Pros & Cons of EngageBay: Analysis of a Leading CRM Software

Are your three customer-facing units – sales, marketing, and service teams – in sync? Or are each team largely left to work on its own? While they may have their own tools to work with such as CRM solutions for sales, marketing automation for marketing, and help desk software for service and support, the three units must be closely coordinated. For this matter, why not have all the necessary tools in one platform that your sales, marketing, and service people can use?

An integrated system brings all concerned in one place and makes coordination tighter and collaboration easier. EngageBay offers such a solution. In this EngageBay pros and cons guide, we’ll explore its features and capabilities so you can determine if it’s integrated nature can fit the requirements of your business.

If sales, marketing, and support are working on their own siloed set of prospect or contact information, generating and qualifying leads will suffer. They’ll be hard put to move deals in the sales pipeline. They will find it difficult to monitor the customer journey. Remember, your teams may have the best service, sales or marketing tools but if they go separate ways these tools won’t matter. After all, solutions are meant to bring people, processes, and tools together. Hence, the need to integrate the three customer-facing units’ workflows.

Integrated solutions help align various functions

Integrated systems with built-in tools for different functions aren’t new. The best example is enterprise resource planning or ERP platforms that combine several functionalities. There are also business process management solutions that offer toolsets for a variety of business functions. However, there are only a few companies that offer core sales, marketing, and service features in one package. EngageBay belongs to this elite group.

Integration capability with external software and services is one of the major features we look for when reviewing and rating software. But in contrast to third-party app integration, software with integrated tools for two or three key customer functions has become a sort of a specialized solution. But they do have advantages. For example, combining sales and marketing give teams better visibility of customer needs and allow the lead process to flow more smoothly. On the other hand, aligning customer service and marketing produced positive results.

Of course, your three teams will be better able to align their activities if they have one platform to work from that has all the essential tools. How does EngageBay fill in this need? It’s time to find out. Let’s begin by knowing what EngageBay is.

What is EngageBay?

EngageBay is a unified sales, marketing, and service platform designed to grow your business. The cloud-hosted solution comes with a CRM and sales module for organizing email contacts, tracking deals, and managing the sales pipeline. It has marketing automation capabilities for automating manual tasks and nurturing your audience. Meanwhile, its live chat and help desk tools let you track and prioritize support tickets to speed up the resolution of issues. All these tools and features are neatly laid out in a modern dashboard for ease of use.

With EngageBay, you can easily generate leads from your website visitors using lead capture forms and landing pages. You’ll be able to manage your leads and streamline processes with tools such as scheduler, deal pipeline, contact organizer, and task manager. Its CRM features give you full customer visibility and sales automation while its service component offers service automation, live chat, and ticket management.

All these features you can test for yourself at no cost. Simply sign up for EngageBay free trial here.

One of EngageBay’s many highlights is its flexible and budget-friendly pricing. It is positioned as an ideal alternative to expensive enterprise solutions. As such, various plans are available to suit feature requirements and budget. It even comes with a completely free plan for up to 1000 contacts and 1000 branded emails with rich email marketing, CRM, help desk, and live chat features. The icing on the cake is that this free plan is good for an unlimited number of users.

Advantages & Disadvantages of EngageBay

All-In-One Suite

With EngageBay, you get three solutions in one – for sales, marketing, and service. The software gives you all the necessary tools for effectively reaching out to your prospects and existing customers. It is expressly built to help you grow your traffic, increase your sales, and improve the company’s bottom line.

EngageBay offers one of the most featured-filled unified solutions for managing leads, contacts, and customers. It also has a robust automation engine for streamlining processes and accelerating workflows. Through EngageBay, you get one integrated and centralized platform for all your data, reports, tools, and tasks for all your customer-facing teams.

Designed for SMBs

EngageBay can be used by teams and companies regardless of size and industry. However, it is most suitable for startups and SMBs looking for a comprehensive CRM system that will not break the bank. And as you’ve learned by now, it goes beyond CRM with dozens of tools to help you handle marketing and customer support.

Further emphasizing its SMB focus is its ease of use, intuitive features, and convenient navigation. While there may be a bit of a learning curve for first-time users of a multi-functional system, it becomes a breeze to use once you get the hang of it.

Free CRM, helpdesk & live chat

You read it right. No one gives you this much freebies for so many features. The free CRM is actually an all-in-one package that allows for 1,000 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month. You also get key features such as: Lists, Email Marketing, Sequences, Contact Management, Ticketing Management and Lead Grabbers. Running campaigns is also made easy with web forms, Facebook ads and social media tools. With up to 20 GB file storage, email and chat support, plus helpdesk and live chat features, the free EngageBay is clearly one of the most robust CRM apps around.

Simple contact management comes free for up to 1,000 contacts.

SMB-friendly pricing

The aforementioned free CRM features are more than enough to jumpstart your business. Eventually, the time will come that you would need to work with more contacts. No problem. Several inexpensive paid plans are available.

You can transition to a paid plan at just $8.99/month which is good for up to 15,000 contacts and 10,000 branded emails. With this Basic plan, you also get email templates, web pop-ups, landing page builder, lead scoring, and more. Meanwhile, the Growth plan at $29.99/month sets you up for up to 50,000 contacts. The premium Pro plan at $47.99/month gives you unlimited contacts.

We’re talking here of prices for all-in-one plans. However, you can choose to avail of any low-cost plans offered separately under marketing, CRM and sales bay, and the service bay. There are options for a monthly subscription, yearly (at 20% off), and biennial (40%).

Comprehensive CRM solution

The paid CRM and sales bay plan start at $12.99/month. There are two other slightly higher-priced plans. Under these subscription plans, you can work on 10,000 to 50,000 contacts and the same number of branded emails. A comprehensive set of features is offered including multiple deal tracking, predictive lead scoring, proposal analytics, and custom reporting among others. There is also a call feature that allows you to call customers directly from the EngageBay platform without the need for additional software or hardware. Calls are recorded and kept by the system for future reference.

Take note that EngageBay is a new player in the market and although it has one of the most extensive offerings of features, many more tools are probably in the pipeline. These additional tools are likely to be introduced as users get to familiarize themselves with the platform and learn what’s lacking with it. So far, users have had positive experiences with the software. In addition, the vendor has been quite receptive to user feedback and suggestions.

Integrated marketing platform

EngageBay is built as an integrated marketing platform for small business. It provides you complete visibility over your customer’s journey. You’ll be able to view every interaction that your agents have with leads as well as track and capture information. You also have at your disposal lead capture forms, landing page builder/editor, and a collection of ready-made templates designed for conversion. Moreover, marketing automation tools let you streamline marketing funnel, nurture contacts, and improve engagements. Likewise, there are analytics features to measure email opens and report on important indicators.

Simple yet powerful customer service

Providing great customer service starts with a robust customer service solution that is easy to use. EngageBay got you covered in this area with helpdesk tools that track and prioritize customer tickets for a quick resolution. You can address unlimited tickets from a single, simple interface and customize ticket view as well as filter information to fit your needs.

Advanced service automation tools, meanwhile, allow you to easily automate routine customer service processes to save time and increase agent efficiency. You’ll also be able to organize tickets into groups and create canned responses for FAQs so agents can handle more tickets in a shorter time. 

EngageBay’s support ticket system lets you track customer interaction in one place.

Dependable support

Any software is only as good as the support provided by the vendor. It is crucial that you are able to get all the information and assistance when you need them. EngageBay is not wanting in this respect. You can schedule a call and get a prompt and quick response when you call them on the phone. You are encouraged to submit tickets so you can get professional assistance from a support team. There are also product videos, guide articles or marketing and CRM. Being relatively new, some support features are currently still being set up such as webinars and a dedicated knowledge base for customer self-service.

Is an Integrated CRM, Marketing & Service Solution for You?

You alone can answer that based on your business requirements. But there is no doubt that an integrated system that carries everything you need is advantageous to a small business. It can redound to savings in cost, time and resources. Agents and reps are better equipped for their job with centralized and readily accessible data. This translates to better work efficiency and employee productivity, which should be your goals when choosing the right CRM.

Our aim with this EngageBay pros and cons article is to help you pick the right solution for your business. There are many leading CRM tools your company can benefit from. But as you’ve learned, EngageBay offers a compelling, feature-rich, and cost-effective alternative. You can further explore it right now at no cost and with no strings attached. Just sign up for EngageBay free trial here. Or if you’re solved with the information you read here, go right ahead and use its free all-in-one suite to begin working on your first 1,000 contacts. That will set you up to a strong start.

By Adam Goldberg

Adam Goldberg is a senior market research analyst and one of the key customer experience technology and CRM pioneers working for the FinancesOnline review team. He has been cooperating with FinancesOnline for over 5 years now. During that time Andrew has analyzed more than 2,000 CRM solutions and he’s well-known for his honest reviews and his unique perspective on challenges and opportunities posed by customer-centric innovation. He’s a strong believer in business process automation and the role it plays in customer data management, conversational intelligence, and customer engagement. His work has been mentioned in many major publications and media sites, including MSN, Springer, TheNextWeb, and CIO.