GoldMine CRM (discontinued)

GoldMine is well suited as a client information library and easy reference system that most offices can adapt to. It should be promoted for company officers and principals to use more often than just support or administrative personnel to enter information into.

GoldMine is great and the support staff have always been prompt and easy to work with.

GoldMine is excellent for large scale contact record keeping. We have tens of thousands of records, and it handles this just fine. It has an SQL back end. It's well suited for call center agents who need reminders of who to call and when, plus what was said in the previous conversations. I would say it's less appropriate for project managing. Once our sale has moved from sales to installation, we use other applications for this.

Their customer support is spot on! We never feel like we're being made to wait, and when we email, they respond and offer assistance very quickly. It's the same response I'd expect from an in-house IT team down the corridor. Some support teams you know you're talking to the first line support chap who probably doesn't know how to resolve your issue, and you have to wait until they give up and pass it, but GM support people seem very knowledgable

Even though this was not specifically built for a recruitment tool, it is built for a sales tool. The cost is a lot less than some of the other prodcuts out there.

We didn't have to use it much but they were always there for us.

In my opinion, GoldMine works well in telesales, telemarketing and general sales and marketing where there are large number of customers and prospects. Its really good, if you don't want to invest in MS Outlook, since you have an in-built email tool, which is pretty good.

Although it has a customer service module for logging of case or tickets, I'm not sure if this is powerful enough or flexible enough. However, in a sales and marketing role, with lots of data it is pretty good and robust. More importantly, it is very fast and I've compared it to other CRM tools, and still think Goldmine is fast in this sort of role.

The biggest issue I suspect is that like a lot of off-the-shelf CRM system it can look a bit daunting from the outset, but with an hours training, you should be up and running, certainty that's what we've found over the years with new starters.

That is the key point I think, GoldMine users that have been trained well, regularly return to the product.

Lots of information acquired internally and we have a host of contacts to ask who have had similar experience. GoldMine's new releases seem nowadays to be pretty stable and robust, which is very good,although the first issue of Premium Edition in around 2007/2008 was a bit buggy, it appears lessons were learned.
Experience in software industry means that unless there is a great new feature, that we tend not to rush at upgrades, which means they tend to bed-down before we would upgrade to them.

For me, the software is bought, so its in place and can't be switched off, although upgrading and keeping it up to date are important in my view. In common with a lot of companies who have invested in CRM over the last 10 years, there is also a cost to move away, thus although we have reviewed this, due in part to functionality requirements over the years, for the foreseeable future, we will stick with GoldMine. I suspect the main reason is it's now embedded and everyone knows it very well and that I 've found usually there is always a way to do something in GoldMine if i need too.

As I said earlier, to me now with all this experience, it is ensuring that you focus on two things:-
1/ Ensure core customisations only are required until you get users started and embedded in using the system.
2/ Ensuring users get some good level of dedicated training time, internal or external, but I feel this is best done in a group rather than at your own speed.

Afterall, no one really customises their MS Word or MS Excel each time, they just ignore the bits they don't need or ask if they do need them.

I was originally trained by the UK distributor and then subsequently trained my self and had access to GoldMine consultants. In the long run, this saved me a lot of time really since I knew the product on an advanced/administrator basis and able to perform day to day tasks. Some things, still needed the consultants. The trick was with the training, I knew when I was out of my depth!

How much is too much customisation? My view is that whilst there are restrictions, the key is not to try to over-customise, especially when you are starting out with CRM. The temptation to create lots of extra fields because you can should be avoided. Only create ore relabel core pieces of information that will give you value and they will be 100% updated by your users.

Personally, perhaps I should give it a higher rating, but I do genuinely think it was very easy to pick up and run with, but I did have a full training session and of course was keen on using it. In my previous marketing role many years ago, I 'd tried to create an MS Access database and this has taken ages, so being introduced to the power of GoldMine really impressed. People have comments on it, but my opinion is its still fast and a great workhorse.

GoldMine, when maintained well has always been pretty reliable and in over 10 years, I don't think we've ever lost a day or more than an hour or so when we cant use it. Occasional a 'blip' will happen and you will have to log out, the only thing to bear in mind, which I'm not good at is ensuring you keep the mailbox to less than 2000 mails in your inbound box, I hover around 1800 and need to streamline this to get rid of my junk or notifications from LinkedIn groups for example when i mean to read, but never get round to it.

For me, its always been there, no worries here about downtime or the internet being down or switched off. Having it on a laptop as well with Goldsync means I'm always able to updated my notes and then synchronise. This to me is one of the benefits of purchased on-premise software, it cant simply be turned off!.

Pretty good, Yes, there are occasions when i may think there should be an easier way to do things, but over the years, I've always found a way to get the information out that i want, sometimes just needing a bit of help from the technical team. Day to day,. it works for me very well.