Poor UX

FCRM is a great idea, but it hasn’t been executed the best.
Many of the updates make the user experience worse or things harder to do, rather than easier. They are also not well thought out, don’t reflect real world use cases and are poorly tested.

For example, when it was first released, you could change the heading colour in about 3 clicks. Now it takes 6 clicks. Think of the time wasted changing lots of headings…

In the real world, some people make a typo in their email. May even site owners do it too. If you have sent a campaign and realise this, or someone has changed jobs and has a new email… good luck resending the email to them. You’ll have to either duplicate the campaign and send it just to them, or hopefully you had brilliant hindsight and save your email as a template so you can quickly create a custom email to the client and reuse the template. Either way, it’s a heap of work..

Documentation is all over the place. Terms are used inconsistently so it not user friendly. Then there is the issue of the plugin writers targeting English users, English is not their first language, so you sit there reading some of the instructions or tool tips and think to yourself, what the heck does that mean. That means you have to waste a heap of time testing things to understand how they work before doing it with real live clients.

Oh and bad luck if you forget to create a tag before working on your lists. You’ll have to create the tag, do all of you filtering again and hope you got it right. Other providers will let you create a tag from the tag list.

Then there is the default display range. Depending on the screen you’re on, it will display 10, 20 or 50. So you always have to have that handy mouse ready to select how many records to show. And it’s always at the bottom of the screen, so you can add the scroll time to your inefficiencies.

Now let’s say you start creating a campaign and all of a sudden you think… I want to save that as a template for later… well you’ll be greatly disappointed. There is no way to save the awesome email you just created as a template. What a shame.

There is no public development roadmap either, so you have no idea whether to keep complaining or suggesting ideas or keep talking to the brick wall.

It is such a shame, because this product could be really, really awesome. Yes it has saved me money, but that’s the only credit I’m going to give it so far.