Administer Automations for all
We're small and scrappy, but one of the most important features for a software tool is the ability for one person to be able to administer items for everyone.
For processes and any automations of those processes, it shouldn't be required that a sales person, for example, have the experience and understanding of a process engineer. However, in pipedrive that seems to be the case, at least in part. It's important that I mention I may be wrong, but this is from evidence I've gathered administering PD for about 8 months, and having 20 years of experience administering CRMs for teams.
For example, while building out our account, it's likely that we'll have 30 to 50 automations that occur as deals pass through stages, pipelines, etc. In every other CRM like tool we've encountered, (leaving out any non-serious players) a single administrator can build and enable automations for everyone. However, in Pipedrive, we have to build them, share them and then every user has to be instructed to navigate to somewhere they almost never go, and manually and individually enable or disable each and every automation we instruct them to.
If we find a bug in an automation and it needs to be disabled, that automation then needs to be disabled manually and individually by every user using it.
The fix here is to allow someone with an administrator or super user role to simply turn on or off automations for any other user, period. It can, and should, remain granular per user. Not only does this mitigate all the problems mentioned above, but it returns the power of accountability for doing it well to the business administrators, rather than being pseudo-policed by a program limitation.
When we build software, especially for people who know less about 'our software' than we do (basically everyone) it's common to follow the belief that we need to protect our users from themselves. However, what we've found in our 2 decades of SaaS service is that it's 10 to 1 better to spend dev time building warnings about what a user is 'about to initiate' than to build in a limitation that blocks them from it. This comes with several obvious caveats, of course, but for the most part, this is sound.
We're very much enjoying Pipedrive and we are hopeful this gets or already has serious consideration.
Comments
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I couldn't agree more with you. We suffer from the same fate with several of our automations. It became so tedious trying to get a few sales agents to enable/reenable automations again that we gave up. I brought this up several times with Pipedrive support an was just told "this is the way its designed to work." Fortunately most of our automations just rely on being triggered by any user, or if it does require the individual user to trigger the deal, we've done our best to hack it with workarounds.
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Same here … the automations are a "decent start" but they leave a lot to be desired …
We recently had a problem because Pipedrive changed how the Slack integration works.
Instead of being notified about this, we only found it because I was doing some updates and saw that one of our users' automations were failing. When I reached out to support, they didn't even have an easy way to troubleshoot, let alone "restart" the automation where it had failed. This is BASIC DEVELOPMENT 101!!I was told "The automation is triggered by an update on Deals. You need to go to those Deals and perform that update" … so essentially i have to "fake it out" to start it over - again stupid - have you guys never written software?
Proper software design should:
a) alert people when these automations fail
b) give an easy way to troubleshoot and see what the errors were
c) easily restart/continue the automations (i don't want the emails to re-trigger in this example)MOST IMPORTANT - an admin should be able to administer/fix these automations for all users. It is simply bad design to "assume" that all sales users have the knowledge (or care) to manage their own automations. The best case scenario would be to have a set of "team" or "shared" automations and "individual" automations - that would give the best of both worlds; but it is probably unnecessary as most sales teams will have one person design the automations rather than expecting each rep to manage their own.
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