As an agency owner for over a decade, I depend on software and automation to streamline operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Customer Support.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always seeking to simplify and scale my service, it seemed like a dream come true on paper. Who would not desire a single option that does it all?
However in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and stopping working) to switch to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my painful mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been happily depending on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small companies maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use web site and social networks types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours per week and boost revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough client partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting consumer connections via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it especially eye-catching for organizations looking to combine their technology stack.
For the most part, it just worked accurately with minimal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the alarm call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s speaking about a new tool that will change your service … The yard typically looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few more frustrations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood changing platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole tech infrastructure from square one utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration work transitioning every little thing over– in addition to taking care of shed performance during the button.
Yet eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel providing a much better long-lasting remedy for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had actually made a big blunder. The issues began accumulating rapidly, till it reached a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event suggestions, managing membership expiries and a lot more.
Everything appeared to be operating penalty … until unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to discover 171 entirely pointless emails had been sent to customers who should NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they vaguely asserted “web server issues” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was totally unacceptable and just really did not help my organization. I have countless contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complicated.
Simple tasks like editing workflows involved excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I suggest by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to take care of overall, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on opposite sides of the display. What!?
As a person who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek item prepared for prime-time usage. Their concerns appeared concentrated on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low price tag featured costly concessions …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Customer Support
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest selling factors is the budget friendly rate for accessibility to numerous features. However I rapidly discovered this cheap base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic costs for core capability. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send an email via their servers. So for high quantity users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported email open prices plunge nearly overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement constantly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending methods or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel Customer Support.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and e-mails instantly had dreadful involvement. The only thing I might believe that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is best, yet the large volume of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to take care of crucial features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending substantial time, cash, and effort moving.
So I made the tough phone call to reverse training course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as an expensive misadventure. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares extensively. Marketing hype around new software application frequently covers larger underlying problems. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed tools need to make your job life much easier, not more difficult and untidy.
- Openness builds count on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles damages trust.
- Seek unbiased evaluations. Happy assistance reviews imply less if extreme issues imply poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary option can flawlessly fulfill every special company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step improvements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
Simply put, I found out to be a lot more skeptical of “also great to be real” marketing insurance claims and less tempted by the allure of shiny brand-new items. The devices you use daily ought to earn depend on via transparency and performance, not slick advertising.