Item: Zoho Analytics
Rating: 8
Author: Abhideep Jain

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We initially used Zoho CRM and then after the successful adoption of CRM, we also used the Zoho Analytics BI platform for Business Intelligence and Insights on Deals. We primarily use it for Sales and Lead Generation Insights and our use case is of simple to medium complexity. We use analytics to create some simple dashboards from our CRM data or data from other lead generation and prospect hunting channel.

Pros and Cons

It gives a single unified view everyday for our sales team to look at to track their progress and the progress of their peers in achieving the targets
It helps Account Executives to analyse their sales pipeline and find out the score for each deal and any high potential deal that is not getting enough attention
Some of our consultants have built very powerful stories on how and what impacts sales using storyboards and they are well understood by senior leadership

When compared to Tableau or PowerBI, I feel Zoho lacks the details on design, color palette, fonts, some advanced charts, etc. Tableau has somehow very new-age UI/UX
Some advanced AI techniques for customer segmentation (like clustering), etc. using standard algorithms like k-means etc. is not available or difficult to use

Return on Investment

Earlier we had 3 full time employees who were always doing sales analytics kind of work and working on excel or google sheet based data reporting. Now that has been replaced by 1 person who has set up some simple dashboards for each vertical and each team and that way it was only a 1 time effort
Our CEO appreciated that he can also sometimes take a look at which verticals are doing great and how is the health of lead pipeline without dropping any emails
Scheduled reports are helping keep up the vibe and enthusiasm of sales team

Usability

I would rate Zoho as one of the easiest BI tools I have used. Most of the visualization is drag and drop and very intuitive. But Zoho Analytics lacks a larger community of users like Tableau and PowerBI so for small issues I have to reach out to Zoho support.
And although the support is good, but it sometimes becomes difficult for us to explain our complex use case in detail to them and they reach out internally to SMEs to resolve this.
Otherwise there is a lot of automation, auto-scheduling of reports, very good storyboarding capabilities, good collaboration, and security with multiple user access levels

Scalability

Since my company is into B2B sales, we have used dataset which are not very large (typically dataset would be 10000 rows) and Zoho works fantastic with small datasets. Data ingestion and transformation is smooth too. I have not used any AI based statistical analysis and I am also not aware if Zoho uses AI techniques.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau CRM and Amazon QuickSight

There is nothing that Zoho can't do that Tableau can do. The only difference is that the UI/UX of Tableau is slightly superior. Tableau can ingest data in about 100 different formats including PDFs etc. Did not see that with Zoho. Data Preparation and Ingestion is infact faster with Zoho CRM. Automated dashboards are also very helpful in Zoho Analytics.

Key Insights

Do you think Zoho Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Zoho Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Zoho Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Zoho Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zoho Analytics again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Skillate: AI Recruitment Platform, greytHR, Darwinbox

Likelihood to Recommend

We had chosen Zoho Analytics as our preferred BI platform due to 2 main reasons:
1. We were already using Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics integrates well with Zoho CRM and learning curve is not so steep
2. With the cloud version (SaaS), the implementation cost was almost negligible and any smart engineer can deploy it for the entire company (if company size is not huge)
3. It has all the features that we would need

Looking for simple and cheaper alternative for Cloud BI - Zoho Analytics is here!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho Analytics