Highrise CRM (discontinued) vs. Kustomer

I am not familiar with other contact management systems; before Highrise, we used a paper rolodex. But for our purposes, which have certainly changed over the last several years, we've been able to adapt Highrise to our needs. We've changed our tagging protocol - now, for example, we have social media tags, so I can narrow a contacts search down by contacts who have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And we've added fields in the Contact Info so that we can include links to those pages when they exist, and you can click on it to go directly to those pages. It definitely meets our needs, though we are a fairly small marketing department, under 50 employees who utilize Highrise, and probably far fewer who use it frequently. Particularly with the tagging system, I could see a large number of users creating useless and overwhelming numbers of tags

Incentivized

It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.

Incentivized

• Able to see all activity, this helps if you need to find out who made updates last.
• You can create different tags for clients. We have tags labels for each product the client has with our company, so when we need to pull reports it saves a lot of time.
• If a client has multiple people in the office you can add all their informaiton.

Incentivized

• All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
• The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
• We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.

Incentivized

• Would like to be able to copy information from the right sidebar more easily without having to open up & edit the contact (like Skype or email info)
• When I start a search by tags and pull out information, I have to re-do the tagged search to pull it up again
• Takes a while to export a custom list

Incentivized

• For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
• Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
• Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
• I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.

Incentivized

It's become the heart of our contact management system - it's low cost, simple to use and high impact for us. We are using a version that allows for unlimited employees, 50,000 Highrise contacts and 100 Gb or file storage. This means to us that this is scalable and sufficient for the foreseeable future. By using some other apps we can add some things that we need that aren't built into the product. We use infusionsoft but not as a contact manager for clients. When a contact in infusionsoft reaches a certain stage and we get more "hands on", we use Zapier to setup the contact in Highrise and create an embryonic deal. We like Mailchimp for email newsletters and Mailchimp syncs nicely with Highrise. Finally we use SalesClic to give us a more refined sales pipeline.

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

It's quick and easy to setup and use. There isn't any feature "bloat". Nothing to struggle with

There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.

Incentivized

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

They are quick and SO nice. They are very friendly and are eager to help.

Incentivized

It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

We use to use Connectwise and Highrise is a breath of fresh air compared to Connectwise. We love that the 37 signal services are all web based. We can connect anywhere making working on the go much easier for everyone. Our challenge with Basecamp was that it was a computer program based product which made it very slow and inefficient. It also conflicted with our Mac computers because it only worked on a Windows platform. None of this is the case for Highrise. I've never had a load issue nor has it ever run slow. It's up to the minute with any updates and entries. The categories it offers is wonderful and very appreciated. Organization is key, and it's the best way to keep everyone on task. Overall, we are very happy with the product

Incentivized

I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.

Incentivized

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

• We use it to streamline and assign inbound sales calls.
• Sales reps use it to automatically store correspondence , schedule follow ups, and note requirements.
• We download the text data and apply big data techniques to learn about customer needs and product requirements in the aggregate.

Incentivized

• We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
• Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.

Incentivized