I’m excited to share my first review of one of the top WordPress CRMs, first up is Presspoint CRM but first…
Why Do I Care?
I received an email recently from a business acquaintance that expressed honest angst about all the noise being made around CRMs these days. They had done their homework and had encouraged others to give their opinions on good CRM solutions. Yet they were still no nearer a definite answer on the whole thing and frankly said, “I honestly wouldn’t link my name to any CRM right now. I’m too frustrated by the whole industry.” Still, they were open to further input and even seeking information about what we had to offer.
“I honestly wouldn’t link my name to any CRM right now. I’m too frustrated by the whole industry.”
And you know what? I can relate to that. We live in a culture with a lot of choices. A lot of variations on the same theme. Sometimes it’s really frustrating finding what I want. But the fact is, I really do want to find a CRM solution that works best for me. In spite of the pain, we honestly don’t want a one-size-fits-all product. Because, in the end, we know it simply isn’t true.
And perhaps that’s part of the reason I’m launching into a series of reviews on WordPress CRMs.
My Rating Method
Awhile back, the team at WPBeginner.com mentioned UkuuPeople’s CRM in a list of other offerings. I decided to take a look at some of the others that were sharing space with us and give you my honest opinion about what I found. Of course, you have to keep in mind, it’s my opinion, and it doesn’t have to be yours. But I’m willing to tell you why I came to my conclusions, and hopefully you’ll find it helpful.
A couple of things to note before we get started. These really are my honest opinions, and I am not being paid to review any of these products. Also, I might use an affiliate link for some of these (if I like the product), but that doesn’t cost you anything.
The format I will be following in presenting these reviews is as follows:
- Brief summary
- Listing of key core features
- Listing of available extensions
- More detailed observations about the features offered
- Rating of 5 basic criteria
So here we go!
Summary of Presspoint CRM
The first CRM up for review here is Presspoint. It is a premium WordPress CRM, at $550 a year for the core plugin, with two extensions that can be purchased for $100 each per year. Reporting seems to be a super strong point and intuitivity a weak side. Thankfully, there is a user manual as well as a number of tutorials that help to guide you through some of the processes. I’m not sure you’d survive without them.
Presspoint CRM Core Features
CRM Dashboard
Contacts
Commerce
Email
Profiles and Forms
Content Settings
Reports
Presspoint CRM Extensions
Digging in to Presspoint CRM
Though Presspoint CRM has no “at a glance” visuals on your home dashboard, it does have its own dashboard that gives a bird’s-eye overview of your CRM activity and of the various tools and settings for running the system. From it, you can click on the little gears to go into background setup or click on some of the links to run specialized searches, filtering, and reports. Also, you can click on the Action alerts to resolve any orders, answer messages, or address open opportunities (if you have the Opportunity extension).
The Contacts Menu is a bit unintuitive, to my way of thinking. You cannot enter new contacts from it, nor can you edit or add to the contact information there. To do any adding, editing, or updating of a contact, you are sent away from the Presspoint CRM to the WordPress Users dashboard, and from there, you must navigate back to the CRM.
The Users dashboard has been enhanced with extra fields, but at the same time, a number of the options that were there natively (in default WordPress) have been removed.
There also seem to be some simple access control options for access to the PressPoint CRM Tools.
The Commerce Tool seems quite powerful. I found it difficult to learn without going through the tutorials to figure out what the settings did, how to unpack the power, and where to paste certain strings of code. But there are numerous settings for running a streamlined e-commerce business, including coupons, credits, inventory management, tracking of orders, and of course all the taxes. Really a comprehensive system.
Email campaigns and autoresponders are both customizable with Presspoint. Once again, you’ll have to follow a couple of tutorials to learn where to put the correct code to make everything run automatically. As with many of the tools and settings, it takes at least an experience admin to set things up if not a junior developer. This is definitely not an out-of-the-box sort of system.
General forms and profile forms and a whole array of form, profile, and content settings can be configured for your website. However, even with the tutorials, I found the setup to be counterintuitive. Perhaps there are just too many options. Most users would rather have 10 choices than 100. This may be a great toolbox for a developer to build out functionality from, but it’s definitely not end-user configurable out of the box.
Top Feature!
The reporting/search/filter tool for Users/Contacts is very powerful. If anything impressed me about the plugin, this did! Search and sort with multiple queries for multiple values and optional is/is not, all/any operators. Once a list is generated with these values, you can take action on the list (email blast, import/export, or make edits). The arguments here are a little cryptic, but if you’re familiar with database arguments you’ll feel right at home. The greater than, equal to, not equal to, etc., variables are not immediately apparent to the untrained user.
You can also save that exact search query as a “smart search” for future use. If, for instance, you sort for all clients with a rating of 5 to 10 so you can send them special sales notices, all contacts given that rating from here on out will be saved to that search query and included in future email blasts for that grouping.
From the filtered list resulting from your search/report query you can select a number of actions to apply to the list of contacts. This list includes Export, Import, Send E-mail, Collect E-mail Addresses, or Bulk Geocode.
I did not purchase the extensions for Presspoint, so I cannot give any opinion about them. They sell for $100 each, per year.
So all in all, I would say there’s a lot of hidden horsepower in this plugin. It involves a fairly steep learning curve and is difficult to navigate, but once harnessed, I can see it pulling a hefty load.
Pros
The Presspoint CRM has some great positives, to be sure. If you’re looking for a self-contained software tool that offers contact management, simple e-commerce tools, advanced reporting, and some level of email automation, this could very well be a fit for you. Especially if you happen to be an advanced technical user.
Bummers
There are a few bummers about this system that I think might discourage the average user from engaging with it.
The first glaring issue that I see is that the interface is very difficult to understand or navigate. Nothing is where you would expect it to be. Adding new contacts, creating relationships between contacts, finding your contacts. All of these functions are pretty unintuitive. Add to that the fact that creating filters and reports requires a basic knowledge of database queries, and you’ve got a formula that firmly plants this CRM in the advanced user category. It’s a shame, considering the amount of features this platform has.
The second problem I see here is this system has very few integrations with other tools. In fact I found that it has exactly one integration with other tools, and that is MailChimp. In other words, it doesn’t play well with others. This generally doesn’t sit well with users of the WordPress community, where they rely on being able to build a solution out of the building blocks of a few different tools. For instance, maybe someone would want to use this CRM with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads; they can’t. Perhaps they would want to connect this with a form builder like Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms; sorry, you can’t do that either. To me, this would be a deal breaker, but for some, this may not pose an issue.
Ratings
First of all, here are my 5 criteria are and why I chose them.
- Core System — this is the system I downloaded without any extra add-ons. I’ll be giving this rating based on how robust and on-point those features seem to be.
- Front-End Integration — it’s important that the tools available in a CRM “speak” with the front end of your site, as this is how you automate the collection of data.
- Ease of Use and UX — naturally, the more intuitive a program is, the quicker it is to become familiar with it. Something like 60% of CRM implementations fail because of poor user adoption. If your CRM system is unintuitive it doesn’t matter how great the feature set is, your users aren’t going to use it.
- Add-ons/Integrations — that’s what WordPress is all about, right? Having the flexibility to build a system that fits your needs. To do that, you need a variety of building blocks to choose from.
- Customer Support —this one is pretty important for me (after UX) in learning a new program. I love browsing through help documents and watching tutorials. And if that doesn’t cut it, I look for the chat box or some contact information.
Score for Presspoint
- Core System — 4.0
- Front-End Integration — 3.0
- Ease of Use/UX — 2.0
- Add-ons/Integrations — 2.0 (Unfortunately this tool has very few integrations with other tools.)
- Customer Support — 4.5 (I’m going solely by their available manuals and tutorials here.)
Total Score = 3.1
Video Overview
Have Something to Say?
Do you use Presspoint CRM and have something to add to our review? We’d love to hear from you. Have questions about something we didn’t cover here? We’d love to hear it and will do our best to answer. Do you use CRM other than Presspoint? We’d love to hear about it and how it’s working for you. Comment below.
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