Likelihood to Recommend Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
Read full review For customizing a CRM without needing specialist support, Zoho CRM is great. The admin UI is pretty intuitive and easy to use. Zoho CRM also works great for tracking contact records and relationships to other records. For instance, we run 10+ different programs, and we need to track every contact's relationship to any and all of our programs. Besides the program relationship, we also track organization/employer relationships, host site relationships for interns, team relationships for several of our programs, and we are starting to track grant disbursement as well. Zoho CRM's "joiner modules" handle all of these different connection points fairly well, though the data import process can be a pain.
Read full review Pros The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty. The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers. Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when). Read full review Zoho CRM has so much space to capture lots of information. Zoho CRM can be customized for your organization's needs. Zoho CRM is great for running reports to help make business decisions. We love all the different dashboards we can create. Read full review Cons In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback. Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us! The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance. Read full review our team found it very challenging to integrate directly to our wordpress site while there may be a way to integrate to the SMS system, we have not discovered how a sales rep would be able to get an sms when customers leave their contact info (not through the app) we have one team member who still works with outlook calendar. it was easy to integrate with google calendar, but a second calendar, depending upon the user Read full review Likelihood to Renew Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
Read full review Zoho has been a wonderful tool for us for several years and there is so much more we can do with it. New features are released often which give a team like us the option to further fine tune our business process management techniques. I honestly couldn't imagine running our business not on Zoho.
Read full review Usability The system meets all my expectations.
Read full review The methodology of the 'out of the box' user interface is fairly easy to learn. In some cases however, the interface is not consistent throughout the software. Upgrades to the interface has certainly improved some of this--- but now we are seeing the same kinds of inconsistencies across Zoho apps, particularly those more recently added to their platform. This issue is not major in that everybody on staff seems able to learn how to work the programs--- it's just annoying and less than efficient when inconsistent user interfaces or inconsistent terms are used in the programs and/or the requisite documentation.
Read full review Support Rating Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.
Read full review We did the training and that was a huge waste of money. The information provided was basic and the instructor was sloppy (he even forgot to turn off his mic when he used the restroom - no one should ever hear what we heard). I offered up a 9 because we were able to find what we needed on your website.
Read full review In-Person Training It was harder to learn when there were mostly real estate users in the room. We are sales solely.
Read full review Online Training Online training is tough, but Zoho and their partners do a good job of explaining things.
Read full review Implementation Rating When you switch CRMs, you can automatically assume everything isn’t going to match up correctly. We had used Salesforce for 10+ years and had a ton of data and customizations. It was not a clean transfer, but we were able to sort it all out. The only issue that really bothered me was Zoho support. Even simple questions couldn’t be answered over chat, and we would have some team members try for hours to find the right answer
Read full review Alternatives Considered Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
Read full review Zoho is the only product we have used. Our company is fairly new and before purchasing Zoho a few years ago, client files were only saved and looked at through our company server. Because of how great Zoho has been, we have never considered looking for another product because there really is no need
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model I think Zoho CRM is priced at a reasonable amount. Simply put, you get what you pay for and Zoho does not disappoint. My organization is comfortable with what we pay and pleased with continually renewing the software. The billing frequency is just right. There are no complaints on our end
Read full review Professional Services In addition to being a user of Zoho CRM, we are a reseller as well. Often, at times our Partners request for on-boarding the platform configuration for them. During such requirements, we have utilized the Professional services team directly from the Zoho CRM team. Our partner feedback was quite positive, throughout.
Read full review Return on Investment Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen. The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it. Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool. Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well. Read full review ROI is good, providing your entire team is involved with the program and uses it During busy season, Zoho keeps the flow going with reminders for quote follow-ups Our company saw an estimated 20% gain in closing sales that went through Zoho as compared to quotes not answered through Zoho Read full review ScreenShots