CRM Module - is it worth it?

Kinetic ERP
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Morning everyone!

I just wanted to ask if anyone has purchased/used the CRM module in Kinetic, and what your experience with it has been like.

We’re considering adding it, but I’m curious if anyone has found it to be a beneficial addition or something they could do without. I’ve been poking around looking for more info on it within Epicor’s documentation and it sounds pretty nice, but wanted to get you guys’ perspective on it and how it’s helped your sales team/company as a whole and the pros and cons.

Thanks in advance!

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If you like an extremely basic CRM (correct me if you find otherwise) it will suite your needs. What I mean by basic is that it’s not going to integrate with other services (i.e. outlook) like hubspot does or any other CRM.

Not sure the state of the mobile app that they had built for it now that kinetic can be run from a browser and arguably a phone…

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Its pretty weak. Honestly I think the main reason we have it is CRM licenses are cheaper than full ones.

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It is not a CRM in the way a salesperson would think. The lack of email integration is really a killer.

I do like Case Management though and we use it primarily for that.

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Oh, yes, case management is nice. But simple enough if that is all you wanted you could probably whip up a UD screen pretty quickly that did the same things.

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The Task Management would be a little more work though.

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Ah we don’t use the task management very much, pretty much only to the degree it forces us to. I can see larger companies having a more complicated flow, but our process is so simple it doesn’t involve many states or people.

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Following along quietly as we need something and aren’t sure what we need.

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Yeah, we don’t use it for Sales. It’s more for customer concern tracking or ECO changes.

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Oh I thought you were just spamming reactions for the points. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well that too of course. We really need something that handles emails, sales, returns, complaints bla bla bla.

Preferably something we could at least have some level of control and customization on.

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Lol…

Note, we have the crm module, but do not know jack about it.

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The RMA screen isn’t part of CRM is it? I thought that was a mfg one.

If our phone calls were both automatically recorded and transcribed into the call log and you could find emails associated with quotes and orders and handle them within the ERP, CRM would be on a whole nuther level.

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exactly… if this is all you need then it works fine. The lack of email integration and now with VOIP to get transcriptions from phone calls in call log would be so so cool too.

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exactly.

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I did customize the case screen.
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It would be cool if when a customer called a screen popped up that had a bunch of information

Customer ZZZA calling…

Open Sales orders

  • 12321
  • 23214

Recent quotes

  • Q12323
  • Q56342

Shipments & tracking info

  • Pack 2131243 - Tracking 1231234123Z123

Cases

  • none

Recent call logs & emails.

Everything would be clickable, maybe some summery information of common things so you didn’t have to click into records unless more detail was needed…

But yeah, anyway… CRM doesn’t do stuff like that.

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Appreciate all the info so far guys, it’s been helping a lot.

One big question I have is I see in the CRM module PDF they have out on EpiWeb is that there’s the ability to integrate an external CRM using the module.

That sounds like a pretty tall order so I’m curious if anyone has actually had any success with using the integration feature and what it’s capable of.

Ideally we’d like to be able to bring over data from our old CRM database on a case by case basis as needed, but I imagine it’s probably bit more of a pipe dream than anything.

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Good to know. I was curious if it had the capability to integrate with Outlook in the first place as our current CRM does and that’s been the big question from our salespeople because they use it so much.

Bummer that’s not a feature right now though :expressionless:

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For every Epicor company I’ve worked at, email integration was the deal breaker. The only CRM that natively does it is Dynamics. SalesForce can and HubSpot pushes you to email in their system unless you blind copy.

We still do RMA tracking in Kinetic instead of HubSpot (or other CRMs) since there’s an accounting link that would be tougher to integrate with.

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