make it a comprehensive, operable real estate CRM.

Ideally, we’d like to see reporting for email campaigns, HTML and rich text enabled email messages, integration with some of the 3rd party applications, customization of homepage, ability to add custom fields, file management, and a quick way to view your active buyers/business.  There are also certain bugs, for example if you are sending an email campaign and you are using a template, the text will be appended to the email as many times as you click the campaign name. So if you accidentally double click a campaign, it will be annoying for your contacts.

Conclusion

With some basic features missing, managing your entire business with Groove right now might be a bit of hassle. But since Groove allows you to focus on your leads/hot clients and automates most activities, plus important features and functionalities are continuously being added, we do believe that when fully launched, it will be one of the finest CRMs for realty businesses available. For now, you can test-drive Groove for thirty days and see how it helps improve your business.