FreeCRM is a hosted CRM offering available at www.freecrm.com. The program comes in two editions. Free and Professional.

The free edition delivers a basic use case unlimited users but limited data storage up to 10MB. Which is not much these days. You also must endure a pretty invasive advertising bar at the top, bottom and left navigation of every screen. The ads are not fully populated and mini sales pitches “Your Ad here” act as place holders. The ads are generic as you can see below.

A hemmorrhoid ad in a CRM system?  COME ON NOW!!!

Adding Users and Set up

Establishing an account is easy with an email address and a few seconds. Adding users is equally as easy by simply navigating to the administration area.

Navigation

Navigation is similar to most web based CRM apps with tabs or modules at the top of the screen. Shortcuts are located directly under the modules.

You can export data and import data using the mapping screens. Custom fields are also supported.

Email

Email is conspicuously absent. You have the ability to run bulk campaigns but not generate individual email communications from within the system. And although there is an outlook plugin offered for the professional version it only synchronizes calls and tasks. This is a substantial problem given that email is fast becoming the primary method of communication for many companies and contacts.

Reporting

Reporting is extremely limited and only provides for canned or predefined reports. From what I can tell there is no ad hoc reporting tool. For all but the move basic use cases this will be a deal breaker.

Companies

FreeCRM is a company centric system. Most objects in the system can be, or are by default, related back to the company object. Flagging companies puts them in your short list which is kind of like a favorites function. I like this feature.

Contacts

Contacts are leads, prospects and customers. The contacts screen captures the common elements of contact data. I like that it has relationships for assistant, supervisor, and referred by. This is nice feature that is a customization for other systems. I also like that it allows for the attachment of an image file. This nice to have feature allows users to put a face with a name. FreeCRM does not break out Leads and Contact into separate objects but rather just categorizes them in to lead, contact, partner, prospect, friend. I like this approach because lead conversion often introduce many clicks to a use case. The downside for high volume lead systems is that data quality can get ugly fast when everything is coexisting in the same database. This is one of those religious sales process discussions best left for another blog.

Documents

The documents repository is a convenient place to store documents. Light meta data about that document is supported such as a title, version, brief description and tags. There are no other classifications such as Marketing Document, Sales Contract, or Product Description. You can associate documents to a contact, company, prospect, task, or case. Currently, it not recognize Office 2007 documents. Which is fine because Windows still knows how to open them when you execute the link.

Forms

These are mini-surveys that can be used internally and externally to gather feedback. This is an interesting idea and could be useful. However the collected answers do not appear to be go anywhere that I can tell.  And, without an ad hoc reporting tool, you could not segment the answers for use in marketing. The design takes you to an edit view where you set up the description, welcome message, and confirmation communication.

Once this is established an saved you can see the values in the detail view along with a system generated URL that could be used in a marketing campaign.

You use the form edit or to create your questions and answers the final output might look something like this example.

Calls

The calls module is well thought out and provides a light scripting solution which is not common. I am still puzzled why the results of those scripts are not available for reporting purposes. Creating call lists or campaigns are also easy.

Tasks

Tasks are similar to cases in that they have basic information such as status, due date, completion %, type and priority. Related contacts are only one contact and one company.

Deals

Deals have a status and a stage. The status is open or closed and stage is customizable to each company. The probability percentage calculation did not work as designed in my test system. The values did not change as I moved through the stages. If you are using the products module and have pricing attached the system will calculate the list prices and auto populate them. This is a nifty feature. Finally, a many-to-many relationship for contacts. They also have roll object which is nice when you have multiple contacts connected to a single deal. They also added a stage feature which I am not sure how relates to the deal which also has stages. It is a bit confusing.

Pipeline provides tables, reports, and charts & graphs showing how your sales team and campaign are doing. By entering products and services and tracking leads you can:

Cases (service requests)

The cases module allows users to manage service requests. Key words and tags are supported for easy retrieval. Searches can be saved and sorted nicely. It is not possible to associate more one contact company contact to the case. This is not realistic since often times multiple contacts are required to ultimately resolve the issue. Other expected objects are related such as: calendar events, calls, tasks, notes and documents. This module would be fine for very simple customer service scenarios.

Workflow

Workflow notifications seem to be completely absent from this application.

History

The history panel is on the far bottom left corner and requires scrolling to access. This is a key navigation object and should be more pronounced.

Economics / Pricing

The free edition comes with the following:

• Unlimited users
• 10MB Storage
• Self Service

Professional edition comes with the following:

• $14.95 / month /user
• Live chat, phone, email support
• 128bit SSL Encryption
• Advanced synchronization (Outlook Plugin)
• Enhanced features
• Predictive Dialer
• Unlimited data storage
• Vonage VOIP support

Onsite is optional

FreeCRM does offer the solution for onsite deployments. Contact sales for details.

Final Thoughts

FreeCRM is not bad for FREE CRM. If you need a simple contact manager with light opportunity management this little guy might just do the trick. For me, the two big problems with this application are: 1) no single email support and 2) no ad hoc reporting tool. This is just a deal breaker for most use cases in my opinion. The lack of many to many relationships on most of the modules except for deals (opportunities) is also problematic.

Good luck out there!