Item: Zoho CRM
Rating: 8
Author: Kristina Spurlock

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At my company we use Zoho to:

Import leads from our website.
Keep up with prospects.
Maintain a history on accounts.
Create and execute tasks.
House login data.
Set up meetings.
Activate workflows.

Zoho meets our business needs fairly well but is missing some basic functionality that makes a few things challenging. There are work arounds but they are time consuming and a bit ridiculous, considering. For instance, you can’t format the content in note and detail fields so you can insert hyperlinks. And you cannot link one contact to multiple accounts. But overall, it’s a solid system.

The flexibility you have with rules and work flows is done really well, especially considering Zoho will write custom functions to do pretty much anything you cannot configure on your own.

Pros and Cons

Zoho is very easy to customize, even for someone who is not a developer.

There are some things are should be configurable that you have to contact Zoho to do. This can delay things.
You cannot connect one contact to multiple accounts. You have to create a parent account and connect the contact to the parent. That's cumbersome.
Zoho's customer support doesn't handle bugs very effectively. They are not very good at providing timely updates and are a bit slow to fix bugs, even bugs that are showstoppers.