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High Marks for Zoho
Updated May 06, 2024

High Marks for Zoho

Ashley Longstaff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho CRM

We use CRM as our partner management software. Whenever we're cultivating leads for our product, we enter them into the CRM, set up follow-up tasks, track our proposals and contracts. Before the CRM, we all had our own way of documenting and following up with partners, and now we have a streamlined, centralized place to put information and look for information.
  • Keep notes centralized in one place
  • Helps us see the big picture of everyone's tasks in the system
  • Helps us filter leads via tags for follow up
  • We tried looking into Zoho Projects for project management, but it was too cumbersome and didn't seem very flexible--we turned to Trello for that need.
  • I'd like an easier way to customized it a bit, but always had to involve someone from Zoho who sounds like they were from India, and the language barrier and strong accent was hard to understand and communicate what I needed.
  • There are so many features in Zoho, almost wish there was a way to hide those options we're not using at the moment.
  • It's helped us become more efficient and transparent in the people we are cultivating relationships with
  • We can see the status of everyone's work rather than just our own
  • We don't know quite how to use all the forecasting and pipeline options, which would be really helpful for us
As we have started using more apps within Zoho One and working with an Implementation Team, things have just gotten more complicated in integrating other workflows into the CRM. In the long run I think we'll be better for it, but it's complicated, technical work that takes a really long time to complete.
While Zoho has served as the central location of where we're inputting the data, I'm not sure we know enough or are using the right modules like Reports or Analytics to get what we need from Zoho to see the full sales cycle. We're doing alot of that work just within Excel spreadsheets because we don't have the knowledge or expertise on how to get to where we need to be with Zoho.
We selected Zoho based on an exploratory phase with a 3rd party tech vendor who sought out recommendations for CRM software based on our criteria. We're mostly happy with the software, but also have felt misled by the claim that there's so many apps you can plug into with Zoho One but many of the apps aren't as great as they say and so we're left disappointed to make this investment, not only money-wise, but time and energy-wise, and feel stuck with what we've got.

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?

No

Did implementation of Zoho CRM go as expected?

No

Would you buy Zoho CRM again?

Yes

Zoho has been a great piece of software to help us centralize all of our contacts in one place, our history, and conversations with those individuals, as well as the history of a partnership with a larger organization that involves multiple people. We also use it as a place to store our more permanent, archive documents (contracts, other special documents), and people at our organization know where to go to find that key information. Also, having the availability to pull certain reports and even schedule those reports has been helpful.

Zoho CRM Feature Ratings

6.7
Customer data management / contact management
8
Workflow management
5
Territory management
Not Rated
Opportunity management
Not Rated
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
4
Contract management
9
Quote & order management
Not Rated
Interaction tracking
7
Channel / partner relationship management
7
Not Rated
Case management
Not Rated
Call center management
Not Rated
Help desk management
Not Rated
7.0
Lead management
7
Email marketing
7
6.5
Task management
6
Billing and invoicing management
Not Rated
Reporting
7
3.7
Forecasting
3
Pipeline visualization
3
Customizable reports
5
5.0
Custom fields
5
Custom objects
5
Scripting environment
Not Rated
API for custom integration
Not Rated
5.5
Role-based user permissions
6
Single sign-on capability
5
Not Rated
Social data
Not Rated
Social engagement
Not Rated
Not Rated
Marketing automation
Not Rated
Compensation management
Not Rated
4.0
Mobile access
4

Using Zoho CRM

30 - All business functions: communications, operations, finance, programs, business development.
3 - We have 1 person who's job is solely dedicated to managing all of our organization's tech and software and then there's about 2 other people who are super users of the system who know it well and have trained other people on the system.
  • centralized location for all of our organization program history and participant information (database)
  • centralized location for documenting all of our business development leads and proposals
  • you can see the partnership history of an organization or individual that we've interacted with over the years
  • we turned the CRM into our participant databased alongside our business development work
  • we've integrated MailChimp into the CRM and connected our website so that traffic flows from the website to the CRM and we can track it
  • Eventually we'd love to be able to create some dashboards that connect to our revenue goals and report out the data we need rather than manually doing it ourselves in spreadsheets
  • Eventually we'd like to be able to forecast our revenue goals for the year
We've poured 3-4 years into getting all of our data and business development processes connected to the CRM that it would be hard to switch to something else. We like the system for the most part but we're also committed to using it and not switching to something else because of the time, energy and money commitment that would take.

Evaluating Zoho CRM and Competitors

Yes - Zoho essentially replaced us documenting our business development cultivation in spreadsheets and emails. We didn't have any software at that time and knew that we needed to grow up and find something that accommodated our needs.
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
We wanted a product that could integrate with other systems so that we could streamline the work into one central location rather than toggling around several different systems that didn't talk to one another.
I think we would re-do our criteria diagnosis to really understand our needs and what we envision this software needing to do for us. We were convinced, at the time, that it was the right solution. But while it looked that we had found our match on paper, not everything has worked out the way were anticipated or were told it would work out.

Zoho CRM Implementation

It's a long and grueling process because it doesn't happen fast and you have to continually test the software to ensure it's doing what you wanted to. Then when issues pop up, it sets you back on the timeline.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Third-party professional services
We initially used someone named Kevin Chieff who was a Zoho-certified implementor. He helped us with some integration but found that he was not making the best choices for us. He created some code on the back-end that served more as bandaids then actual solutions. So we shifted to a Zoho Integration Team to help us with the work.
Yes - We had an initial Discovery Phase for the Zoho team to learn about our needs, assess the feasibility of whether Zoho could match the need, and determine the scope of this request. Then, we moved into 2 Implementation Phases based on the current, prioritized needs.
Change management was minimal - Our organization was onboard with the changes so there was little change management or convincing people to do the changes that were needed. We had stakeholder buy-in and were ready to launch in.
  • Technical issues on the Zoho end, they would implement a change and it wouldn't go according to plan or cause more issues in our system
  • the length of time it takes to do this work has been underestimated

Zoho CRM Training

  • Online Training
  • No Training
The online training consisted of watching youtube videos and pre-recorded webinars. They helped us learn what we needed, but there's still a need to learn more and where to access that information.
Some modules are easy to learn, some need more training to fully understand how to use it.

Configuring Zoho CRM

It depends on what you're configuring, but most of my experience has been it's too complex.
One best practice is to have Zoho CRM share updates via Slack because there's not an easy way to get notifications otherwise.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - We mainly customized the homepage/dashboard to each role so they could see the relevant data to their work first. It was fairly easy to pick the data to be displayed.
Yes - we have added extensive custom code - When we looped in Zoho Forms to process our program registrations, it took so much code and it wasn't very good. We had to redo it this past year.
Nothing I can recall.

Zoho CRM Support

The support is there, but it's hard to interact with people from India with a strong accent. It would be nice to be placed with someone from the US that I can understand and to stick with the same person time after time rather than starting over new with someone else. We eventually had to hire an Implementation Team from Zoho to help us utilize more of the apps and it's been nice working with the same group.
ProsCons
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Poor followup
Problems left unsolved
Need to explain problems multiple times
Yes, when we first launched Zoho, we purchased the premium support so we could get the help we needed in the initial stage. We had varying levels of success with the help and eventually stopped using them and waited to hire someone within our company who had more tech software expertise to pursue the support from Zoho.
Sorry, I can't recall a time.

Using Zoho CRM

I wanted a product that was fairly intuitive and most of the features are intuitive, but not all without some training. Once you understand how everything is set up, it's easy to train someone and help them know what steps they need to take in order to use the software appropriately.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Convenient
Requires technical support
Slow to learn
Lots to learn
  • Adding in new leads
  • Adding in notes to contact pages
  • Adding in contracts and the associated files
  • being able to only use a certain number of tags in the system
  • contacts aren't associated with an organization until they've been converted
Yes - Not well at all. I downloaded the app when we first purchased Zoho and found the interface very difficult to use and eventually uninstalled it from my phone.

Zoho CRM Reliability

We're still in the early stages of scaling this across departments. We have high aspirations of doing this, but it takes time to migrate to the new system and to help people get acquainted of doing their work in a different way thru Zoho.
I've rarely encountered unplanned outages or application errors.
Pages load fairly quickly.

Integrating Zoho CRM

It's not an easy process and even if you want to integrate a product, it may not have the capabilities you want.
  • Mailchimp
  • Trello
Mailchimp was difficult and many things did not integrate well or created more issues. We tried to integrate Trello, but it couldn't do what we needed it to do.
  • Xero, our accounting system
I do not know if Xero is supported.
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
Unsure.
Be clear with your needs and double check that Zoho CRM can do it and do it well.

Relationship with Zoho

They were pleasant to work with.
It was easy to work with them.
Certain # of users and premium support.
Not at this time.

Upgrading Zoho CRM