Updated August 2016
Our team has been on the lookout for CRM tools that are similar to UkuuPeople. Our goal is to have our team members, that have had no input into the UkuuPeople development or design process, try UkuuPeople alongside another similarly targeted tool and give us their honest feedback on the pros and cons of both. In short, research and development. This one was interesting enough we thought we’d share it with you. Our team member, Emily Levy, gave Relate IQ a try for two weeks, creating duplicate records in both Relate IQ and UkuuPeople. The results surprised us! Here’s what she had to say.
Who is Relate IQ?
Relate IQ is an enterprise CRM tool that was founded in 2011 by a team of people based in Palo Alto, CA, keen on using big data to help simplify/automate the sales management process. In three years they have raised $69 Million in venture funding and in 2014 they were bought by Salesforce.com.
Who is UkuuPeople?
UkuuPeople is a simple CRM tool created to be installed on the popular open source platform, WordPress. It was built by the team at Wanna Pixel Inc., a Denver, CO based software company, in response to market demand for a more accessible CRM option that was tightly integrated with web properties and other web based tools. The project was funded wholly by Wanna Pixel Inc. and the first version became available on the WordPress plugin repository in June of 2015.
First Impressions
Whether you are a small or large company it might be time to upgrade from your old spreadsheet to a simple Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. In the world of technology many companies claim that their CRM is the simplest solution, but how simple are they really? I spent the past two weeks analyzing and learning the odds and ends of RelateIQ.
The features of RelateIQ are easy to navigate and almost anyone with little to no background knowledge of this software can pick it up and use it. RelateIQ has the ability to pull and gather information from other sources and saves you the time and stress of finding your contact history. It is ideal for keeping a record of your contact interactions and pulling information into a database. But have you really upgraded from your previous spreadsheet? Sure it allows you to integrate with useful apps such as MailChimp and HubSpot, but the main interface is almost identical to an Excel spreadsheet.
RelateIQ - Opportunities Dashboard
UkuuPeople - People Dashboard
In RelateIQ I found myself spending most of my time updating and organizing my contacts. A couple of the features I enjoyed were the Inactive (days) button, which allows me to sort my opportunities by days since my last activity with that contact.
RelateIQ - Opportunities Dashboard with Inactive days
I also liked that I could see my activity with a contact in an easy timeline view.
RelateIQ - Activity Timeline
UkuuPeople - Contact Dashboard with Activity (TouchPoint) History
the reports tab was also nice, it showed the activity of my leads, however I felt restricted in what I could do.
My time using RelateIQ was about to expire so I decided to take a look at the monthly fee. To my dismay the software cost more than what it seemed worth. Ultimately, I felt that the interface was a little too flat and unhelpful. An Excel spreadsheet is pretty mundane in terms of graphics and styling, mostly because the UX needs to be flexible to accommodate a wide range of data types. A CRM like RelateIQ has every data type defined so it seems like it would make sense to make the interaction with the data more visually appealing.
Pros
- Relate IQ is able to pull data from other sources
- It offers the ability to send an Activity follow up reminder by email
- It allows you to save time by pulling all the information into one organized database
- You can see the whole history of interactions with an organization in the activity view
- I like the inactive (days) button
Cons
- UX is very flat and doesn’t offer any visual cues or differentiators to help in visually analyzing the data
- limited integration options and pretty limited features
- offers very limited options for logging an activity and very few automated methods of creating activities
- cost is somewhat expensive if you want any features at all (for our Denver team [5 people] alone we would have to pay nearly $4,000 up front in order to use it for a year)
A Few Areas Where UkuuPeople Beat RelateIQ
- Base plugin is completely free. Add-ons are available for a low annual fee (unlimited users). For UkuuPeople + MailChimp our cost would be $79 for a year vs. the $4,000 for RelateIQ.
- Interface feels much more intuitive and it offers visual differentiators to help guide me to where I want to be.
- Offers much more flexibility in terms of deep integration with my website. (contact forms, donations and purchases are all automatically captured as activity on a contact)
- Offers more integrations (MailChimp, Gravity Forms, Give Donation Pages, Google Apps)
- More ways of creating activities and viewing key data that is tailored to my specific user at a glance. (WordPress dashlets for TouchPoint creation, My Favorite [contacts], and My Activities)
In conclusion, we learned a lot of great things from our journey into RelateIQ. There will certainly be a few new features in future releases of UkuuPeople as a result of it. One of the biggest things we noticed is that RelateIQ offers a much more robust feature set in terms of tracking $$ opportunities and the actual dollar value of the pipeline. We’d be interested in creating an add-on to add some of these features to UkuuPeople too.
Update - August 2016
As you noticed, we’ve highlighted some great features of the RelateIQ platform above. We’ve since implemented a few of our favorite features on the UkuuPeople Platform. UkuuPeople now offers the following:
- Opportunity Management (AKA Sales or Pipeline Management)
- Inactive Days - The cool feature where you can see how long it’s been since you’ve last had an interaction with a contact.
Opportunity Management
Inactive Days
What’s your favorite CRM tool? What do you like about it? Let us know in the comments.
The main value of IQ is that it scans your emails automatically, and pulls in all the interactions with customers. That is huge. Does Ukuu also pull in emails and automatically assign them to the customer they related to?
Hi Sean,
At the moment we don’t have a publicly available mechanism for this though we do have an alpha version of a Google Apps integration that does just that. The thing we want to make sure of is that we handle this elegantly rather than simply sucking all the email in with no chance of user configuration. Privacy of the user is a big concern.
I’m loving the idea of UkuuPeople. I do wish you guys had a way to send mail through an API like SendGrid. A complete reliance on MailChimp (though I love them) makes me a little nervous. And if my contact lists grows large, even though UkuuPeople is free, the cost for MailChimp is very large. As in… more than just paying for Sales Force. So that’s the rub for me and some of my clients right now. I’d rather pay you guys for your plugin and have the sending flexibility.
Hi Kyler,
That’s definitely a valid concern and one we will likely address in the future. Maybe near future. 😉 We have an aggressive roadmap even though we’re still pushing for better market penetration. Thank you for being a customer and for your feedback.