Nimble.com; the social crm

One of my readers asked if I had used nimble.com and what my thoughts were. I hadn’t and was very interested in trying a CRM that had reportedly deep social ties. I spent some time connecting my social accounts and moving around in the software and here is my take.

The Good: First, it’s incredibly easy to get started and to get your social accounts, Google Calendar and e-mail account/s connected. I might even say it’s kind of fun – but that might just be me. Once you have your accounts connected the application brings in contact information from the various social accounts – this is just cool.

Here’s an example . . .

Now that the information is in nimble.com I can add tasks, calendar activities, and even log previous activities. Better yet, I can send an e-mail, LinkedIn Message, and other social messages via the “Quick Actions” menu. I can even see my contacts social stream on the same page.

The rest of the software is incredibility easy to use; from adding activities and deals to viewing your full social stream. Another easy to use and very useful feature is found under the Messages tab. If you connected your e-mail (IMAP) account/s to the software it displays all your messages in one stream – including all your social messages. Don’t worry, you have the option of choosing specific message types from the tabs – All, Email, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

The Ugly: The product is pretty new on the scene and requires significant updates before it’s what I would consider fully functional. The first and biggest sin is its inability to send you e-mail reminders when tasks come due. This is a pretty basic feature that resides in any good CRM system. The only thing that might persuade me that this is not necessary is the fact that nimble can act as my e-mail client as well. The problem is its low level of functionality as an e-mail client.

First, there is no way to create sub-folders in your e-mail accounts. This might not be so annoying if you could sort by any of the columns; however, as far as I could tell you can’t. When composing a message there are no formatting options; so, you’re stuck with plain text. One other annoyance with e-mail is the fact that while you can add multiple e-mail accounts – which I like – you can’t have multiple signature files. So, your signature has to be one size fits all.

In closing, while I won’t do a full switch to nimble.com from my current Zoho account it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on as they develop some of these important features. I’ll certainly keep my account open and might even use nimble.com to communicate to some of my social networks. It’s a cool product and definitely shows the other guys why integrating social media into CRM is really important and useful.