Eh.... keep looking. Promising but doesn't deliver.
July 23, 2013

Eh.... keep looking. Promising but doesn't deliver.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Overall Satisfaction

  • Inexpensive. The product is good value for money and is a good choice for small businesses that just want a simple CRM and don't care too much about integration.
  • Complicated. The product is not that intuitive and definitely requires training. It does not have the ease-of-use that we have come to expect of more modern products.
  • Poor integration with other Zoho tools. This was a major disappointment. Zoho CRM is part of a broad suite of products and our expectation was that these various tools would all be completely integrated. That is not the case. For example, we wanted to integrate the CRM with the help desk and bug tracking modules. Integration with bug tracking was not really possible and integration with the help desk system was just a simple logging of help desk tickets. The various modules are still disparate tool sets.
  • Rather barebones though flexible. The CRM product is pretty basic, but does offer lots of configuration options.
  • Reducing costs. Since the product is inexpensive, we saw some positive ROI for the CRM part.
  • Integration with other tools both ZOho modules and external tools was a major disappointment and we never got the full ROI we were expecting because of this.
Doesn't integrate well with other Zoho tools, let alone others external applications.

Product Usage

  • Customer data.
  • Contact management.
  • Marketing automation.
  • Subscription management.
  • Lead scoring.

Evaluation and Selection

Salesforce.com.
Pipedrive, Highrise, Pipeline Deals, Sugar. We ultimately decided on Zoho CRM because of the low cost and the extreme flexibility of the platform. It is possible to change pretty much anything in the the product through configuration options and that was important to us.

Implementation

If you want only a CRM, Zoho is a good solution. If you want an integrated toolset, keep looking.

Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Training was basic, and didn't really cover more advanced aspects of using the product.
No. The product is highly flexible, but the flexibility means that the product is not as intuitive as better-designed products. Training really is required to get up to speed. The product has a surprisingly steep learning curve.

Support

Responsive but not helpful. They tended to respond to all requests, but were not really able to help with the integration issues we were struggling with.