Bigin by Zoho CRM Review: My Honest Thoughts

What Does Bigin Do?

Bigin Zoho CRM software is a simple platform that encourages small businesses to start their CRM journey. It’s designed to help firms abandon spreadsheets and other traditional IT methods and have a platform where customer and project management come together.

You can customize it according to your industry and set it up in a few minutes. With every facet of your business neatly organized and accessible in one system, managing projects is quicker and easier. This results in less money spent on IT equipment, increased productivity, and increased leads discovered and converted.

Bigin connects various teams through features such as pipeline and customer management, customization, analytics, data administration, automation, and multichannel communication. It’s a comprehensive CRM system that shares some of its functionalities with project management software, such as compliance, activity management, and workflow management.

As the name suggests, Bigin CRM supports small businesses through onboarding and training resources. This ensures that your business teams can combine their knowledge and skills with CRM techniques for overall brand management.

Pricing

Bigin CRM has straightforward pricing. When you decide to use the CRM software services, you aren’t required to share your credit card information, enter into a contract, or pay hidden fees. You can choose to be billed monthly or annually. Annual billings on your plans can get you a 35% discount.

Bigin has a free plan that one user can access. It has basic features like automation, a single pipeline, telephony, developer APIs, and a standard dashboard. You can have up to 500 contacts, notes, and other tasks. Integrations include Zapier and Zoho Desk, Campaigns, and Forms.

All plans come with Android, iOS, macOS, and iPadOS Bigin CRM applications. Of course, the two paid plans offer more of what’s in the free plan plus additional solutions. The Express plan starts at $7 per user/month when billed annually and increases to $8 per user/month when billed monthly.

It comes with three team pipelines, allows up to 50,000 records, customizable dashboards, and mass emails, to name a few tools. Conversely, when billed annually or monthly, the Premier plan costs $12 or $14. It has all Express plan features with advanced automation, five team pipelines, 100,000 records, and the ability to sell internationally with various currencies.

The support you get from Bigin is extremely helpful. Itincludes phone, email, and live chat support training, as well as webinars. You’ll also receive assistance with importing your business data, and a 30-day dedicated onboarding service.

What is Bigin Best Known for?

Bigin is best known for its straightforward customer management tools. It’s suitable for small businesses in any industry and has ready-made templates that suit various businesses and teams. It helps small-sized organizations increase revenue, improve customer retention and lead conversion rates, and decrease sales and marketing costs.

It organizes workflow so well that there’s little chance of missing follow-ups, and it eliminates entering data manually. This information management system promotes interconnectivity, workflow, and communication between various departments within a company.

One of its special features is team pipelines, which manage more than just sales. Team pipelines have been extended to include all customer-facing operations. It integrates with countless third-party apps and connects with any external source, including Pabbly and Make.

Bigin is also known for making the CRM journey easier for organizations or solopreneurs who’ve just heard of this software. It’s for people who’re coming straight from spreadsheets and other traditional ways of keeping and using customer data. Its features are simple, but unlike traditional systems, they also help save time and money.

The aim of most small businesses is to grow, and they can do that through sales. Selling more means having more customers and keeping them loyal. This is the reason Bigin’s main focus is on customers. When you have the tools to attract more clients and keep existing ones happy, then there’ll be an increase in deals, leading to a boost in sales and profits. 

These are all the reasons why Bigin is trusted by over 20,000 small businesses. It has gotten positive feedback from companies like Trigya, CIEL, Service Square, and APEX-able. It’s also highly rated by third-party platforms such as Google Play, Trustpilot, and Capterra. 

Bigin CRM is among the best software systems for helping small businesses manage their customers. In 2022, Capterra recognized it for its ease of use and value. 

Bigin’s Key Features

Bigin’s features are designed for small entities. Unlike some CRMs, focusing on sales as their primary feature, Bigin components are more diverse, and spread out to provide a solution for your whole business. Here is how its primary features work:

Team Pipelines

Pipeline management helps ensure that your whole business operates smoothly by giving you an overview of each corner. The team pipelines feature is the main player in ensuring Bigin doesn’t only focus on pushing sales. It unifies various parts of customer management, including sales, marketing, onboarding, support, and delivery.

Its customer-centric tools allow you to create various pipelines for customer management teams. You can set up more specific sub-pipelines within these pipelines to record every small task used to achieve bigger goals. For example, you can have new and closed deals in the sales pipeline. 

Multichannel Communication

Bigin offers various ways to interact with your customers. You can call them using built-in telephony or communicate with them via WhatsApp and X integrations. You can also use various email platforms to send single or mass emails. If you need to hold a meeting to explain your product in depth to a couple of customers, you can do so through virtual communication platforms like Zoho Meeting, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams.

You can use these communication platforms to follow up on leads, for regular consumer interactions, carry out and analyze email campaigns, and post about your products. 

Automation

How does Bigin software save time? It automates tasks you do all the time and in the same manner. Advanced technologies help detect and eliminate human errors in the automation process. It also helps maintain consistency in productivity by ensuring you’ve completed all your scheduled tasks.

Automation uses tools like email-in to ensure your pipelines show the latest data. Integration with Zoho Flow and Zapier enables a smoother data flow between teams. Also, Zoho Invoice integration automates invoicing reminders, generates invoices, and gives you real-time reports.

Customer Management

The customer management feature helps you stay organized enough to catch leads, follow up on them, and convert them to customers. This begins when you import data from your spreadsheets to Bigin. Once stored, you can customize and save them in a way that works for your organization.

This feature allows you to create and customize forms and share them on various communication apps to capture customer data. Bigin’s Signals tool updates you on who directly contacts you on various communication platforms and alerts you of missed telephony calls. 

Is Bigin Easy to Use?

Bigin CRM is very easy to use. It has a straightforward user interface with all the primary features clearly visible. Other important tabs like resources, pricing, solutions, and security information are easy to find.

 Although the home page displays a lot of information, it’s very helpful for learning about Bigin. Features are also defined and explained in simple terms so that those who’ve just been introduced to CRM can understand what it’s all about. 

In addition, you’ll find helpful resources such as the knowledge base, videos, webinars, blog posts, the developer center, and the community. There’s also a guide on how to start using the CRM, and you can request a callback for more assistance. On top of that, when you sign up for Bigin’s paid plans, you’ll receive thirty days of onboarding services and training. 

Which Companies Work with Bigin?

As mentioned before, Bigin works with over 20,000 small businesses. These include well-known companies like:

• Creative
• Mutrux Firm, LLC
• Lawyers of Preston
• TalentReel
• NetCare
• Technomax
• Edcorp International
• Kodar
• Pristine Energy
• Technosoft Corporation

Alternatives

You can compare Bigin with the following top five alternatives before selecting the best one for your business.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive CRM’s main focus is sales. It organizes your business data so that you can notice any movement that can help you sell your products. It integrates with over 350 third-party apps and features lead management, automation, and reports to help you drive sales. This CRM software suits small and medium-sized businesses looking to increase sales.

HubSpot

HubSpot CRM has AI-powered features appropriate for businesses looking for scalability. Its primary focus is on customers. Therefore, its marketing, sales, commerce, operations, and content features have tools centered around ensuring customer satisfaction to push sales and increase profits. It integrates with over 1,500 apps and has pricing plans suitable for small to large organizations.

Salesforce

Salesforce’s primary focus is on relationship management. This CRM system manages the relationships between businesses and customers and also between business teams. It does this through features such as the AI-powered Einstein tool. Salesforce helps organize customer data by customizing it into different sections and connecting teams for excellent workflow. The system is suitable for both big and small businesses in various industries.

Monday.com

Monday.com is one of the most straightforward CRM platforms. It uses simple language to help users understand its features. It focuses on eliminating manual labor to speed up the process of finding customers and selling products. Its features include sales analytics, automation, and customization. It handles small-sized organizations’ data better.

Insightly

Insightly offers a simple CRM platform with tools that’ll help you increase revenue. It features sales, marketing, and service management to centralize customer data, grow the pipeline, and exceed customer expectations. You can integrate with various applications to import more data and interact with potential and existing customers. The CRM offers good plans for small and medium-sized businesses.

Suitability Assessment

You can check the suitability assessment below to evaluate whether Bigin is best for your business. I’ve listed scenarios that fit into what Bigin offers and scenarios in which the CRM isn’t ideal. 

Choose Bigin if:

•  You have a small business with no employees yet and insufficient money to add more expenses 
• You’re looking for a CRM with a free plan that’ll help your business grow
• You have a small team looking for scalability
• You run a medium-sized business with several teams struggling to connect their data and produce profitable results
• You want to customize your business data according to various aspects of what defines your company
• You’re looking for a platform that unifies your business data
• You use various external platforms to advertise and interact with customers and want a CRM allowing integration with most, if not all, of them
• You have international customers and need a CRM to help you convert prices when making invoices, cutting deals, and labeling prices

Avoid Bigin if:

• You’re looking for a CRM that only focuses on sales
• You run a large company
• You’d like a month-long free trial