Zoho CRM

It ticks our list as a Cloud-based solution after moving from a system on a shared network drive operation. You receive quite a lot for the price. It is built around the sales funnel/channel and does this well. It gives you all the functionality within the leads or accounts fields to record meetings, interactions, emails, phone calls, emailing directly from Zoho and calling from Soho if using a VOIP system.

It's actually got good 3rd party cross-functionality with 365 or G-Suite, I use the former with excellent Outlook usage.. Chat functions or messages are easy and can be linked to a client or user and sometimes are a better way to record the customer record that on ordinary business email.

I have only needed to contact the support team a few times but each time has been very quick and a swift resolution.

I have used some of the automated marketing features and it is definitely something that I will utilise more with any web info request funnelled to Zoho.

The UI can look a bit plain for some if you do not know how to customise. Downloading or collating data is not always straight forward. This is also to be said about uploading leads. It is not always clear which part of an upload has failed. However, when the upload does work it is a great time saver.

The search function is not that intuitive; I found sometimes unless you type in an exact match it does not return anything.

The best thing about Zoho is that it's free for up to a number of users. Great for a small business who doesn't have a budget for CRM yet and needs somewhere to store information and search it later. It can be simple to use. I always look for a system that you can enter a very minimal amount of information into in order to store a lead or prospect. Zoho is definitely capable of that.

I have used this in conjunction with inside and outside sales teams together. It was simple enough for the inside team to look up an account that calls in to see if they've had contact with an outside rep, and vice versa. It's nice that it has a mobile app, though when I stopped using it it was still the least intuitive/useful app I had on my mobile devices.

I've used other CRMs, and I noticed that using both Zoho and another (Salesforce) it is very common to happen upon duplicate prospects in the system. It seems like the way an account is entered is not as intuitive in detecting that the account already exists. I've used others that will suggest any contact, address, phone number, name or business that already exist in the company's pipeline literally as you're typing them. With Zoho it's more like you look up each data field first on your own to be sure the account doesn't exist before entering it.

That can be pretty tedious for an already tedious job like assisting our reps with data entry. The result is lost notes, because some are on one of the duplicates and some are on the other. I've seen this particular problem cause a lot of lost time and energy for outside reps in particular, who go out to an account not knowing the most up to date information about it.

I also found the other tools to be less useful than in other CRMs. For instance, generating a report on your pipeline and what stage the accounts are in. Other CRMs in a similar price range are easily capable of telling a user how many prospects are in follow up or final stages of the sales process. While using Zoho, I actually tracked my pipeline on my own separately using a spreadsheet. It was easier and more intuitive than the CRM offered. Now, leading a team, I would not use this CRM and this would be a big reason why. I can't imagine trying to track the progress of our leads via a team using this CRM's tools.