In four plus years of business I have tried three CRMs and used two of them. As much as I like Markate, the company seems to be slow responding to problems ie. I can’t convert a phone contact to a customer because of a glitch that hasn’t been fixed for over a year.
Does anyone use KEAP? What are it’s weaknesses? I would say that Markate’s biggest weakness is that they constantly develop tangential services at the expense of improving on the core functions that I .use every day. Glitches are frequent enough that for most of them I’ve come up with workarounds. Contacting them for attention often falls on deaf ears so I seldom bother.
KEAP looks very slick, but do they deliver?
If you have first hand knowledge of KEAP then I hope you’ll respond. For me this is the right season to migrate but I can’t keep doing this crap.
Have you tried Jobber? We just switched to it. The customer service and tech support is so quick and helpful. It’s made learning a new system nice since I used Housecall pro since 2016.
I have not. I intend to make this switch my last one. I left HouseCall Pro in 2018 to go to Markate, but they seem so intent on creating new income streams that they fail to focus on the maintenance of their core strengths. IMHO, THATS unforgivable.
I WILL take a good look at Jobber. Other than The Customer Factor, are there any other suggestions?
BTW, @SurfaceTherapy , what transpired with Markate to make YOU so angry?
Every year there has been price increases. I think my first year I paid 220, second year was 260, third year is 320. Not exact but something like that. In the grand scheme of things that isn’t that much money, but I know a lot of other crm’s lock you in on the price from when you joined.
Have also made a few suggestions in the past to get something working better on their end, nothing major, it just falls on deaf ears. They are really good at making you seem like you are the problem. When in reality that is not the case. You see it all the time on their Facebook page.
What put me over the edge was I went to logon to look up an estimate I had pending, and also get info of someone I already had in there so I could give them a call. I log on and the account is shut down because subscription was over. (turns out the email they send out like a day before saying subscription is about over went to spam). Everything was on lockdown, could not view old estimates. It was on lockdown so much so that I could not change my card info to make a payment to get back in to get all my info being held hostage back open. Naturally it was a Saturday morning so nothing could be done.
We signed up back when they first started and we’re grandfathered in although they stopped offering the plan we were on so technically they say we were on a retired plan. So for us to upgrade as our company grows we would need to get the top-tier plan and for the same pricing Jobber offered a lot more.
Also the customer service seems to be better with Jobber over house call. The reports section allows you to do more detailed reports at least compared to the plan I was on.
One feature though that really sold me on the service was the packages option that jobber offers with their estimates. Since we sell our services with packages this was really handy. Also when a customer calls us for one service we can have optional line items on a quote and so we will just put all of our services on the quote but not select them so it doesn’t show up in the total but if they want to add that service all they do is check the box and it automatically gets put onto the estimate before they approve it. My feeling was that this would help us to sell bigger jobs with multiple services at one time since they have it all in front of them.
So out of the ones that I have heard about the four that interested me are the customer factor, housecall pro, Markate, jobber and service monster. I tried customer factor a while back and well it does seem to have a lot of features I just didn’t like the overall feeling of the software as I used it. Housecall is great for a lot of things but wanted to try something different. Markate looks nice but based off what you are telling me as well as what else I’ve heard I wouldn’t want to go with it. Service monster allows you to do commission reports and that was really appealing since that’s how we pay our technicians but again this after just kind of felt dated and I didn’t think I would enjoy using it. I know that seems like maybe a weird thing to factor in but apart from function I do want the software to have a nice modern feel to it
