User feedback on PD's response to change, suggestion requests
We are using PD on a trial basis to see if this is the route we want to go for CRM. We have found it very easy to use and overall like it very much.
We are finding that there are some key things missing; product options and viewing custom product fields in a deal, splitting deals to name a couple. I have seen these topics in the community but nothing seems to have been done.
What I would like to know from users is, what has been your experience when it comes to making a request for changes or additional functionality?
Have you seen changes implemented?
What time frame has it taken for the changes to be made?
I am sure there are many requests that come in and realize that it takes time to make changes to a system and have them function correctly. That said, if suggestions are not receiving consideration and changes are not being implemented, PD may not be the platform for us.
Comments
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I think they have done a really good job overall. Their customer support has been excellent. It's hard to judge their feature implementation based on what someone individually wants. Its their roadmap to manage and I'm sure some of those implementations are pretty complicated to keep simple and maintain an easier to use interface. So far I would say they have done an excellent job with that and that's what matters to me most.
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Brad Krause said:
I think they have done a really good job overall. Their customer support has been excellent. It's hard to judge their feature implementation based on what someone individually wants. Its their roadmap to manage and I'm sure some of those implementations are pretty complicated to keep simple and maintain an easier to use interface. So far I would say they have done an excellent job with that and that's what matters to me most.
Hi Brad,
Thank you for the feedback. So far my experience with customer support has been very positive. I understand the challenge of making system wide changes and I am not referring to one-off requests but questions that have been raised by multiple people and things that you would think would be part of a CRM system.
Do you mind sharing how long have you been using PD and what changes have you seen made during that time?
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Brad Krause said:
I think they have done a really good job overall. Their customer support has been excellent. It's hard to judge their feature implementation based on what someone individually wants. Its their roadmap to manage and I'm sure some of those implementations are pretty complicated to keep simple and maintain an easier to use interface. So far I would say they have done an excellent job with that and that's what matters to me most.
Brad,
Here is another example which has, according to the poster, been on-going for more than 4 years. Fiscal year calendar is certainly not an individual request.
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Brad Krause said:
I think they have done a really good job overall. Their customer support has been excellent. It's hard to judge their feature implementation based on what someone individually wants. Its their roadmap to manage and I'm sure some of those implementations are pretty complicated to keep simple and maintain an easier to use interface. So far I would say they have done an excellent job with that and that's what matters to me most.
Been using since 2018 and we are currently in the process of getting about 15 other people on pipedrive in our organization. Previously most of our sales data was managed in spreadsheets and now we are doing a full blown transition to Pipedrive CRM.
There are for sure things pipedrive has not addressed and should. Delayed emails would be a prime glaring example.
And IMO with what limited info I have would probably be willing to say that maybe at times they focus on features when they should probably be focused on others but then I have very limited info I'm basing my decision on. For all I know they have to worry about some patent issues that prevent them from moving forward faster in a specific area.
I have definitely been able to make due with pipedrive with no critical sacrifices. Plenty of things I think I would like improved or implemented but I actually mostly enjoy solving those problems in creative ways.
At the end of the day its a standard solution that we are all trying to make work the best for our specific needs. It's working well for us. It has if not the best one of the best user interfaces.
And as long as they allow us to keep superfluous to us features out of view as much as possible I think we are satisfied.
My biggest gripe is the mail implementation. It's not possible to not use outlook. So I'm basically stuck using two email clients to manage mail if I want to keep my pipedrive mailbox at zero, which is how I roll.
Threaded/conversation style email reading in an inbox is the worst IMO and it's not realistic to expect people to adapt to reading email like that. It's not going to happen. If I archive in outlook it does not archive in pipedrive. very annoying.
Wish I could abandon outlook mail.
I definitely recommend Pipedrive. They take care on how to implement things, mail aside.
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We have been using PD for more than 6 years. In that time I've made several suggestions in this forum (once it came about) but nothing much seems to happen.
There are some changes which have been great. Eg; Better Pandadoc integration, and we even took part in providing feedback on wireframes and functionality as it was delivered.
Lately, there seems to be a lot of work being performed on improved reporting. However, our business is all inbound and we struggle enough to keep our heads above water processing orders and answering enquiries to even give reporting a second glance (though I expect larger companies with sales forces would appreciate the tweaks and feature releases in that area).
Similarily a lot of effort lately is going into the sales document functionality. .. Once again we use a third-party solution (Pandadoc) which does an awesome job and integrates into PD with a PD integration and/or zapier integrations. .. So, once again PD are working on something we will probably never use.
We invested A LOT of time testing competing products to PD and found it to be the best for us. However, I will say that Zapier is also an important 'cog' in our wheel and if PD can't do what we want we usually find a workaround using Zapier and other SAAS products.
The area which I think needs the most attention is the email service PD uses. It is my understanding that the email functionality is provided by a third party so issues like being able to change the 'reply as' address to a standard 'customer service' or other functional nomination is not something they can actually do as they don't have a hand in the mail system. The same goes for threading which is also the bane of our day to day workflows. .. We use G-Suite and sync across to PD. We turned threading off in Gmail years ago .. yet PD re-threads and it makes it impossible to associate correspondence with emails when we have multiple emails from the same address daily (eg supplier order confirmations or other notifications). ... I really wish we could unthread. I'd even be happy if we could go in and edit subject lines manually, if only to unthread.
Mail handling is also key to providing a 'universal' or 'single' inbound mailbox.... .. To be honest there are a lot of things that closely related to mail handling.
.. But I've gone off topic a bit.
Generally posting in these forums, from my experience, doesn't really generate change, unless it is for something which is already on their product roadmap. .. Then PD is interested in whether they need tweaks to that which they are already delivering.
Support is great but make a suggestion and they just send you to the forums (eg here) and tell you to put up a post. (pretty much the same way most SAAS providers palm off suggestions from proactive users interested in helping to improve a SASS product). .. PD are no better or worse in that regard and I don't think any other CRM provider would be any more responsive to suggestions.
Another gripe that really irks me is the PD mobile app. The app could do with some improvement and it is regularly updated ... but each mobile app update contains little to no information as to what has actually been fixed. ... It's pretty much a reused tag about improvements and bug fixes. (Yes, I know PD isn't the only mobile app developer that doesn't put much thought into actually telling us what has been fixed or improved .. but hey! ... I might actually take an interest if they started telling me what bugs had been fixed and / or features added.
Finally, completely off topic, but since you are evaluating PD. ... We drop-ship a lot of product directly from our suppliers. ... So we not only use PD to manage oder processing through Pipelines, but we have also added our suppliers as Organisation+Organisation-contacts. Simply add your supply line contacts (even functional no-reply notifications from your suppliers) to an org record as a contact and let PD auto-associate your inbound/outbound supplier correspondence.
Any inbound supplier information that is related to a customer order can be associated with the customer deal (manually) in addition to automatically being associated with the supplier. ... May not be useful to your business model but really an awesome feature it took us a while to gerry onto.
Happy trails. PD has really friendly and responsive support. Those Estonians seem to be really neat people .. lol. I recommend the product and am happy 'enough' at the moment without gushing overly about it.
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Brad Krause said:
I think they have done a really good job overall. Their customer support has been excellent. It's hard to judge their feature implementation based on what someone individually wants. Its their roadmap to manage and I'm sure some of those implementations are pretty complicated to keep simple and maintain an easier to use interface. So far I would say they have done an excellent job with that and that's what matters to me most.
Hi Brad,
Thanks for the transparency. I have not tried email integration yet but will give this a go and see how it works.
Overall, I like the product very much and except for a couple of areas, the system is just what we need.
Hopefully PD will make some of these changes. It would be nice to see what is in their queue.
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