Yes I agree. Ran a whole software support system for 10 years with Helpdesk on E9… Frankly without others help here I would have been dead in the water.
It did what you need apart from the email and attaching case closure report pdfs to emails which we got working, even integrated with ITSM to have a customer facing support portal.
What I do like about it is that it is simple. Gives you the details and links to the main parts of the system (parts, orders, jobs, quotes etc). Can link cases to cases. Has a running commentary (call log) for each case, and you can route it with workflows…So it has all the basics without some convoluted Hubspotish UI that I am forever fighting with every day.
I am going to NOTE a large caveat here, up front, and explain it a little later in the post. We ARE using the CRM; it was a must for us and we are less than a month from Go-Live. We looked at what Epicor offered up-front (took a deep dive) and we do have experience in Salesforce and other CRMs within our company makeup.
After exploring the programming side of Epicor, we decided to use the Epicor CRM, KNOWING that we would have to make some large changes to the CRM structure to accommodate the way we do sales activities, reporting, and ultimately the way we we market.
We have successfully modified Epicor to work the way we need to utilize our CRM functions and it works very well for us (again, through Pilot and our extensive testing); it would be considered, now, a robust CRM. We do have a developer in-house, and that was/is the key for us. In the end, it saves a tremendous amount of subscription services and if you need, I’m going to use the term “not a large-scale CRM” (because it is more than basic out of the box) -this could/would for you with Epicor’s base-functionality.
Also, note: we have extensive Collaborate and e-mail notifications built-in to the CRM now (again, custom in-house programming). There are still some glaring issues with collaborate as far as its functionality, but I am certain that is getting better - I do believe that people will adopt it and use it more and more.
Once our team gets through Go-Live a month or so, we are going to put together some snapshots of our customizations (including how our CRM works within the Epicor framework) to share with the Epicor community.
I appreciate all of the responses guys, y’all have been super helpful and I appreciate the effort and you guys sharing your experiences.
So, I started to do some more poking around in Kinetic and I uh, realized… something.
Turns out we already have the CRM module purchased but haven’t really used it at all yet. Fortunately, we have a couple months until we go live, so I guess now is as good a time as any to start seeing what it can do.
You guys’ recommendations will definitely go a long way with this, as I imagine we’ll need a lot of customization to get it up to speed with what our Sales team would like it to do.
Sometimes the answer is right in front of you I guess.
Tasks go a long way into reducing all that filling up of a mailbox, and of course as soon as you are using Tasks then you can use Global alerts… Not very much spoken about these days.
We used the Epicor CRM for a while with quite a lot of customisation and it worked well in its limitations. However we ended up migrating to MS Dynamics Sales. There was a few reasons:
Email integration (D365 Sales just does it)
Pipeline values and opportunity forecasting (we do a lot of construction project work so important for us). You can customise Epicor or use reporting to achieve this, but D365 has it all embedded.
Lack of good mobile access (that may have changed, but the D365 one is good, and works with other MS products nicely).
We also had pressure from management and the sales team because some of them had used SalesForce/D365 Sales in the past, and preferred it.
We did integrate customers, contacts and quotes so that we didn’t have to maintain the same information in two different systems.
IMHO if your looking to implement a new CRM system then you can’t really compare Epicor CRM with SalesForce and the other industry leaders, they simply aren’t at the same level. However if you’re looking to utilise basic CRM features in your ERP system, then there’s good features.
There’s another post here with more feedback in case you haven’t seen it: Epicor CRM poll
You still have to plumb it though… like I don’t know how many pre-built recipes there are… in fact, does anyone know how the “community recipes” are coming? Anything happening in that arena yet where you’re actually able to share recipes with eachother? Probably need another category for that at some point on here.
So our integration takes a Deal in HubSpot at the right stage and creates a quote header for it once that is done. If customer does not exist or is not mapped to company in HubSpot it will create a new customer in kinetic. Then create the quote header.
Once the quote is created and quoted in kinetic it will take all dollar amounts and update the deal with quote number and dollar amounts for our sales funnel out of HubSpot.
When the order is created from quote it closes the quote and the deal as won.
In full disclosure, we are displaying unquoted deals in Quote Entry and linking the HubSpot Deal record number to the Quote’s External CRM ID in Kinetic. When the quote goes to Quoted, we’re updating the lines in the deal to update the Deal amount. I’d love to create the quote header, but we often quote the same deal multiple ways. So, we created a custom object called Kinetic quotes. This object has the quote number, the quote amount, and a URL to the Kinetic quote. When they click on the URL, it opens the Kinetic quote in another tab.
When the customer PO comes in, we’re going to update the Deal Stage. There is no External CRM ID’s for OrderHed, so that’s a custom field we are adding this weekend.
Also in process, added the CustID and CustNum to Company in HubSpot and will maintain the HubSpot record number in Kinetic. Not sure if we’ll need to do the same for contacts…
Since it’s integrated with Epicor Kinetic, you get seamless access to both crm data enrichment and ERP. This helps your sales team track customer interactions alongside financial and supply chain information without needing to switch systems. The unified platform enhances decision-making by providing real-time insights across departments. As a result, your teams can collaborate more effectively, improving both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Our talented developer created our own Call Monitor that does exactly that. Mitel VOIP phone system and 2023.2 running classic screens. We’re upgrading to RingCentral now, and slowly switching to Kinetic screens…
We integrated Hubspot earlier this year, via Azure messaging queues to do the bidirectional sync. Historical and current Epicor call logs and memos are pushed to Hubspot as well, so the sales folks can stay there for most of their flow.
