Zoho CRM

Comments: Inherited Zoho Service Desk CRM for help desk tickets. If you're considering Zoho CRM because the price is right, make sure you have clear and precise department directories, support categories, clear SLAs, spelled out escalation points, and strategic auto-repliers and boiler plate email templates ready. If you don't have these already pre-established sit down with staff and discuss it first. You'll be much more successful cut and pasting these into a blank system than to muddle along. At first this system was just a email inbox with useless reporting and we couldn't keep track of progress. Overtime, with tough changes we were able to modify the system to handle tickets better (between maintenance tickets, auto generated tickets, and support requests) for more accurate department reporting of urgent issues, projects, and regular requests by category.

Pros: - Great ticketing / response help desk solution that's free for small IT teams
- Great automation for creating special filters, automation rules, and auto replies for anything that comes across your [email protected] address.
- Great CRM tracking for monitoring customer responses, reporting tools, SLA alerting when nearing SLA deadlines, agent tracking KPI metrics, and ticket history tracking.
- Great solutions archive and knowledge base which can be added to via the ticket itself
- Great notification options including (email alerts, webhook integrations, and SMS text messaging.)
- Nice tools for scheduling routine maintenance tasks which appear as tickets and count towards technician KPIs (as tickets).
- Very secure portal, customer portal, 2 FA authentication options, and easy to manage UI

Cons: - Takes some time to initially setup, defaults often aren't helpful.
- Hard to understand webhook integration instructions, uncertain if two-way functionality is available for a Slack integration (if so, it'll be manual).
- Need to watch for mail fetching often! If you aren't getting tickets after 6 hours, mail fetching is turned off and needs to manually be reset. No polling service, or automated mail fetching ping service so you need to make sure when doing exchange maintenance to remember to start this service when stopped.

Comments: It is an easy to use application that offers a good overview of open items, action items and things to do.

Pros: It is a layered product that you can use with ease, without flooding your screen with more information than you need to follow customer cases. If you want to drill down to more functionality, you can enter it without changing too many screens and wasting time back and forth.

Cons: It does not offer a direct integration with Zoho projects and the ability to create more layers of information in action items and assign project teams for client cases.
The registration process does not have an import function from emails or the web browser - something that could be very helpful when registering a lead from an email or the contact section of a web page.

Comments: Zoho CRM has prooved to be one of the most fascinating tools I've ever used and implemented, it's a very user friendly, highly efficient and incredibly easy to integrate tool. I saw Zoho CRM becoming the perfect tool for many different companies and it blew my mind. The whole tool makes data connectivity, organization, maintainance and traceability incredibly easy if well implemented and used.

Pros: I love the way it integrates so easily and smoothly with the rest of the Zoho apps and even other supplier apps. Another MAJOR feature of Zoho CRM is how extremely customizable it is, I was lucky to use it and also implement it into other companies and I became a fan of this tool because it adapts to so many different businesses and processes, from hospitals to water irrigation, finance and accounting to events organization, entertainment, sales, education... I saw Zoho CRM becoming the perfect tool for many different companies and it blew my mind. The whole tool makes data connectivity, organization, maintainance and traceability incredibly easy if well implemented and used.

Cons: Nothing, sorry, I got in love with this tool, the only thing I don't like is people not using it correctly sometimes and blaming Zoho when it "doesn't work", the tool is magnificent, and if well implemented it can boost your business and help you standardize your commercial processes, digitalize your commercial operation.

Comments: I always recommend Zoho before I recommend SalesForce. It is a best-in-class product.

Pros: I recommend Zoho very often. A lot of companies go big earlier than they really need to and spend way too much on SalesForce & Marketo. I worked for a very small company with some limited budget that pivoted to sell it's product to the Enterprise. Zoho was incredibly easy to set up, intuitive to use, and contains all the most important features that most users need and seek in SalesForce. We integrated with MailChimp & Unbounce and were able to be incredible effective acquiring leads, nurturing them, and tracking pipeline in Zoho. Our small sales team found it very easy to use and loved it.

Cons: There's a point when you need a more robust integration eco-system and a lot of customization. This isn't really a con per se, but Zoho, by being not as complex and customizable as SFDC, will eventually need to be replaced. This should last you many years before you outgrow the functionality.

Comments: Really good. I needed a lead-management system that i could use to capture lots of data, and ZOHO CRM provided this. However, when it comes to building such a flow (outwith a standard workflow) - the product isn't up to the job (you need a more sophisticated ZOHO product, which comes at a hefty price).

Pros: High functionality at a very low cost.
Love the ability to add web forms (from Zoho CRM) straight into your website for lead capture (integrate this with Zoho Sales IQ) and you have a very cool and functionality-rich inbound lead capture system.

Cons: Bit clunky. Bit amateur. Design & look and feel are a bit flakey. Heck - even the Zoho logo looks cheap!