Item: Zoho CRM
Rating: 9
Author: Lisa Parshan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company sells SERVICES. We have customers that find our website by search terms. Once a customer fills out a form on our site, it starts the process, using a CRM
1. Email response with a personal questionnaire
2. Reviewing responses
Then, the CRM really starts - if the person doesn't respond to the questionnare --> follow up
If the person answers the CRM - they start the flow of selling our services.

Pros and Cons

Setting up flows, based on customer responses
access to customer details so that campaigns can be targeted
contact information

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

Return on Investment

because we are new to the CRM world, we wanted a product that was reasonably priced, yet had the features we were looking for
we have found a much higher customer engagement rate and ROI
we used to "lose" customers in our makeshift process. Now, all customers are being attended to.

Product Scalability

This has been a great launching point for our newly formed sales team, which is more used to making sales calls, than using a flow, and keeping track of leads from the moment they enter our pipeline. We're scaling slow, but it's easy to envision a time when we have hundreds of leads and they will all be followed up. In fact, more leads have been entering our site, and we are expanding our sales team to accommodate that growth.

Zoho Customer Experience

Prior to using a formal CRM, we had a manual system. that meant a few things -
1. Customers were being left alone when they didn't responded to the first time
2. Customers were not being followed through if they failed to answer our questionnaire
3. Customers were not leaving reviews on our site (because we weren't engaging them after service)
Now, all of the 3 above goals are being met, and we are increasing the length of time for "conversations" which also means more likely to close a deal.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot CRM, Zapier and Salesforce Essentials

We selected ZOHO over the above - specifically Salesforce - initially because of the price. Secondly, we do not have the technical expertise and budget to do a lot of customization at this time. So, we needed a product that had a good user interface, and that was flexible and intuitive enough for non-programmers.

Key Insights

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

Yes

Are you happy with Zoho CRM's feature set?

Yes

Did Zoho CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Zoho CRM go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zoho CRM again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft 365, Google Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

We searched different CRM platforms and noticed that ZOHO was well-priced, but some reviews said it didn't support forms well. IN our case, we already had forms on our wp site, so we did not need to use that aspect. instead, we used an integrator, so I don't have a review on that aspect of the CRM as we're not using that feature. This works for our company, so we are not using the standard automation with zoho forms.

Zoho answers the call for CRMS that are affordable and easy to use

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho CRM