Month: March 2013

Plaxo as a personal CRM business tool


In these days of below-the-line marketing, everyone should have a personal social-media CRM independently to whatever CRM they have in their office. This reflects the blurring of the work and play areas of life which is one of the recognised aspects of Generations Y and Z, as well as a very natural result of the interactive technology most of our readers will be native to and working in every day of their lives.

Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) is an address book synchronising and back-up tool which has a number of interesting features such as the ability to access your contacts from the net, to import and export as CSV files, to send greetings cards to check duplicates and synchronise in a limited way with google applications, facebook and other social media.

The interface seems to offer a lot of benefits and certainly the ability to send greetings cards is a useful one. There are, however a whole series of issues and bugs and incomplete aspects to Plaxo which means that it can easily be superseded as the personal CRM of choice by any app maker able to sort out these issues more efficiently.

1) There’s no official Plaxo app on Android phones and so the synchronisation goes via Google Apps and is clunky. Whenever codeword security runs out, it seems to stop synchronising. Also the synchronising doesn’t seem to work well all the time and in my case telephone numbers have been moved from one person to another, which is very troublesome.

2) There are not really enough greetings cards and they are in too few languages.

3) Intelligent updating from the web of what our contacts are doing seems not to be working half the time. Occasionally the robot makes a half-hearted attempt to find and update people, but nowhere near what you’d expect for the annual fee.

4) Above about 3000 contacts and the site works slowly. It is unable to offer you a print out of the whole database at that size.

5) It often loses the pictures it has imported from facebook and doesn’t seem to be able to import any at all from Linked In. It cannot update calendars directly to Android, again only via Google apps.

6) It doesn’t deal properly with any scripts beyond basic Latin script, so it mangles names written even with Polish or Czech letters, leave alone Cyrillics or Chinese names.

7) The folders are a clunky interface, but even when you have done the work of putting contacts into the appropriate folders, they don’t carry through to the greetings cards area, so you cannot, for instance, make a folder of people who would receive, let’s say, and Eidh card or a more/less traditional Hannukah card and then easily access that folder from the greetings card area. Also send outs of more than about 200 cards per time tend to fail and need all that work to be done again.

These are my main Plaxo gripes. I am airing them in the hope that Plaxo will finally get their act together and repair their product before their remaining users find another app on the market among the choice which seems to be growing every day that does all the things that Plaxo is expected to do, but still fails to deliver.

 

 

 

 

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