5 Top Tools That We Use At Crugo
Having the right tools makes all the difference to being able to get things done, and that stretches all the way from using a lever to move a heavyweight to using a time tracker to establish precisely how long you spend on each task.
Whether you are an app aficionado or you just need to get things done, finding new tools and exploring previously undiscovered features and functionality in your existing toolset can be enormously valuable. Indeed, effective tools come with the potential to amplify your abilities and to make you and your team more efficient and more effective. In fact, the very best tools do not just augment your capabilities, but they open up whole new ways of working and allow you to tackle previously impossible tasks.
Needless to say, we use a wide range of tools across our different departments at Crugo. Here are five of the very best which we use on a daily basis and which might very well be a perfect fit for you.
Consumers today expect it to be fast and simple to ferret out information on your website, and having a customer service rep always available via web chat ensures that fact-finding is as painless as possible.
We use Intercom for all of our website chats, user onboarding and support communications. I cannot stress enough what a great tool Intercom is — and, what’s more, it goes far beyond just providing website chat features.
For example, Intercom can launch automated campaigns (either in-app or via email) which can be triggered based on events and milestones. Intercom also provides a full help center template which you can use on your site for sharing FAQs and step-by-step guides, which is enormously useful as a resource. Lastly, it can store data around conversations and users. This means that it can provide an easy-to-use overview of what’s going on, which users join when and exactly how active they are, providing precise user metrics to augment your analytics package (which we will get to in a moment).
In short, Intercom provides the essential tools that we at Crugo need to deliver a high standard of service for our customers.
When you think of a CRM system (a Customer Relationship Manager) the first image that likely comes to mind is an old version of Salesforce: something that feels clunky, outdated and slow. While Salesforce comes with an exhaustive feature list, in most cases it is likely to be overkill for your requirements; and although it may well be the most used sales-focused CRM package on the planet, it is not necessarily the best option for your team.
Pipedrive, on the other hand, is highly visual and allows you to create boards and to then view and progress your “deals”, moving them across boards as you do so. What’s more, it is easy to edit deals, store conversation notes, set activities and view your team stats. Having an effective CRM is crucial to successfully onboarding clients and ensuring that key information is shared between teams. Because of that, ease of use and intuitive controls are essential — and potentially more powerful than a larger feature-set or more complex customisation options.
We have been using Pipedrive for over a year and a half now (having previously used Salesforce and trialled several other platforms) and we are thrilled with our current setup.
Having command of the metrics is extremely important to us, allowing us to observe how customers are using our platform and to identify where things are working and where there may be issues. With that knowledge, we can then optimise our delivery and ensure that we are doing the best job possible. In addition to Pipedrive and Intercom, GoSquared provides a third dimension on the data that we are collecting, ensuring that we have a thorough, detailed view of user interactions.
Most people who have set up or managed a web domain will be familiar with Google Analytics, which provides exceptionally detailed stats and information about visitors on your site. Think of GoSquared as something similar, but that allows you to easily visualise this information in just a few pages, updating in real time as visitors arrive at your website.
This enables you to quickly make informed decisions and to get ahold of necessary demographic information about your visitors. It is true that you can get similar details using Google Analytics but what makes GoSquared unique is how it presents this information. GoSquared’s key feature is its dashboards which display a wide range of stats that can be understood at a glance, where Google Analytic’s equivalent reports would require tinkering and analysis to get similar results. Providing a fast, simple solution, GoSquared is a tool that we use on a daily basis.
Timekit— Timekit.io
At Crugo, we offer personalised demonstrations of our product and platform as well as onboarding training when customers join. Timekit is an app that is tightly focused on a single application: all it does is place meetings into your calendar. However, like the best tools, it does this in a way that can save a great deal of time and energy.
In brief, Timekit allows someone to book a meeting with you from your website or via a shareable link. This means that there’s no need for you to bounce back and forth between different slots to see if you can find one that works for both parties. Instead, your contact can simply select an available slot directly from your calendar with Timekit — and the app then fills out your calendar for you. All of our demonstrations and training sessions are booked through our Timekit account, meaning that it is easy to stay organised. While we use the tool to schedule calls with people we have never talked to, you can equally use it to book meetings with your contacts and teammates.
Last, but by no means least, is Crugo itself. We firmly believe that businesses should use their own product or service whenever possible, and for us, the Crugo product is at the center of everything that we do. That means that in effect we are constantly user testing it across our business — and if there are ever any issues, we will be the first to know (and we will ensure that they are promptly fixed!).
Everyone in our company is accessible via Crugo throughout the day. We use Crugo for all of our communications — meaning that we do not send a single internal email (phew!). We also use Crugo for all of our file sharing, storage requirements and task tracking across our sales, marketing and development teams.
We categorise our different teams and topics into groups and then select how the group should be used and what its requirements are (for example, whether it needs features like file sharing, a chat room or a calendar).
Ultimately, this allows us to work extremely efficiently with easy task management, rapid communication and flexible file sharing and calendaring. We also feed in information from other systems that we use (like Intercom and Pipedrive) directly into our Crugo groups via our Zapier integration, so that we can use Crugo as a single, central information hub for everything that we do.
