Web Worker Daily

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those very flexible terms when applied to software; it gets used for practically anything that helps you keep track of your customers and the progress you’re making in selling them things. Because the definition is so flexible, there are a lot of products wearing the CRM tag, with a variety of features and price points.

TactileCRM (now in late beta) is the latest entrant in what I think of as the “starter” CRM market: basic tracking of customers and your interactions with them. It’s a hosted web application whose overall design and presentation is reminiscent of Basecamp, and with a similar plan of letting you try features for free and then having you pick a plan by deciding how much data you want to store and how much you’re willing to pay.

After signing up, you’ll be sitting at your Tactile Dashboard which (as you’d expect) pulls together an overview of recent activity, together with some graphs showing your sales history and pipeline of business to come. From there, tabs get you into clients, leads, people, opportunities, and activities. You can track existing clients and leads on new clients (and convert leads into clients easily), and follow up on what you’re doing with each one. The system also lets you tag everything, add notes, and cc: it on email so that it becomes an overall hub for all customer-related activity. There’s also a file-sharing module.

There are still a few rough edges here, as you’d expect of an unreleased product, though I didn’t hit anything too major in my explorations. US-based customers will want to beware that the company is in the UK and so far nothing is internationalized, so currency will be shown in pounds and dates must be import in DD/MM/YY format. And of course at a starter price you get starter features – don’t look for some of the elaborate features and extensibility you’ll get (and pay for) in products like SugarCRM, Dynamics, or Salesforce. Sales-heavy organizations will want to look elsewhere; those small companies just outgrowing home-rolled spreadsheets may want to give Tactile a look.

Related:
Free CRM Apps: Nothing to Shake a Stick At
Hosted CRM Contact Management Solutions for Individuals and Small Teams
Review: Kyliptix Free CRM for Individuals