Creatio: Nearly Two Decades of CRM and Business Processing

Experience and robustness: This is the Creatio advantage. 

The company, formerly known as bpm’online, is a process automation and CRM platform giving its users the power to accelerate their business to new levels of sophistication since 2002. 

The biggest perk of Creatio? No need for highly-trained specialists, IT geniuses or expensive outside consultants.

A steady evolution

Creatio is divided into two main sections of business tools: a low-code process automation tool and a CRM proper.

The CRM offers features ready for use by all three major departmental wings of an organization: sales, marketing, and customer service. Studio, the platform’s BPM (business process management), offers features that enable users to design and implement automated workflows, without the need to code. 

What makes Creatio a cut above the crowd is twofold: the robustness of its tools and unified packages combined with its years of industry experience.

CRM Creatio

Creatio offers three CRM products all on a unified platform. You have the option to purchase one, two, or the whole bundled package. This flexibility is particularly handy for budding businesses that might not require all three packages in the beginning. We dive into the features and benefits of each package below. 

Marketing Creatio

The marketing wing of CRM Creatio is a set of tools to identify the right kinds of audiences for outreach campaigns. The idea isn’t to indiscriminately blast ads all over the web helter-skelter, but rather to source the right kinds of prospects to eventually nurture down the path toward sales.

The 360-degree view digs deep into your contact list providing information on location, job, company, industry, and interests; as well as a complete history of events and interactions with each contact.

Contacts can be segmented using historical data, like previous purchases, or by using dynamic filters. You can then plan marketing campaigns using dynamic fields (matching those dynamic filters) for the right kind of targeted ad delivery.

Sales Creatio

Once sales takes over from marketing, the idea is to monitor, nurture, and stay in touch with a lead throughout the buyer’s journey. 

With CRM Creatio, you can zoom in on any individual lead to see how they’re doing on their journey, or get a broad overview of everyone currently working their way through the sales funnel.

Creatio offers what they call ‘opportunity tracking’, which helps define tactics for each potential opportunity, tries to identify strategy weaknesses, and even offers a competitive analysis on competing companies’ sales processes.

There are simple tools for organizing your orders and helping out with issues like budgeting and delivery. For sales reps who still hit the road, Creatio Sales offers scheduling, mapping, and directions features.

Finally, you can use Creatio to set sales forecasts and monitor your progress in meeting your goals. 

Service Creatio 

In today’s economy, where companies aim to forge long-term relationships with customers, service has become an equal partner to marketing and sales. That’s why for customer service and support, CRM data is an absolute lifeline. 

With Creatio, service reps get omnichannel communication abilities, meaning no matter where or how a contact reaches out, reps can handle it all within a simple unified dashboard; this includes phone, email, chat, social media, or using a custom customer portal.

Service Creatio offers a thorough case management database that automatically registers cases from the self-service portal, manages activities and tasks, logs a complete case history and even offers a comprehensive dashboard for analytics. 

Going one step further, the Service Creatio Enterprise edition offers queue management, which processes cases with specified priorities in mind. 

Repetitive tasks can be automated using built-in processes so that simple ticket requests can be resolved more quickly, while reps can handle more complicated issues. There’s also a service catalog, which lets all reps contribute to a database of these service processes.

Finally, you can set up a knowledge base for customers to use, with solid search features for people to get answers on their own without a fuss.

Studio Creatio: BPM for everyone

In the past, to be a BPM specialist meant you also had to be a coding wiz.

Creatio changed the BPM game with Studio, where no code (or very little code) is required to take advantage of automated processes. 

What’s more, with Studio Creatio Free edition anyone can get started building business automation without even dropping a dime. Studio Creatio Enterprise edition is also available, to really get into it (yet always with no or low-code functionality).

BPM follows the simple but effective pattern of planning, implementing, measuring and learning. Setting up these processes with Creatio is a visual drag-n-drop endear — Creatio even likens it to playing with “LEGO.”

It works like this: You start with a blank slate and add various elements in block forms then link these blocks either directly (for a simple process) or with branches (when dynamic elements can mean a process may follow more than one path).

Automated business processes are used to streamline recruiting and onboarding; to share, verify and approve documents among teams; to extract data and create analytical reports; to fulfill sales orders and track shipments; and handle support cases, among many other things.

These Creatio-built processes can be created individually, then shared among teams; or created as part of a collaborative effort.

A marketplace of extra solutions

If all the above wasn’t enough, Creatio opens up a world of out-of-the-box solutions for its users with the Creatio Marketplace.

This includes applications like custom connectors between your BPM blocks and other add-ons, as well as templates pre-designed to help with things like messaging, record keeping, and tags/labels organization.

A cost for all considerations

CRM

Since Creatio is such a big package with so many arms and wings, the pricing is tailored to your needs. All three products—Marketing Creatio, Sales Creatio, and Service Creatio—use features from one common feature pool, with pricing differences based on package and tier. You can always opt for the total CRM Creatio bundle, which comes with nearly every feature. 

Best to visit Creatio’s site or contact the company directly to find the best price fit. 

BPM

As mentioned above, you can start using Studio Creatio Free for an unlimited number of users, which also gets you the process design tools, lets you organize all your processes in a library, and most importantly, allows for team collaboration.

The Studio Creatio Enterprise edition costs an impressively modest $25 per user/per month. 

Aside from all the tools in Studio Creatio Free, in Studio Creatio Enterprise you receive a whole lot of extra features, including more UI customizations, analytics, mobile applications, and a slew of off-the-shelf tools to do anything from managing employee profiles to task management to streamlining customer data into a single omnichannel environment.

Large but versatile

While the company's extensive history in the CRM and BPM industry might lead one to assume this is a product befit for large corporations with deep pockets, massive databases, and an army of technicians, don’t be fooled—with Creatio, this is not the case. The company’s product and pricing are flexible enough for solo entrepreneurs and developing businesses too. 

The platform lives up to its promise to be intuitive to even the most code-noob around. They also offer a wealth of helpful resources for their users, including a community to share tips and a Creatio Academy for more thorough instructions. 

And while a well-seasoned name in the industry, Creatio still prioritizes self-reinvention to stay relevant. In fact, that’s part of the company’s recent decision to rename itself in October of 2019. 

“Since our initial launch as bpm’online, our company, platform, and our global reach have changed a lot,” says Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner. “Our new name, Creatio, emphasizes the many powerful solutions that have been created using our platform, and it clearly communicates our vision of allowing anyone to become a developer.”

Creatio is a platform that lets users create the business or organization of their aspirations—no technical specialists required.