Unclaimed: Are you working at Zoho CRM?
Zoho CRM Reviews: 4.1/5 — Solid Choice
Zoho CRM is a leading customer relationship management platform that businesses of all sizes can rely to manage sales, track marketing campaigns, and gain customer insight within a centralized, collaborative environment. Using Zoho CRM, users can set up and customize that platform according to their personal preferences and incorporate all necessary data and workflow to maximize its features. Zoho CRM is also available on a free plan and scales gradually depending on features needed.
| Company | Zoho Corporation |
|---|---|
| Year founded | 2000 |
| Company size | 10,001+ employees |
| Headquarters | Chennai, Tamil Nadu |
| Social Media |
| Capabilities |
AI
API
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
Small Business
Mid Market
Enterprise
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
| Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
Zoho CRM Pros and Cons
- Extensive omnichannel customer support via live chat, phone and email
- High-level automation options for various sales tasks
- Tons of integrations with third-party tools like Outlook and LinkedIn
- Mobile version with access to visual reports
- Data security, integrity, and regulatory compliance built-in
- Not the best tutorials for beginners
- Integrations can be a little clunky
Compare Zoho CRM with other popular tools in the same category.
The only good thing about Zoho CRM is that if you're on a budget or have a very small amount of leads, it will at least give you a place to store your lead's information.
Very hard to navigate, and if you've ever used a different CRM it is counter productive to what you expect from a CRM and what other platforms offer and integrate with.
At the time, it solved the problem of needing a CRM on a startup budget that would allow our sales team to track lead information and reach out to them as needed.
the email is good. some of the apps are nice. some of the interfacing looks like it could be very beneficial. Very hard to intergrade and to understand. Lots of extra training needed and extra time.
Customer service is the absolute worst i have ever experienced. The company I was working for I haven't worked for in over a year we have been trying to get just my Zohoone Account closed for now 2 month and have been getting a complete run around. The CEO of my past company is involved and has sent numerous emails as have I and still no resolved. It has been frustrating and a complete disaster.
Hasn't solved really any problems only created more. Had zoho email way before having a zohoone account like 10 years before and now they are threatening taking away my email account if I do not have a zohoone account. I think language barrier is an issue here as well.
Zoho One and its apps are relatively easy to use if you haven't used another CRM or similar app before. We have had a lot of frustration and confusion with users trying to figure out Zoho CRM, and how to make it function like Salesforce. It doesn't, and some things it just can't do. Another good feature is that most of the apps in Zoho connect and can share data. Zoho apps can connect to many external applications if you need to share data outside the Zoho ecosystem. It's possible to use Zapier to connect some Zoho apps to other applications; however, the capability is somewhat limited. They have at least one really great trainer. I took a webinar class to learn CRM and felt that it was one of the best training experiences I've ever had. Too bad all their customer support personell aren't as knowledgable and helpful.
My list is far too long, but here are the biggest failures of Zoho. These are reasons why I will not recommend Zoho to friends, colleagues, or acquaintences. In Zoho One, you cannot actually delete a user. The best you can do is deactivate the user account, which is a huge flaw and incomprehensible when considering that Zoho is a business management platform. Why would a company architect an application, which is designed to manage people, and not allow an admin or superuser to delete user accounts? The closest customer service response I've found, in the help forum, was to send an email to customer Zoho service and they would delete the user account. But, if it gets deleted all documents and email history of that user are deleted, as well. By the way, as of 9/2021 this issue in the Zoho customer help forum is over 3 years old. Nothing has been done to fix this and it appears Zoho has no intention to fix it. For those who operate under GDPR and US state data privacy laws, this inability to delete former employee accounts violates parts of those policies. Plus its just really annoying for admins, really bad application architecture, and unacceptable for an enterprise level suite of software. Horrible customer service. Customer support providers frequently send an answer to a question without fully reading and understanding the issue. Responses take too long and are usually a repetition of content from the Zoho help or getting started web page. There are more issues we have but I won't go into too much detail. For example, the false promise of customization that reaches a limit then can go no further. The arbitrary limitation to the number of filters that can be applied to a data set. An obvious policy to limit the number of queries users make and reduce bandwidth consumption. Again, very poor software architecture and implementation. It also shows a lack of commitment to providing adequate hardware to support the user's needs. It's an obvious strategy of Zoho to cut their costs and maximize profit over user needs. As a source of reference and basis for my comments, I have been a software developer for 15+ years. I've worked on multi-user cloud applications, much like the Zoho apps, that serve massive amounts of data and support thousands of concurrent users. The only reasons I can find for the problems we have with Zoho are, poorly designed application architecheture, poor choice of programming language and/or framework used for development, substandard poorly optimized code, and cost cutting measures to maximize profit.
We are trying to use Zoho One to manage our business operations, which includes CRM, Forms, Project, Meeting, Flow, Campaigns, etc. We are having a hard time realizing the benefits. Most of our experience with Zoho, for nearly two years, has been a frustrating fight against its limitations.
Nothing really, the interface is old, everything is hard to use and it has not been updated in 8+ years much.
- You can not link Accounts with Emails unless you pay for the most expensive versions - Old 2001 Interface - Hard to use - Is never updated with new features
Trying to use it as a CRM, but its very hard.
I liked how the features were advertised. I wish they actually worked the way they were presented.
This isn't actually connected to any job boards that matter. All of the free ones they provide do absolutely nothing and you're out a huge chunk of change buying into the ones that do produce. You're better off just paying more on the front end for an ATS that already has those connections.
I was trying to find a cost-effective ATS. I realized that this was not that.
Zoho has a tool for just about everything, and it is very inexpensive.
In a word, usability. Out of the box, Zoho CRM is not awesome. And once you start customizing it, it can quickly devolve into a hot mess.
Tracking leads from creation to closed deal... sort of.
some of the features are good, but the customer service is the worst
The worst customer service, help, responsiveness of all time, we can have a very urgent technical issue that affects your whole business and no one would answer you for weeks, your business could really go down, and still, they can reply after a month to tell you they will look into it
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There so many products in one license. The pricing is really good for the number of apps we get.
The platform has too many known bugs and they do nothing to solve them. It takes forever for each bug, even those that were raised 6 years ago. Tramsfers between zoho crm and campaigns are not done right and they simply say there's a bug that would be fixed sometime in the next years. There's no way to create a simple email sequence in zoho crm. You could create email sequence, but the sequence would continue even if the customer repies to your mail. You cannot even track the sales by product. You could get the sales per stage and customer, but not by product. The analytics are not sufficiently dynamic either. Just an example: If you want to have last month's sales in a table, you have to change the dates every month for all the stats using "last month". Overall, it's an awkward platform that is stuck in the year 2004. Compared to other CRMs we used, the whole team is extremely deceived by the switch to Zoho we made this year. The lack of productivity with this platform outgrow the higher cost of other platofrms.
We add difficulty to track information of all our leads. This tool made it really easy to see who's responsible for every lead and what their status is.
Integration of Campaigns, Gmail plugin, customisation options
Email tracking is not poor, its difficult to find, deliverability is a issue, templates tracking is really poor. We verified our accounts as required but it didn't help. We were expecting any modern-day CRM to at least be as good as Yesware. We can track and see our opens in real time. We get no dashboard notifications at all from Zoho despite enabling them. Asking for support is a long gruelling process that never solved some of the above. We are a small business but need advanced intelligence - you really need to hire an external consultant to deploy Zoho properly and that can run into the thousands. All in all, despite trying this product many times over the years, just cannot recommend it. ( Sales IQ however is amazing- that is another product of theirs) Also the integration with Campaigns, doesn't provide our sales staff the most frequent openers of marketing emails, it will list WHO has opened it but not how many times, and that is important to have on your dashboard and should come up every morning as a hot lead- we probably could have this customised but it's an expensive long-winded endeavour.
Updating data records, creating lists for sales staff, integration into our inbox. (Data consolidation)
CRM is good but your CS team and developers are of very low standard.
Your CS and Developer team. They don't know to fix the issues.
There are many benefits with Zoho CRM, but your CS and Developer team is ridiculous.
Easy to USe. Integrate with Zoho Apps. Lots of Free features
Bad Customer Support. They keep saying they will fix next day. Its 2 weeks, we cant even set up for our eamployees. While starting CRM if any of your employees subscribe to Free ENterprise trail, they become admin and then you cant add them in your company's free Team. We cant even delete Company details, as we cant see them. So our employees are not productive for last 2 weeks. Hubspot is better
CRM solution to maintain our vendors , leads, Marketing campaign
I did not like Zoho at all--I found it difficult to even launch and never got past the implementation phase.
There were so many separate products in the Zoho suite that I never was sure which one to use and how to coordinate them. I found the entire platform to be confusing and not at all user friendly. I tried to take advantage of their free consultations but the advice I got was "watch a video tutorial."
I was trying to solve the problem of needing to migrate to a CRM to track client data, leads, and workflow. I did not realize these benefits with Zoho--quite the opposite. I wasted a lot of time trying to learn the system and ended up not using it.
I find the functions of zoho easy to navigate and especially helpful for their word processing features
I think the interface is a bit outdated. Perhaps something a bit more modern with an eye for UI.
I use it to track projects so I find it useful as a spreadsheet platform.
The overall appearance is okay...Easy to edit records. Sharing records between reps is relatively straight forward and makes it easy to centralize information on leads.
Very incomplete CRM, no true (easy) integration, support is terrible ! Took 1 entire day to reset my login because I had changed my cellphone number...I had to constantly call / send email, was receiving no replies. The links between sections are unclear and lead to duplicate records. Additionally, no real link with the outside world in terms of validation (companies, contacts, etc...)
The only benefit right now is just to show which rep owns an account in the company...We could have done this with any low end CRM...
I liked the easiness and zoho because its free. Thats all
Small things like buggy design or a little zoomed page.. Scrollbars in each widget made me uncomfortable
The problems im rn solving with hubspot. Hubspot is good and minimal
It's free which is nice if you just need something very basic.
I didn't get a lot of value out it it. I wasn't able to easily see what tasks needed to be done for each customer
Trying to get track of our prospects and customers. It created a database for the prospects and customers.
Zoho shows deals and accounts in an easy to navigate UX
It doesn't work well with our workflow. We use a lot of outreach and the communication between the two is not good.
This is a CRM, we need a CRM. We'd prefer Salesforce in hindsight.
It never really did want we wanted it to do, so there wasn't much to like.
We got the CRM Plus suite. In theory, this is a bunch of useful modules that would handle the whole customer pipeline from pre-sales, purchase, support and more. In reality, none of these worked well together. They were all like separate programs. Why buy a suite if none of them work together? We were replicating work in each module, the modules weren't sending basic information to each other. Every time we contacted Zoho support they were like... you can do that manually. NO! That's not the point. We even sent someone to one of their 3-day training seminars because we thought we were doing it wrong. Nope. If you get this suite and want them to integrate, expect to hire someone to to custom development. Ridiculous and I couldn't recommend Zoho less. Poor product and poor support.
We were attempting to take all the disparate systems we used for customer acquisition and support and get everything in one place. Unfortunately, it didn't work and we wasted a LOT of time and effort.
We spent money to build a curlstom CRM on Zoho and hated everything about it.
Slow customer service, refunds take a month, partners are not screened well and really stink, clunky CRM, does not integrate to much, just difficult to use.
Nothing. This CRM became a problem.
It is really flexible CRM which you can configure as you want, but there are a lot of disadvantages in using it
The main disadvantage of ZohoCRM is nonprofessional support, their English is awful, also they require to connect to your PC, which, I think is totally insecure
I tried to use it as CRM at my previous job
Pricing was reasonable. I’d leave it at that because there wasn’t anything else worth mentioning, but I’m required to put more characters here.
Cumbersome for end uses. Results in lack of sales team buy in
None. Needed better solution
There is absolutely nothing that I like about his CRM tool. It is not user friendly at all.
Way too complicated of a tool. This is the worst CRM tool.
Assoiciate dropped the ball several times and has lost business for clients.
Conceptually, the features and cross application integration are very appealing. Many work well and are relatively straight forward to setup.
When things don't work as stated, they don't work at all. Some documented features no longer exist, or are not functioning in the manner described. Terrible support channels. I waited 5 days for technical support to assist in enabling a cross-platform function, between 2 Zoho applications (CRM and Desk), as the settings were broken, providing a 404 error. I requested a migration of data, which is stated to take less than 48 hours. 6 days in, still not completed, and I'm given the response "someone will follow up with you within 24 hours."
Attempting to utilize the product as an outbound sales solution, having data synced with existing customers and support inquiries. The product gets us about 80% of the way, however, very little is executed in entirety.
Terrible customer support. This software is very buggy and causes alot if issues.
Importing, uploading files. Everything sucks
Nothing
Email platform...that's the only thing I can honelty say i like.
The majority of the system is difficult to use and not easy to learn. Don't feel it's a beneficial program. Their customer service is hard to reach and get questions answered. Seems like they don't care to help.
Only happy with the email platform.
project management and emails are what I like best
it's buggy at times probably every 3-4 months
a lot of organizational needs have been improved by Zoho.
I like that it allows multiple accounts in one place
The prepublishing features didn't let you choose a thumbnail for videos on Instagram.
social media/crm support///we cancelled
The simplicity and out had a solid base of tools for us to use.
The interface for our end users was a bit clunky and it wasn't a simple task to clean up.
Small scale event sales.
There were a number of features that were initially attractive and discontinued with the update after spending three months of development time using the old software.
When we purchased access it cost us $200/year. Before purchase, we played in the sandbox to make sure the features would work for our very small company. Three months into the development, the software update dropped most of the features we needed. Spent a LOT of money searching for work-arounds. Support staff was essentially unhelpful. Gradually they added back a couple of the features we needed but we are still waiting for the others. In the meantime, we found we needed more permalinks (150 vs 50 that came with the Premier version we had purchased. The ONLY option we had was to upgrade to their Ultimate version for $4,2000!!!
Manage student registrations; hence the need for permalinks.
the main thing i like best about this is the ease of use on where to find everything i need. they are really able to make the user experience something that i can really use to keep my workday organized.
mostly it is down quite a bit for the software that is why we no longer use it here at the office. The site can also have issue s with loading. Sometimes the site will spin and not allow you to refresh or make any changes. It then forces you to exit out of the tab and restart everything
the business problems we were having was that we did not have any analytics, but this gave great ways to see them in a nice view. The benefits that I have realized for this is that I am able to resolve is the ability to integrate phone systems with the site to make the process seamless and much quicker than other crm's