As a firm proprietor for over a decade, I depend on software application and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely caught my focus GoHighLevel Customer Service.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly wanting to simplify and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come true on paper. Who would not desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business demands, ideally you can gain from my agonizing mistakes and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of ideal CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and task monitoring option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business maintain their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use website and social media types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive client relationship administration (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting customer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it particularly attractive for services seeking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it simply worked accurately with marginal fuss or maintenance required. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren call of “shiny things disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will change your service … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, yet a couple of more frustrations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Moving My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I understood changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire technology framework from the ground up utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of just several of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration work transitioning whatever over– not to mention handling lost efficiency throughout the button.
But ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me regarding a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a large blunder. The issues started accumulating rapidly, up until it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish problems I ran into.
Security Issues & Lots of Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, managing membership expirations and far more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it had not been. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had actually been sent out to users who ought to NOT have actually gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously tried repairing and restoring the automation from the ground up. However the trouble persisted.
When I frantically connected to their support group, they vaguely claimed “web server problems” were responsible. However this description really did not make any kind of sense, because the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my organization. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows entailed digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in totally different sections. Moving between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle overall, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined product prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low cost tag came with pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Customer Service
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing points is the affordable price for access to many features. Yet I promptly learned this economical base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Suddenly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain charged each time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to numerous dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was alluring, but simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported email open rates plummet nearly over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every fixing technique, I can barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards GoHighLevel Customer Service.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails all of a sudden had dreadful involvement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed fees, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a huge blunder. The cons significantly outweighed any benefits.
No software program is ideal, but the large volume of problems was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage important features capably or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to reverse program and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not distress what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software application frequently covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Properly designed tools should make your work life less complicated, not much more complex and messy.
- Transparency builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins depend on.
- Look for impartial evaluations. Happy support examines indicate less if extreme problems indicate poor general usability.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind company demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Step-by-step improvements usually outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I found out to be much more cynical of “too great to be real” marketing claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you use daily ought to earn depend on through transparency and performance, not slick advertising.