Hi everyone,
We’re currently using an external crm (lessannoying), and our sales people now want something that integrates with epicor. They’ve looked at what’s already built in (we do have the CRM module), but they don’t like it. Was wondering which CRM people here are using, and how they are integrated with epicor. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Pedro Marques
Hey Pedro,
Did they specify what integration they want to have? View Customer Tracker Information? Sync contacts? What are they missing in dynamicsforcegeneric.com? 
Hi Mark,
They want to see customer/contact integration, plus documents (quote/order/rma/invoice). Trying to get a feel for what people are using and how they integrated their crm if it’s external.
Pedro
Hi Pedro,
The Customer Tracker has all that - It has tabs for quotes, orders, invoices, shipments… And if you want to see attachments, right-click open-with on the quote or order… You do need to click on the Retrieve button to bring it in (maybe automate that if you don’t have massive lists).
Or create a dashboard / Active Homepage view to show everything…
We were evaluating third party CRM’s this spring (Zoho, Apptivo), but decided to add a few customizations to Epicor to make it 95% of what we wanted… This may change next year, but so far it’s working well enough. Our hold-up was the amount of time needed to integrate millions of customers and creating a robust bi-directional sync between Epicor and the CRM.
The thing with Epicor is it doesn’t as easily track all correspondence with the customers, emails and calls. And the interface is honestly a lot less user friendly.
Still hoping someone using an external crm with epicor integration will chime in with feedback in how their solution is working.
@pmarques We used bezl.io and it worked great. They provide a hosted Ionic app that is extremely fast and very easy to customize. I would definitely get a demo because I don’t think you need a third party CRM, just a better interface for the Epicor CRM.
Thanks John, this is what I’m looking for. I’ve passed it along for them to look at.
We’re back looking at other more robust CRM alternatives again. Our challenge is finding one that would integrate our marketing workflows - Automatic followups that are integrated to Epicor quotes, etc. We currently have Hubspot set up very well.
I’m trying to find the sticking points that our sales managers have with Epicor, and see how external CRM’s address them. Getting Epicor to do it may be easier than integrating a whole new CRM with Epicor.
What are you guys using, and what do you like / don’t like about it? How difficult was the integration?
Previously looked at:
New:
@askulte - have you seen much of Epicor Kinetic (Epicor 11)? If not, I would strongly recommend reviewing its standard features and customization capabilities before looking to integrate another system. Having the dynamic web user interfaces (easily accessible via web browsers) that can easily be optimized and extended is going to be a major advantage/improvement for CRM capabilities and value for many organizations.
Personally I try to steer clear of CRM integrations as much as possible. I’ve seen way too many cases where they’d been positioned as being strictly just for the early pipeline activities only for request after request to be logged to essentially replicate the ERP in the CRM system as in many cases people don’t realise how important having easy access/visibility/links to all the related transactions and processes related to a customer is.
@Callum_Stott - We’re on-prem, and are waiting until Kinetic is released on June 10th, and will spin up a test environment. From what I’ve heard on the webinars, the base functionality is identical to 10.2.700, but has better Kinetic-style front end option instead of the classic winforms we have now (or partially featured Kinetic).
Some of the feature requests from the sales managers (we could customize Epicor to handle some of these, but not others):
Yeah, there are minimal functionality changes so far in Kinetic 2021 but quite a lot of useability improvements and new/better customisation/UI/UX capabilities. As one of the biggest challenges from a CRM implementation/adoption perspective has been the useability/UX side, these improvements amongst others are and will be significant.
In regards to the feature request list, apart from items 3 and 11, the rest seem quite doable within/around Epicor with some customizations. A lot of it obviously comes down to scale and specific business processes and business cases, though. For a lot of organizations, the Epicor CRM functionality has been sufficient, while albeit being a bit painful from a UX perspective in places, without a huge amount of customizations.
