Agile CRM Review: Pricing, Features, Support, Pros & Cons

Agile CRM is one of the most effective and popular tools that many businesses use to automate their sales, marketing, and service in one place. Because as the business grows, the more data about customers, products, orders, and deals will be. Without a system that manages all that information and sorts the actions automatically, there is a high chance that information gaps will appear and you will lose customers. Therefore, let’s look at Agile CRM features, pros and cons to see if it is the right choice for you.

Table Content

• Agile CRM Overview
• Agile Sale Enablement review
  • Add contacts
  • Custom fields
  • Tags
  • Filter contact and companies
  • Online Appointment Scheduling
  • Deals Management
  • Contact pages and widgets
  • Email/ Calendar Sync
• Agile Marketing Automation review
  • Campaign Nodes - elements of any Agile marketing campaign
  • Building marketing campaigns in Agile CRM
  • Web Rules - How to setup the automation?
• Agile Service Automation review
  • Group & email forwarding - Helpdes
  • Ticket labels and canned responses
• What are Agile CRM packages?
  • Agile CRM e-Commerce CRM
  • Agile SAAS CRM
  • Agile Free CRM
  • Agile Small business CRM
• How much do you have to pay for Agile CRM?
• How is Agile CRM usability?
• Agile CRM Customer Support & Service
• Agile CRM Pros and Cons
• Who is Agile CRM suitable for?
  • A suitable CRM for startups and new business
  • A simple and lean selection for small to mid-sized companies
• Agile CRM Alternatives
  • HubSpot’s CRM
  • ConvergeHub CRM
  • Sugar CRM
  • Pipedrive CRM
• Summary

Agile CRM Overview

Agile CRM is a customer relationship management solution which is known for its specific design for small to midsize businesses. This platform emphasizes on connecting sales, marketing, customer services, social media marketing and other online channels in one centralized and integrated interface. By doing that, it will help companies to boost customer engagement, optimize customer lifetime cycle and improve conversion & profit ultimately.

The brand offers a diversity of pricing plans, ranging from free plan for newcomers to enterprise plan that supports medium size companies with unlimited contacts, over 50 integrations with third-party plug-ins and apps.

Get Started with Agile CRM

A customer relationship management system is an essential part of any company because it focuses on converting each lead to a purchased customer and retaining customers by involving them in a tailored communication.

Agile CRM, of course, makes sure that its users can depend on its automatic system to build a complete circle including sales, marketing and service. These three functions work together and help businesses to grow sales and benefits ultimately.

When using Agile, you will have accessibilities to a larger number of features. To categorize them, we will have three functions: Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. Let’s see what Agile CRM provides you to reduce the manual work and optimize the business process.

Agile Sale Enablement review

Sales is one of the three essential services that Agile attempts to bring to businesses. This function is a strategic process that allows sales reps to collect valuable information about prospects, develop insightful conversions with them at each stage of the customer purchase journey.

So, What does Agile do with the Sales? It automates the process, with really useful functions. Let’s look at the list first:

• Add contacts for Sales Enablement
• Add custom fields
• Add tags for Sale Enablement
• Filter contacts and companies
• Bulk Actions
• Appointment scheduling
• Contact pages and widgets
• Email sync
• Calendar sync
• Deals

Add contacts

By contact management, Agile offers a variety of methods such as adding manually, importing from CSV files, pulling data from the web, and syncing from apps (Google, Stripe, Shopify, FreshBooks, and QuickBooks). For more information and guidelines about integration, you can check out here - they have provided a comprehensive list of their available connections with leading third-party service providers.

In brief, adding new contacts to Agile is an easy task and it can be done within minutes!

Custom fields

The next function of Sales Enablement is customizing contact & company fields. Businesses will always need to customize the default fields in a CRM for enriching the customer database and optimize the sales performance. For this function, you can add several custom fields to contacts, companies, deals, cases separately and with ease.

Tags

Tags is an important part of the Sales Enablement because it helps you carry out your campaigns. In Agile CRM, tags can be used for sorting, filtering, segmenting and targeting. Based on the tag system, you are able to organize prospects into different segments and campaigns.

You can tag a single contact or multiple ones based on your demand. The tag action will be displayed on the timeline of each contact to let you easily keep track of the process.

Agile has also has a blog post remmending some methods to use custom tags. In details, they suggest using these kinds of tags for your customer segmentation:

• Demographics
• Purchase cycle phase
• Behavioral patterns
• Competitor’s contact
• Products that leads are having interests in

So, you can easily create tags and assign to single or multiple contacts in Agile. One contact can be assigned with multiple tags. Also, these tags can be added automatically to the Campaigns under Marketing Automation.

Filter contact and companies

The next feature of Agile is filtering, which is elementary for all actions related to customers. In general, filters help search, sort, group and therefore any team member, form staff, market, sales agent, sales rep or account manager can access the needed customers’ data. Each member in the team can create filters to keep track of the required data.

Online Appointment Scheduling

Agile Sales Enablement has another useful feature, which is online appointment scheduling. Considering that the meeting schedule is hard to follow, Agile has created a relatively intuitive interface for setting up a scheduling system. In details, step by step, here is the process you will go through:

• Calendar: get the calendar link to send to your prospects. You can also add the “Schedule URL” to pages as you might wish
• Business hours: choose your business hour by select dates and times
• Meeting types: add name (e.g. let keep it short) and choose the slot (with detailed minutes)
• Advanced: add a Buffer time to avoid unexpectedly-scheduled appointments.

Agile does allow Google Calendar, Outlook and Office 365 integration, therefore, you can conveniently control your schedule.

The link to choose an appointment can be sent automatically to customers by using trigger task. For example, when creating a marketing campaign, which will be reviewed in the next part, you can add the task “sending an email to invite appointment scheduling”, so when customers perform a certain desired action, they will be sent an automatic email for choosing the date & time for meeting.

Deals Management

Agile CRM provides an easy-to-use deal tracking system including Deal Tracks and Deal Milestones. Track is the process or a pipeline through which you move deals. One business can have multiple sales tracks, let’s say, b2b deals, b2c deals, VIP deals, etc. You can build a suitable track for each segment, very flexible. Inside one track, we have a set of milestones, which are the condition or step where the deals are placed. For example, Agile already provides some default milestones: New, Prospect, Proposal, Won, Lost.

You can easily create new deal tracks on the Deals section on the interface of Agile. After that, you need to add deal milestones, based on the customer journey that you have examined and developed. Once you finish creating the sales track, you can add deals to it.

Contact pages and widgets

Contacts pages are an essential part of any CRM. Just like all other CRMs, Agile provides contact pages that help you to view all a broad view of contacts.

Informations on the Contact Pages:

• Contact Information: includes basic information of the lead/customer including name, email, lead score, tags
• Contact Activities: includes all activities of or related to the contact such as timeline, notes, events, tasks, deals, cases, campaigns, web stats, mail and documents
• Contact Widgets: are flexible components on the contact pages, you can add relevant information to the contact to instantly view them when opening the page such as telephony, support, billing, etc. For higher tech level, Agile allows users to create custom widgets using its documents.

Overall, contact pages in Agile are highly customizable and user-friendly. Even if you are new to CRM, you can also access these pages, get necessary information and make use of them.

Email/ Calendar Sync

For Email integration, Agile provides three integration gates which are Gmail, Imap and Office 365. You will see all email exchanging between you and contacts in the contact pages.

For Calendar Sync, Agile can sync emails between Google Calendar and Office 365. Then, this allows you to manage your schedule quite easily with the two most popular calendar platforms.

Agile Marketing Automation review

Marketing is another essential feature of Agile. This function focuses on segmentation and personalized campaigns which make sure you will not treat everyone the same. Also, the value Agile brings is the automation of all campaigns, which save you a lot of time and increase efficiency.

So, What does Agile do with Marketing Automation? It automates the process, with really useful functions. Let’s look at the list first:

• Building campaigns
• Social suite
• Web rules

Campaign Nodes - elements of any Agile marketing campaign

Nodes are the elements of a campaign and a campaign is a structure of different nodes. Nodes are frequently actions that are performed by customers or actions that will automatically performed to customers. Important nodes in Agile:

• Send email
• Wait/ Wait till
• Clicked/ Opened
• Tags
• Score
• URL visited
• Add task/ deal/ note/ case( case arre helpdesk/support issues)
• Close case/task/deal
• Send message
• Notify
• Has deal/ event
• A/B test

All of these nodes will surely be used multiple times in your automation workflows because they are all important actions that decide whether to treat the prospects in the next step.

You will find it a lot easier to create an efficient marketing campaign for different segments. Agile also allows users to add their expected nodes to its user community for improvement.

Building marketing campaigns in Agile CRM

Say Goodbye to one-size-fit-all marketing campaigns, now you will build different segments based on different customers’ characteristics. Agile provided pre-made marketing campaign templates, let’s see what we have.

For Marketing Automation

• Newsletter: send newsletter to contacts, track email opened and link clicked
• Autoresponder: send an automatic email when customers perform certain actions. For example, send a pdf file when a customer send the form then send different emails later
• Lead scoring: track behaviors of leads and edit the score accordingly. Automatically edit score and tags along the journey of leads while interacting with your brand.
• Social: automatically engage with audiences on Twitter. You can collect leads who have directed messages, mentioned, retweeted, searched your brand. In term of marketing, you can send tweet to customer once he/she takes a desired actions, for instance, subscribe for a private network of your brand
• A/B test: split test two different email workflows

For SAAS campaigns

• Signup welcome: with SAAS project, Agile can help you to send a welcome email when a contact signs up for SaaS products, email lists, etc.
• Trial conversion: Agile can track user behavior to define when is the time that a contact is ready to level up their subscription. It will then automatically send messages to motivate at a suitable time.
• User onboarding: you can create a system of user onboarding on your website. Agile helps displaying the messages at the right moment and in the right place

For E-commerce campaigns

• Cart abandonment: send cart abandonment emails on typical timelines to take customers back to your stores.
• Target promo: send promo emails, at the perfect time, to customers based on their behavior

Overall, with these pre-made templates by Agile, businesses can build basic but effective marketing campaigns which support marketing from the beginning step to the ending step of a customer journey.

The workflow design interface is quite simple and intuitive. Users will not have to spend more time on understanding the interface and how it works.

Web Rules - How to setup the automation?

Web rules - another useful tool to let you quickly create automated actions following customer activities on your website.

One of the most important uses of this function is showing popup when customers are in your store. Agile allows you to set a web rules based on a group of conditions such as:

• Page URL: show popup on which page
• Referral URL: show popup only when customers come from a selected referring URL
• Device: show popup when customer using certain devices
• Tag/ Tag & created date/ lead score/ created/company/ job title/ owner, visit type ( anonymous or existing contact)/ shopify cart conditions

About the popup design, Agile CRM does support certain pre-made templates that you can use if you don’t have enough time, technical & design skills. However, the templates are quite basic and popular so if you want to design a beautiful and unique popup, you will need to employ designers and developers.

On the whole, with the Web Rules function in Agile, you can create types of the most basic and fundamental rules that aim at collecting email addresses for further sales steps on your website.

Agile Service Automation review

Group & email forwarding - Helpdesk

With this feature, Agile allows you to create multiple helpdesk groups and the system will send tickets for all the users in the group. All the tickets will be available on the Agile interface, at the Ticket section. The creation is easy and quick.

Each helpdesk group has a forwarding email which receives emails from customers and forwards them to group members. You can quickly set this forwarding email once you read the Agile guideline on forwarding emails.

Ticket labels and canned responses

In Agile, you can manage all the tickets based on a system of labels. Working just like Tags in Contacts, labels let you to organize tickets, for example, set the priority, set the person in charge, set the group of tickets.

About canned responses, Agile allows creating multiple responses, which enable you to quickly respond to customer requests before reaching them with a specific answer.

What are Agile CRM packages?

Agile provides a diversity of integrated sales, marketing and service features. To understand more about what you will receive with each of its packages? What can it do for different business purposes? Let’s look at these specified solutions.

Agile CRM e-Commerce CRM

As its name, e-Commerce CMR focuses on streamlining the purchasing journeys then ultimately improves the conversion rate:

• Engagement boosting (smart on-screen pop ups displaying related products, customer feedback, or discounts)
• Email marketing (abandonment cart emails, automatedly triggered newsletters, coupons. etc.)

With these capabilities, small to midsize stores will be able to take care of leads better, increase customer engagement, and more importantly, save a lot of time on manual email marketing tasks and spend time digging deep into the skills.

Agile SAAS CRM

According to Agile, SaaS CRM was developed for growing SaaS businesses of all sizes. Therefore, the solution focus on solving these problems:

• Number of sign ups attained.
• Conversion rate reflecting the percentage of those signups to paid customers.
• Retention or churn of those customers over time
• Customer support impacts on user behavior.
• And of course, killer engineering and your product road-map

To be more specific, Agile CRM development team has created a comprehensive process which starts from analyzing user behaviors, nurturing users, re-engaging users, converting, and reporting. To be more specific:

• Collect data for user behavior reports by automatically signing contacts from the website signups and use its contact level analysis to define the time on apps, visited pages, apps use changes over time
• Automatically offer coupons related to the features which users have previously deeply interacted with
• Automatically send personalized emails offering deals and incentives to contacts who have signed-up but not made any purchase
• Quickly integrate with other SaaS apps such as Zendesk or Twilio by one-click only
• Evaluate the churning activity with their analytics which is driven from the logged data collected at every step of a user journey

Learn more: What is the Customer Retention Rate?

Also, it provides detailed reports on the stickiness of customers to help you optimize the performance:

• Growth reports: track usage stats and compare channels over a time length
• Funnel reports: define the falling off and jumping in points
• Cohorts analysis: how long does it take to convert a reaching customer to a paid one
• Filter: demographic stats that shed the light on the most effective journey for a certain segment

Agile Free CRM

Contact and companies allowed: 1,000

The non-profit version of Agile CRM was developed to support startups and small teams to manage customer data in one place. In details, you will receive these capabilities from this free CRM:

• A maximum of 10 users
• 360-degree contact management
• Web pop ups and surveys
• Sales and Marketing Reports by emails
• Social media CRM
• Integrations to some popular third-party plugins like Twitter, Facebook for social and Twilio, VoIP Services, RingCentral for calling

Overall, the free version helps business starters to manage all important data including deals, tasks & documents in one system. Based on that, companies can pursue the most potential leads, nurture customer relationships professionally and effectively.

Agile Small business CRM

Support small businesses that have limited staff to leverage the business sales & marketing automation with necessary features. Specifically, it improves 3 main areas of a small Business:

• Marketing: create and run multiple marketing campaigns at the same time with automated workflows. You can design multiple automated workflows which include customer actions and your reactions to those. Eg: email personalization, email tracking & reports, email A/B testing, behavior-based segmentation.
• Sales: 360-degree contact view with a centralized and comprehensive address book of a customer or lead.
• Services: automated customer support such as helpdesk ticketing, feedback surveys, tracking and resolution of FAQs

How much do you have to pay for Agile CRM?

With the budget from $0 to $79.99 per month, you can adopt this CRM solution. In details, the pricing is divided into 4 levels:

• Free: $0 for 10 users
• Starter: $14.99 monthly/ $9.99 yearly / $8.99 2 years (NOTE: prices per user per month)
• Regular: $44.99 monthly/ $39.99 yearly / $29.99 2 years (NOTE: prices per user per month)
• Enterprise: $79.99 monthly/ $64.99 yearly / $47.99 2 years (NOTE: prices per user per month)

If you want to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your plan, it’s super convenient because you can do it anytime. Also, you can easily change the plan by yourself right on from the Agile CRM’s online dashboard.

How is Agile CRM usability?

It’s hard to deny that Agile is among the top easy-to-use CRMs in the market. The management interface is indeed quick and intuitive even with a non-tech user. Every major feature can be proceeded with several clicks because it has been gone through many iterations and mockups by the development team.

Agile CRM Customer Support & Service

Agile CRM offers multiple customer support resources to its users.

For customers using the free package, they can email Agile CRM 24 hours a day, five days a week. For paid users, they may contact the support team via email, or by phone between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST Monday to Friday.

Besides, you can schedule a call at your convenience or chat with a representative online. If you are a member of the highest-level package, Enterprise, you will have a dedicated account representative to guide you through any issues.

Agile CRM offers free webinars on its website to teach users more about its products. The company has a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, and SlideShare, where users may find helpful information. However, of course, it doesn’t make sense to expect a comprehensive forum knowledge base from Agile like the giant - Salesforce.

Agile CRM Pros and Cons

In sum, Agile does have a lot of pros and cons. If you want to decide whether to acquire this CRM, you need to figure out what features you need from a CRM. Here are Agile CRM pros and cons.

Agile Pros:

• Affordable prices
• Contact management made easy
• One of the best email marketing tools:
• Easy-to-use setting and management interface even for beginners
• Automated sales pipeline system makes it easier to close deals

Agile Cons:

• Only one integration feature is available for Starter package
• Buggy email capabilities
• Third-party integration issues
• Limited third party integrations
• Limited service automation features
• Lack of reporting

Who is Agile CRM suitable for?

A suitable CRM for startups and new business

The free version of Agile is definitely suitable for new companies or start-ups. It provides new companies with basic features such as contact management, marketing automation, pop ups and surveys, reports by email, social media CRM, some plugin and integrations, and extensive API.

The Starter plan with a capacity of up to 10,000 contacts can also be a smart choice because it provides the most essential features for all activities related to sales and marketing. You can utilize this solution to optimize your automation workflow and make sure there is no data is dropped and wasted.

A simple and lean selection for small to mid-sized companies

This is where the Regular and Enterprises plans come into the play. With up to 50,000 and an unlimited number of contacts, you can be confident that these solutions will help you to manage the entire customer lifecycle, at the same time, monetize the data collected from multiple sources with analytics and automated workflows.

Agile CRM Alternatives

Besides Agile CRM, there are different vendors that you might want to take a look at in the market. Each tool has its own focus, your work is to find out what you need and find the suitable solution.

HubSpot’s CRM

Hubspot’s CRM is a fully integrated CRM solution that includes three functions: CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub. The CRM is totally free while the other two features are provided with multiple packages for multiple demands.

What makes Hubspot’s CRM special:

• Outstanding email integration features
• Intuitive user interface makes it easy to get up and running
• Exceptionally good import and exporting capability

What drives Hubspot’s CRM back:

• Its sales management is not flexible
• Very steep price levels
• Paid technical support

ConvergeHub CRM

Founded in 2013, ConvergeHub is a cloud-based solution which provides invaluable market automation features. With this solution, you can manage all contacts, leads, prospects, forecast and customer activities from one interface.

What makes ConvergeHub CRM special:

• User-friendly interface
• Simple and easy-to-use marketing tasks

What drives ConvergeHub CRM back:

• Lack of integrations with third-party apps

Sugar CRM

Sugar CRM is an open-source platform that is favored for its ability to customize, and you can make changes to features to fit your demand. SugarCRM is available in nine languages.

What makes Sugar CRM special:

• Standout communication features including phone, email, personalize message, video meetings
• Highly visual analytics built-in
• Campaign Wizard, which collects leads and distribute forms across the engagement programs

What drives Sugar CRM back:

• Lack of integrations with third-party apps
• Complicated integration procedure

Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive is a noticeable name of Agile alternatives. It’s a straightforward CRM service that focuses on sales pipelines and allows sales teams to actively manage sales.

What makes Pipedrive CRM special:

• Rich third-party integrations
• Multi-device access
• Simplified platform interface

What drives ConvergeHub CRM back:

• Lack of integrations with third-party apps
• Basic reports features
• Complicated integration procedure
• The CRM groups new leads and contacts

Further reading:

• Top 15 Best Free CRM Software
• What is CRM? 5 Best CRM Software & How to choose the best CRM software?

Summary

That’s the end! Hope that you have gained a deeper understanding of Agile CRM - an affordable choice for small to mid-sized businesses. It covers a wide range of aspects regarding customer relationship management relatively well. It performs effectively on conversion maximization by integrating multichannel data into one system, creating sophisticated reports to help generate the supreme workflow for marketing and sales automation. However, if you need a deeply-centralized CRM that covers all aspects of your business, you might want to take a look at other high-level CRM like Zoho CRM or Salesforce CRM.

If you still consider whether to recruit this CRM, go for the Free version beforehand and define whether it’s suitable for your business.