Verity IQ

Pros

I like that it stores all text communication for reference.

Cons

- We are 8 months in and things are worse than they were 5 months ago. -The task organization is extremly slow. It is not intuitive. Everything in this CRM take 50% longer to do than in most CRMs I have worked with. It is as if they tried to re-invent the wheel, and the best they could come up with was a triangle. Everything is organized into what they call "speed lanes" and "campaigns." When you create an email campaign to remind students of an upcoming start date or orientation, not all of the emails go out. Verity "Portico" is extremely unreliable. We rely on mass follow up with existing and potential students. Creating campaigns takes time, and does not always work properly. Many other CRMs with much simpler mechanics can accomplish what portico sets out to do in half of the time. They need to have mass email and text options without the hassle of creating a speeedlane or template. - The training we received initially was supposedly incorrect. We trained for months on utilizing the CRM a certain way for enrollments to then find out months later, that these enrollments were not being processed correctly within the system. This caused countless issues for other departments who needed access to student information withing the CRM. Most notably financial aid. A lot of retraining and countless meetings with Portico. -Portico is the product of a merger between other ed tech CRM's and software companies. This creates a messy environment where merging tools and making changes breaks something else within the software. I get the impression that Portico is learning as they go and rolled this CRM out too soon. - The software is very unintuitive. It takes a remarkable amount of clicks to get to student information that should be one or two clicks aways. These clicks add up. They slow things down. It is also impossible to quickly edit an email template within portico before sending an email. We need to send start dates and personalized emails to our students, a feature where we can quickly edit a template for that student would make things much faster. - Texting templates sometimes will not properly save. Which makes creating and revamping old templates frustrating - email templates take a tremendous amount of time to create. The template builder is also not intuitive, Its really easy to back out of the template while creating it, extending the time it takes to make it. - These are just a handful of issues. I do not recommend doing business with portico. The biggest con us the level of automation they promised and could not deliver on. Admissions takes tremendously longer with portico than our previous CRM. I would avoid them like the plague.

Pros

Building multi-channel workflows is something I really appreciate in La Growth Machine. The branch conditions make campaigns much more powerful since they help you reach the highest possible number of prospects.

Cons

Managing the widget can be tricky though. You have to keep it open on your computer, otherwise the actions won't run.

Pros

The dashboard is pretty helpful, with alerts that notify us whenever new texts or leads come in. Overall it keeps me on top of everything making sure nothing slips through the cracks.

Cons

We had a terrible experience with this company. Their system had constant glitches which they blamed on our Wi-Fi yet we were using Comcast and Google Fiber. After we pointed it out, they canceled our subscription, despite us spending months and nearly $15,000 on consulting, onboarding and training. They refused to fix their software and dropped us as clients within the first year because we filed too many support tickets. The ownership is ruthless and does not care about client success. Also their CRM caused issues like missed calls and lost notes which ruined our small school's operations. Now we have lost our $15,000 investment and their contract lets them cancel without offering any refund. I have never seen a company operate like this. So I would suggest stay away from this and do not invest.