Jetpack CRM

Jetpack has a Customer Relationship Management tool that they want to share with you. As entrepreneurs themselves, they say, they like to give back. So this is a gift to you. Go to jetpackcrm.com and download Jetpack CRM.

Upload and activate it as a plugin, and it will start walking you through the options. There aren’t very many.

Connecting the extensions (see more on this below) will doubtless take some time, but the basic free version has just a few options.

You will very quickly be through this section and ready to add a customer.

Automation — at a price

Jetpack CRM will pull customers from your WooCommerce records and elsewhere with extensions.

In fact, Jetpack CRM has lots of extensions. The pricing can definitely add up. However, you can pay $17 a month (billed annually) and get access to all of the extensions. There’s also an $11/month tier that bundles the PayPal and WooCommerce extensions with Gravity Forms and Invoicing Pro.

If you choose to stick with the free version, you will need to type in all your customers’ information.

The customer editor is the familiar WordPress editor with a form to guide you in adding your client’s name, email, address, photo, social media info, and such. You can add unlimited notes and upload pdf files, too.

Once you have your customers in…

Jetpack CRM lets you keep notes on your clients and upload documents, as well as creating a customer portal and adding custom fields. Keeping everything in one place is big plus of using a CRM, so I like the fact that you can add tasks and deadlines sorted by team member. Jetpack CRM will automatically add this to your calendar and send reminders.

You can build quotes in this CRM as well, and it will actually produce some content. It’s fairly human-sounding, too. “A paragraph summary, such as: Works to website at clientsdomain.com, including a re-design with three client-feedback stages, and translation into French” was the first sentence of the first example it produced for us.

There were some good ideas in there, too. I can see this being quite helpful.

You can produce invoices, list transactions, create forms, and review data. There’s a calendar for scheduling tasks, a team members page with easy control over permissions, and email tools.

Since it’s built in WordPress, everything will seem familiar to you if you already use WordPress.

Will this work as your CRM?

If you don’t already have a CRM but you do have or want customers, install the free version and see how you like it. I think it looks useful.

Even the paid version, at $204 a year, is very economical.

It doesn’t have all the features you might find in a more robust tool. For example, it doesn’t track time, show you your clients’ social media posts, forecast financials, track your client acquisition channels (though there’s an extension that looks as though it might do that) — okay, there are lots of things it doesn’t do. I am not tempted to switch.

For a basic, economical CRM, however, it looks excellent.