Should I get the CRM module or use EspoCRM instead?

[marcusquinn]

I'd always do everything possible to minimise duplicate data, and for me that's sticking with Wordpress + EspoCRM. Not found anything I couldn't do with either of those. That being said, Freescout has some excellent features, eg the time-tracking.

Add FluentCRM & FluentSupport to your candidates if you have a Wordpress website.

Depending on the business model and user count, I might be able to be more specific as I've dug into all of these for gotchas and scalability.

[humptydumpty]

I’m using the E&P form you saw in a different post of mine on a Wordpress site, but the bulk of my orders are sent by regular email. The E&P form orders get funneled into Freescout automatically.

Freescout works great for me. I have it set up where it sends me notifications to my regular email (roundcube/ios mail) when a new ticket comes in. I have a lot of back and forth emails with my clients so having a ticket system is a must (open/pending/closed states). What's missing in Freescout is some CRM features, like adding additional contacts and having them all under the same company. When orders/replies come in from different salespeople, I can easily tell who they are and which company they belong to. This should also make it easier to pull up convo history by looking up a single company name instead of relying on the contacts name.

I’m using Invoice Ninja for payments, and it doubles as a basic CRM app. I also use NocoDB to keep track of leads and as a third backup. The cool thing is that Noco lets me export (CSV) the lists which go into cold storage (bi-yearly) and on Nextcloud (across multiple devices). I think that covers my setup.

[ccfu]

@humptydumpty

Freescout's CRM functionality is very basic. It doesn't group contacts by company at all if you need that functionality. You can add more than one email address for a customer and use the custom fields module to add new fields, but that is about it. In theory you could have a contact field for the company and filter on that field and you can set certain fields to display on messages. Import and export of records is supported.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty OK, best system is usually the one you already have, as change has a big time cost. What @ccfu said is good advice, with any system you want the ability to use custom fields to design to the business needs.

[humptydumpty]

@ccfu thanks for confirming my suspicion. It’s like a trend with Freescout where are modules are quickly hacked together for revenue without any serious thought put into any of them. I’ll give the crm module a try and use custom fields as you recommended.

@marcusquinn time consuming? Yes, but I’m interested in exploring the wp+espocrm route. How do they connect together? Do you handle email inside the wp dashboard or in espocrm?

[marcusquinn]

I use Espo more as an ERP / Project Management system, but the CRM part can do anything you need.

If it's a Wordpress website, then FluentCRM.

Freescout is great if you don't need it to do anything else, perhaps better than Espo in some ways, but Espo is just so extendable, I see it as more of a business operating system.

Ultimately as any business scales, you want to do everything possible to avoid duplicate data in multiple systems. So, whatever you decide, you'll be stuck with for a very long time, as migrations are headache costs that rarely go as quickly as anyone would like, so best to make decisions that avoid any needs for later migrations or data syncing integrations.

[marcusquinn]

I'm thinking we might build something as a tighter integration between Wordpress and Espo one day, but for now, I just use either Wordpress + FluentCRM, which is already integrated, or just use Espo for everything that doesn't need a website.

The 3rd thing, is I would also recommend that most accounting software can be used as a CRM of a kind, and you really want the data in there to be primary source. Preferences there are Quickfile.co.uk and Xero.com, although would be keen to see what Akaunting could do when that's a packaged app.

[robi]

As a workaround, perhaps include the company name in the contact info to help with sorting/grouping/recognition.

[marcusquinn]

@sarah-white Your posts read like they were written by ChatGPT, 3 random posts, then the payload of the advertising link you were looking to drop here. Reported.

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn We shouldn't have banned the AI this quick. I wanted to ask it if it's an AI or not, and if it was programmed to say no, ask it more complex questions until we get the "As an AI program, I was developed by.."

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty It's a taste of the future. Get ready to have some CBDC linked to some DNA ID all justified as an upgraded "I am not a robot" captchya. The internet is not reality. 🫥