Multiple clients of customer relationship management (CRM) tool Contactually are dismayed over the lack of support the company is providing existing clients since it was acquired by Compass in February.
“To date, they have said they are continuing to support Contactually,” David Hargreaves, an agent at Modern Living Sonoma, told Inman. “It looks like those days are now over after I got the email … from Compass [Tuesday].”
Hargreaves passed along an email from Contactually’s support team, which he received after he reached out with an issue regarding duplicate and synced contacts.
“As much as I would like to bring this to the engineers, the majority of our resources are focused on building the Compass CRM,” the support staffer said in the email. “We are still resolving issues for Contactually but on a very limited capacity. We are primarily maintaining and monitoring the Contactually application to make sure major problems do not occur that affect large numbers of users and that the application remains up and available.”
The staffer continued, saying because the majority of resources are focused on the Compass CRM, they would not be able to help with issues that require the product and engineering team.
“Any other issues that require the help of our product and engineering team will unfortunately not be able to be prioritized, although issues that are possible to resolve with the help of our support team, we will do our best to resolve,” the email from the support staffer continued.
Liz Kroft, another Realtor, reported an email from Contactually support in July that used the exact same wording, that the majority of resources are going to Compass’ CRM and that the company is resolving issues on “a very limited capacity.”
A big brokerage client of Contactually’s told Inman that it is seeing similar support issues around bug resolutions.
“We do have a plan to migrate away, but they aren’t ready to be discussed at this time,” the brokerage told Inman.
At the time of the acquisition, Contactually said in a company blog post that individual users will still be able to use Contactually.
Inman previously reported that the plan is to have a small team of engineers continue to work on Contactually’s current offering for brokerages outside Compass, while the bulk of work will be on powering and enhancing Compass’ CRM.
A Compass spokesperson told Inman that the brokerage is still accepting new clients at this time, despite the allegations from agents and brokers over lack of support. When Compass acquired Contactually, the customer count was roughly 37,000. The company declined to give the current number of subscribers.
Zvi Band | Photo credit: Contactually
“We are committed to making sure the agents, teams and brokerages we support can trust and rely on Contactually as they always have, while focusing the majority of our effort on building the Compass’ end-to-end platform,” Zvi Band, the general manager of Compass CRM and co-founder of Contactually said in a statement when asked about the allegations.
“For example, we now have integrations that connect the Compass CRM with our Open House app so our agents can combine their real-world activities with all their digital outreach,” Band’s statement continued.
At the time of the acquisition, Contactually had stated the company was evaluating long-term support beyond 2019. However, it was allowing agents and brokers whose contracts were up for renewal in 2019 to renew their service through the end of the year.
A Compass source, however, said there are no immediate plans to stop offering Contactually to non-Compass users in the near future.
Compass acquired Contactually and its 30-agent team in February 2019 in an effort to boost the development of its own CRM, which had previously been powered by Contactually. In the acquisition, Compass scooped up the CRM-maker’s 30-person engineering team.
With the acquisition, Compass announced plans to take the most impactful and popular features of the existing Contactually feature sets and build those into its Compass CRM, according to a Compass source.
A brokerage or real estate company acquiring a tech startup and offering its services to rivals isn’t unheard of in the industry. When RE/MAX acquired tech startup booj, it allowed existing clients to continue utilizing the platform. As of February 2019, booj still had around 40 brokerage clients.
