Tactile CRM Review - DISCONTINUED

Introduction

Tactile CRM is a robust, easy to use, cost effective, web based contact and sales management system provided by omelett.es ltd. It’s a great tool for managing and monitoring your sales pipeline, clients, activities, meetings, notes and emails. It facilitates easier collaboration and sharing of information amongst team members by maintaining all your important data in one place.

Technical details

Tactile CRM is a cloud based application built using an award winning framework and PHP programming language, the application is hosted on the scalable Amazon EC2 platform and can be accessed from standard web browsers or mobile devices having access to the Internet. Though Tactile CRM’s code isn’t open source and isn’t available for customization, they do expose a developer friendly application programming interface (API) which can be used for seamless integration with a variety of third party applications.

Tactile CRM at a glance

• Free trial: Yes, a free trial is available with premium plan enabled for 14 days and solo plan available for life.
• Ideal for: Small and medium sized businesses looking to streamline their contact management.
• Training required: Not much, Tactile CRM is simple and easy to use.
• User limit: There’s no user limit, the solution is available on pay per user model, add as many users as required.
• Support available: Yes, all plans are backed by full email support with priority email support available for premium plans, additionally phone support is available for subscribers of the enterprise plan.

Website

Their website  has a simple yet friendly design. Content is neatly organized, help & support options are easy to locate. There is a dedicated blog with latest updates on the product and on CRM in general.

Getting started

Tactile CRM can be evaluated for free and 30 day free trials are available on all existing plans – enterprise, premium, solo. The free for life solo plan, offers a no obligation 14 day trial of premium features. The registration form for the solo plan can be quickly filled in under a minute, importantly credit card details are not required during the registration process.

One notable and unique aspect of the registration process is that it allows defining the URL to be used to access the CRM instance.

A successful registration results in an email with all details essential for login.

Look and feel

The first screen post successful login is the dashboard which has a summary of all important information in your CRM – listing your activities, opportunities, notes, emails.

The intuitive interface has options to search or add add an organization, person, opportunity, activity.

The application itself has a tabbed layout with major modules organized under tabs.

Analyzing the configuration options

Configuration options often indicate the difficulty involved in customizing the application to suit specific requirements.
The screen capture below shows the controls available to the admin users for customizing Tactile CRM based on the needs of their organization.

Let’s take a look at various sections

• Users & Groups – This section has functions to allow creating users, groups and setting permissions to control the features your internal users have access to.
• Your Tactile Account – With options to manage your plan, payment details and usage, this section allows you to control your Tactile CRM configuration. There’s an option to customize the color scheme to suit your needs.
• Data & Templates – Allows defining custom fields, defining options available for classifying your data – organizations, opportunities, and activities. Activity Tracks allow setting up activity workflows wherein multiple activities can be created at once.
• External Applications – Manage your CRM’s interaction with external applications such as your website OR specialized applications like Zendesk, FreshBooks etc.

Data import

Businesses often have customer data in their legacy systems which they would like to import into their new systems. Software tools like CRM must provide an easy to use data import system which facilitates quick insertion of data into the system. In the upcoming paragraph we analyze the data import offering of Tactile CRM.

Importing Contacts is the fastest way to add multiple Organizations and People into Tactile CRM. The CRM allows importing data from a variety of external applications and as well supports importing from commonly used file formats as CSV, vCard, Excel.

We went ahead with importing contacts and organizations from CSV files. The import process involves very simple steps, they are –

1. Prepare CSV file and upload it into the CRM.
2. Match and map CRM’s fields with column headings found in the CSV. Herein, Tactile CRM analyzes the file and shows up a screen with proposed mapping, it attempts to ”auto map’ CSV columns, showing the columns which could not be auto mapped. The same screen allows tagging the contacts and settings permissions on the data that will be imported. Click import.
3. Tagging imports allows you to easily view and manage the results which is a great way to help Tactile CRM undo any mistakes you may make.

We were pleasantly surprised when we noticed that import wizard does automatic duplicate detection too.

Customization options

Adoption and success rates of CRMs are often determined by their offerings of customization options. Tactile CRM offers a decent set of tools for its customizations, let’s take a look at them –

1. It can be rebranded by customizing its appearance, there are options to change the colours used by the application and upload a logo to be displayed on the login page.
2. There are a number of places in Tactile CRM where you have to choose values, these values can be easily updated/ managed thus allowing you to customize the application to your needs.
3. With the possibility to add custom fields to organizations, contacts, activities you can store information specific to your business.
4. Individual users can customize their dashboards too.

Activities and reminders via emails notifications

Activities are an easy way to remember to get things done. Activities can be added on contacts or opportunities.

Users can add activities for themselves or their colleagues and get email notifications when they are due. On days with activities due, users will get an email, which will contain any overdue activities that they might have – pretty handy feature isn’t it?

Users can download and export their activities as an iCal file.

The Email dropbox

Tactile CRM is designed to work seamlessly with all mail clients. Each user a unique email address – in Tactile’s parlance it’s their own ‘dropbox’ (not to be confused with the popular file sharing service). You can forward emails, or BCC the dropbox and email will then be attached to the correct record in Tactile CRM.
Opportunities each have their own unique dropbox too.

Dashboard

Users can customize their dashboards to show the information they are interested in.

With a variety of graphs and reports to choose from users can select what to display on their dashboard. Some of these graphs are –

• their current pipeline,
• the opportunities they have won (sometimes referred to as closed) over the last 12 months,
• open opportunities and those that you have either won or lost in the current month, and many more.

Data export

Almost all data can be exported out of the system. Data may be exported to either maintain backups or to run custom reports on them.

Most of the objects may be downloaded as CSV files, an email with exported files is sent as attachment once export is complete.

• Activities will be grouped downloaded into CSV files. Individual activities can be downloaded as iCal files.
• Opportunities can be exported into as a CSV to run custom reports or to load them into a spread sheet for analysis.
• Exporting organizations & people is straightforward and not too tough either.

Contact management

Contact management is greatly simplified. With contact information neatly organized and all information at a single place, sales personnel are better prepared while dealing with customers.

Here’s how important data is organized on the screen –

Security and access controls

Tactile CRM has a simple permissions system for controlling access to the contacts. Access control encompasses specifying who can look at a record and who can edit it. By default, when every new will be visible by all users in your CRM account, Organizations are the only record type where you can specify permissions all items related to an Organization will inherit its permissions.

Users can as well create private activities or notes – means only the owner of the activity or note, can see or edit the it.

Existing plans work won SSL, SSL is used by e-commerce sites, banks, and other online services to ensure that your data is encrypted when it is sent across the Internet.

Reporting and analytics

Reporting is an important component of any enterprise solution. Tactile CRM comes with a set of built-in reports, graphs and charts for analyzing opportunities and sales pipeline. However, there’s no option to design custom reports, but users can always export data out of the system and analyze it in excel.

Mobile integration

There’s an iPhone app available which has to be downloaded from the apple app store, this app allows account holders to view, edit and update contacts, sales leads or opportunities, activities, notes and emails directly from their iPhones.

“Even though Tactile CRM is a web-based CRM, the iPhone app has an offline cache that enables users to look up critical information the moment they need it, even if they are out of network range,” said George Step, Product and Community Manager for Tactile CRM.

There’s no Android app.

Social media integration

Social media is a great way to expand your customer reach, become known as an expert in your field and win new business. Tactile CRM has built-in support for popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. All such addresses are stored as contact methods. Especially for twitter, users can follow their customer’s tweets from inside the application itself.

Integration with external applications

One of Tactile’s biggest strengths is that it integrates very well with external applications. Seamless integration exists with some of the best online services, such as –

1. FreshBooks for efficient billing and invoicing.
2. Campaign Monitor for managing email campaigns.
3. Zendesk for managing cases and monitoring support.
4. Can import contacts from Google Contacts, CloudContacts, Shoeboxed

If you are using an application which is not listed herein, you can always use make a request for the integration.

Integration with website

If you have a website then its likely would like to capture customer data from the website and save into your CRM.

Tactile CRM has a built in tool for you to easily add a web form to your website so you can safely capture leads and customer data directly into Tactile CRM. In they themselves “eat their own dog food” by using such a web form on their website.

Setting up a web form in Tactile CRM is very easy and can be accomplished by following simple steps –

1. Simply login as an admin user, visit the admin section and chose the ‘Configure Tactile CRM Web Form’.
2. Choose the values you want to capture and make sure you tick the ‘Enable Web Form’ box so that this feature is turned on.
3. Click save and copy the code Tactile CRM gives you into your website and start collecting leads from your website.
4. You can as well create opportunities and activities for the leads that entered via the web form.

Pricing

The subscription is available in 3 plans – Enterprise, Premium, Solo.

While solo plan is free, its not really meant for serious use due to obvious limitations in terms of number of contacts or opportunities that can be stored.

Premium membership of Tactile CRM costs $9 per user/month. The plan provides businesses with 1GB of file storage space per user and the freedom to store unlimited contacts and opportunities, it also allows the user to take advantage of 3rd party integration for popular business apps with priority email support.

Enterprise membership costs $18 per user/month. It includes all features of the premium membership, the file storage space is increased to 5GB with email and phone support.

Benefits

1. Reasonably priced.
2. Its very easy to use, easy to administer, users can very quickly adapt to its interface.
3. It integrates very well with leading third party applications.
4. The web forms integrate very well with your website.
5. Nicely designed data import and export features.

Verdict

Tactile CRM has most of the important functions needed for handling crucial business tasks. True it has a very short feature set and lacks many but it integrates very with third party applications. Its offering can definitely be improved by providing a customizable dashboard that can display multiple reports and an android app for android users.

Everything included, we think Tactile CRM is one of the easiest CRM software systems there is, its such a really simple sales tool that we think you can get your users up and running very quickly.