CRM systems

[Thoughtcat]

Hi,

Long time no post - hope you guys are all good...

Hope nobody minds me posting this, but the membership organisation I work for is choosing a new CRM, and we've been recommended to consider the following longlist of products/providers, who may also supply us with a new website into the "bargain". I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience of any of these:

Civi - Compucorp (CiviCRM + Drupal website)
Dynamics - Bluelight CRM (MS Dynamics + portal + Preside CMS)
Eudonet: proprietary CRM
IMIS-ifinity: proprietary CRM and proprietary CMS (called RiSE)
Protech: proprietary CRM system + Umbraco web CMS
Your Membership: proprietary system

I'm interested in any feedback, whether positive or negative, from any point of view, e.g. usability, customer support, ease of integration with existing systems, etc etc.

Thanks in advance

[Mat]

We've used Dynamics in the past before we were bought out, and are now using Salesforce.
The basic rule of "Garbage in, garbage out" very much dictates your experience from a user perspective.

Dynamics certainly seemed better for asset tracking, but was more finicky to use. Part of that was down to our primary developer, who treated users like children, and made sure that entering any information consisted of a series of convoluted and condescending check-lists. It would frequently take longer to create a case and populate it with information than generating a solution for the customer.

Salesforce has been bludgeoned into fitting into a support role for us. Entering information is easier than it was in Dynamics, and doesn't impact your flow anywhere near as much, but finding what you want amidst the crud is a lot harder.
It doesn't help when overenthusiastic people have created multiple account entries for the same customer, resulting in assets being scattered amongst them.
And it's very sales-oriented (the clue's in the name).

Unfortunately, both Dynamics and Salesforce have been leveraged by management in our companies primarily for performance metrics. Management will frequently ignore real-world customer satisfaction and instead focus on the metrics generated by the CRM, holding it over employees' heads like a virtual Sword of Damocles.

I definitely see the value of a good CRM system, but the implementation is critical.

[Thoughtcat]

@Mat, thanks very much for the comments!

[Mat]

No worries!
Wish I could offer you more from a developer's perspective. Our implementation of Dynamics was a bit more open in that respect, and users could tinker with dashboard layouts and basic scripting. It was all very Microsoft; lots of adding additional operators and choosing them from drop-downs.

Our Salesforce implementation is a lot more locked down, and we usually end up submitting feature requests to our internal Saleforce bods and waiting for the next "Dev Sprint" in order to see whether our suggestions have been acted upon or not.
They also lock a lot of functionality behind subscription paywalls.

With Dynamics, the subscription seems to get you most if not all of the system's functionality (I might be horribly wrong with this).
MS would then rely on third-party developers to implement functionality extensions. It's a bit odd when you have to go to a third-party developer to get the Mac version of Outlook to talk properly to Dynamics.

And that's the other thing; while it looks and feels like a Microsoft product, its compatibility with other Microsoft products is worryingly shonky.