Journey

11 Reasons Why I Chose Oprius as my Customer Relationship Manager

Oprius is what I use to manage my clients, sales, leads, some autoresponders, task management, contact management, important emails, small landing pages, and it also integrates seamlessly with my billing system (Freshbooks).

Yeah – it pretty much runs my entire life…

Pro’s

• Considering it almost has the same features as Office Autopilot (the “Dream” software that I’m saving up for), it’s an affordable alternative that does everything I need it to do. I know I bitched it out below for what I “wish” it would do, but I really cannot live without it, and I have no idea how I would be able to handle my life without it – seriously.
• It manages all my contacts –  all my clients, friends, leads, business contacts, acquaintances  email opt-ins, groups, quick opt-in forms, and more
• I can group all my contacts in so many different ways – they can belong to multiple groups with just a “tick” of a box, and with that, I can make mini groups and send out group emails
• I can put all people I meet in different areas too, such as “New Lead, Hot Lead, Send Quote, New Sale“, etc (whatever you want to call them, everything is customizable), and with each “area” that I put them in, I can setup tasks to automatically remind me to do whatever it is I need to do – ie, you can set it up to automatically email them, or to book an appointment to call them, or to do “any” task… I have mini-systems for everything now and I just move people from group-to-group depending on what relationship they currently have with me.
• I have notes on everyone – I can open them up in a second and be reminded about everything at a glance. If I don’t recognise a “Missed Call” on my phone for example, I can look it up in Oprius and if they are someone that has given me their number, they will be there, along with how I met them, what their interests are, even their current Facebook & Twitter status updates (very handy to know what’s going on in their life right now!)
• No more not knowing what you are up to.. you know exactly where everyone is at, and you get reminded at every step of the way. Let’s say you want to make sure that you keep a customer up-to-date on their project every 5 days.. there’s a task for that and when it’s time to contact them, the task is automatically created. If you end up talking to the customer earlier, you can “check it off” and it will move on to the next task in the queue – whatever that may be.
• Phone Scripts – if you are a sales person, network marketer, or even a small business owner that needs certain information, you can store all your phone scripts and then “attach” the phone script to a future call you are going to make. When it’s time to call that customer, the phone script is there, on a call screen for you, as well as an area to take notes which you can store to the customer. I’m an internet marketer and I should probably use the phone scripts but as a nerd, I very rarely make calls anyway :) but it is a cool feature for those that use the phone a lot.
• Email Scripts – in addition to standard autoresponder system (a series of emails that are sent out automatically), it also allows you to save commonly used emails so that you don’t have to type it up again. I use it for bookings, directions, and regular meetups.
• Unlike a lot of Customer Relationship Managers I’ve seen (I reviewed 27 different CRM’s before I decided to go with Oprius), Oprius lets you add unlimited contact details about a customer. If they have 50 phone numbers, you could list them all. You can have their skype, their mobile, their mums mobile, lol, anything, it’s really awesome for having “all” their contact data – unlimited addresses included, and unlimited email addresses – you have everything.
• The Relationship Manager is the thing I couldn’t live without most.. or maybe all of the above, I don’t know, but the Relationship Manager is where the magic happens for me, being able to setup a “set list of tasks” to do, that I can instantly put a client in and it automatically do, is reason enough to make this software your best friend.
• Integrates with Freshbooks. One of the reasons I ended up taking a chance on Oprius vs some of the others that I was reviewing, was the fact that it integrates with Freshbooks. In that, if I get a new lead who then becomes a new client, I can “click a button” and it will automatically transfer their details over to Freshbooks. It’s not perfect – as in, I would prefer if it automatically store the invoices in the client as well – like if Freshbooks integrated with Oprius better, but the fact that I don’t have to type everything all over again to have them setup in my billing system is a real time-saver.

Cons

• Pretty slow for me – it just feels a bit sluggish at times, maybe because I’m located in Australia and the server is in the United States.
• The Opt-in Form Widgets are not very customizable, so I don’t use this for any of my main sites for it’s opt-in capabilities, just small lists (my community list, my little signups like free ebooks for offline customers that I actually want to stay in touch with, and advice for small business marketers, etc). I would love to get rid of Aweber and replace it with Oprius but unfortunately Aweber kicks Oprius’s butt when it comes to customization as well as being already integrated with a lot of the plugins I use in WordPress.
• The Landing Pages are ugly and basic – don’t get Oprius just because of it’s ability to create landing pages, yes it does it, but you probably wouldn’t want to use them. I’ve used it about 6 times for various things but I prefer other solutions for this task, they are just not very professional looking.
• Opening up emails in new windows – sometimes when I’m trying to find an email and my clients haven’t put a descriptive subject, I have to open up many emails to try and find the one that I need, and unfortunately Oprius doesnt let me open them in a new window, I have to click, wait – wait – wait, it loads, and then have to go “back” to the client, and then wait while the page loads, then click on the next email.. it’s a nightmare, so much so that I actually have Oprius emails come to both my computer and the Oprius system so that I can get a bit of time back in my life
• Their permission manager is annoying. Although they are doing this to try and make the world a better place, free of spam, it’s really annoying. You have to use it to understand what I mean, but pretty much to use any kind of group-send, the person has to click on a “I give NAME permission to send me mail”. Sounds fair enough right? Except most people don’t click on it, some people who do click on it, the page doesn’t load for them and they stay “blocked”, it also only saves your last “Permission Request” message, so unless you have the same permission request for every group (very unlikely, you meet people at all sorts of different places), you have to customize a new message for them.
• They have SMS reminders built-in and I was upset to find out that it doesn’t work with Australian carriers when I signed up. I also emailed them to at least try and contact the major carriers in Australia or to hook-in to Google Calendar (then Google would automatically SMS me anyway and they work with a heck of a lot more carriers). But alas, it has not been done yet and I didn’t get the impression it was on anyone’s todo list :(  I’m still wishing they would do something about this, it annoys me that I would have to enter my appointments in two places – actually I pretty much only use Google Calendar, not the oprius calendar for this reason. If they could only integrate with Google Calendar, my life would be bliss.
• Would be good if they had “Multiple” Email Signatures (there is a work-around but I’d rather have a dropdown box to select which “email signature” to use). Being that I run several different companies out of the one system, having a “standard” one-size-fits-all type of email signature is not ideal and I’m probably confusing some of my clients.

Summary

I can’t live without Oprius and unless you can afford Office Autopilot (at $300 or so a month…), then Oprius does everything an internet marketer, small business owner, network marketer, sales person needs it to do. It’s “Pro’s” well and truly override it’s “Con’s” for me anyway. I’ve talked about it endlessly to my clients as well and it’s something that I would definitely recommend to any sole-trader business (no matter what their size) for personal & professional lead management.  I wouldn’t recommend it to companies though as you cannot integrate your data with another account and so everyone would have access to the one account, which might be ok for some businesses but I can’t think of any business that I’ve ever worked for that would see that as a workable solution. But if you are a single entrepreneur working on many projects and companies, this is an almost perfect solution.