Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software tools go a long way in empowering today’s marketing teams to accomplish success in retaining and acquiring customers. A CRM tool can help your organization maintain an accurate record of interactions and deals with each and every customer. This information available across your company can provide valuable insights for the shop-floor as well as the board room of your company.
Apart from customer records, the tool can also help you track new business prospects and lead conversions, which help your sales team a long way in doing their essential tasks. In this article, we review PlaybookIQ CRM, developed by Synap Software LLC, that promises to take your Customer and Sales Management to the next level with ease.
Playbook available as Software as a Service (SaaS)
PlaybookIQ offers to make CRM implementation and usage simple and pleasurable. This application comes fully loaded with customer and sales management features and requires no complicated installations on your (client) side. The solution is available through the SaaS model (aka Hosted / Online / Web based / Cloud) , and is hosted on a secure location.
PlaybookIQ can be accessed and operated through a simple web browser and at any Internet enabled location through secure user authentication. This arrangement brings down implementation time and costs for your organization, and gives you a ready CRM solution which is already live.
Getting Started with Playbook IQ
Starting off with PlaybookIQ is very simple. You may logon to their website – www.playbookiq.com – and choose from various accounts and pricing plans available. PlaybookIQ also provides you with a free 30 day trial. Depending on your requirement, you may choose a single user “Solo account” for $29 a month, ranging upto $199 for 25 users per month ie. $7.95 per user per month. The pricing plans are targeted towards small and medium business, with great flexibility in pricing. PlaybookIQ has no free crm version, but does offer a 30 day free trial.
How does PlaybookIQ CRM work?
You need to login as a valid user after subscribing with any of the pricing plans of PlaybookIQ. You may login through the PlaybookIQ website members area. The CRM provides you functionality across three simple steps:
- Creating a “Playbook” – You need to create a Playbook for your organization by entering existing customer data and those of new leads into the system. You also need to invite members of your sales team as PlaybookIQ users for your account.
- Assign Contacts to respective sales team member to fulfill a sales request, or develop a lead.
- Track results of your complete sales effort. PlaybookIQ brings advanced reporting features here that give you a total picture of sales and customer focused activities and its effectiveness.
Features of PlaybookIQ CRM
PlaybookIQ bears a very light and easy ambience with a set of features that makes it really friendly for sales and customer care team to work upon. Few special features combined neatly with the regular ones make this one of the most usable CRM Tools out there. Some of the features are as below:
Dashboard: The dashboard is what you will see the moment you log on. The view gives you an overall picture of the information you are authorized to see, in a single glance. You may then choose to click and drill down on a specific aspect of the CRM tool.
Playbooks: Just when the function of Sales and Customer care tends to get a bit dry and sometimes stressful, the CRM tool here gives us Playbooks. Playbooks are nothing but a collection of standard operating norms, such as inquiry redressal, lead promotion, and periodic marketing communication. With pre-defined set of rules and process. Playbooks make the response from your customer care and sales
team standardized and very fast.
Simplified contact management: Contacts, whether they are cold prospects, warm leads, or converted customers; are managed through the simple contacts module without having a pile of tabs for each classification of contact. Through an intuitive interface, any particular contact and his or her complete financial history with the company can be reviewed. Within a matter of clicks, the task of responding to a customer or a lead can be assigned to a specific member of the sales team.
Access Control: To administer the access control of PlaybookIQ doesn’t require you to be a systems expert. The capabilities of creating, managing and escalating leads can be controlled across all users by an authorized administrator. The front-end of these controls are so smooth, that you do not need a dedicated IT or a database resource to configure access controls.
Calendar View: A calendar view gives a complete overview of appointments to any user, when he or she is signs in to the system. This allows sales people in particular to plan their calls and client meetings.
SSL Security: A prime concern of a hosted CRM service is that crucial customer data is hosted on a third-party server. Strong security arrangements include SSL-certified security that ensures that the website exchanges critical data through a secure location.
Benefits of PlaybookIQ
The benefits associated with SaaS model of delivery are straight away applicable to PlaybookIQ. These benefits include very low total cost of ownership, since the CRM solution doesn’t require you to buy expensive licenses. There are no costs associated with procurement of separate servers and hardware for the application to rest. All of it is hosted on a remote server. The pricing plans are also designed as per a pay-as-you-use model. PlaybookIQ does not require experts to administer and run the application. Therefore, the requirement of having
dedicated IT tasks, otherwise, is ruled out.
Drawbacks
While PlaybookIQ simplifies CRM and offers it as a highly affordable CRM package to small businesses, there are a few factors that need to be looked at. PlaybookIQ doesn’t offer Mobile CRM, which is an essential feature for a sales force that is totally on the move. Customers these days also register their feedback and grievances through new Social media channels on the Internet, such as Twitter and Facebook. Some of the other competing products may offer Social CRM, which helps collate customer feedback from conversations that happen over the new age social media sites.
It would be good to see their blog being updated more frequently, too. There have only been three entries over the last 9 months.
Conclusion
Overall, PlaybookIQ CRM offers a great CRM solution for small businesses that may not have the luxury of a dedicated IT team to implement and manage an in-house or on-premise CRM product. PlaybookIQ has adequate functionalities to bring in key aspects of Customer Interaction and marketing under total control of your customer care team. At under $8.00 per user on a 25 user license, Playbook IQ offers an excellent value-for-money, small business CRM solution.