Dear, Zoho and Community. 

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I can always put the first name in the last name. Try telling that to potential Zoho customers that say that's too hard. 

Last night, in my frustrations as a Zoho Partner convincing businesses that Zoho is a better solution than their current offering, I wrote a simple Python Program to scan the web for how many unique times an admin has requested Zoho to remove the Last Name Required Field from Zoho CRM and it's other applications.

The program I wrote was simple but definitely had many conditions applied, such as checking the username to avoid duplicates, as well as to read the number of people that upvoted/followed a request, as well as the unique comments attached to each thread as well. 

The results are in. After scanning 890,558 unique links, In the last 5 years, Zoho Users have requested the required field to be removed in a whopping total of 432,191 times, not only from Zoho Community Forums but from other online forums as well. 

Zoho - When are we going to see this change? 

Let me just provide some commercial insight to this as well. 

I'm also a Partner to a VOIP Phone provider. 85% of customers I have dealt with already have an existing service and switch to the one that I offer. I have an 84% closing rate on all of these deals. I'm a great salesperson, not to boast, but to indicate why that close rate is so high, despite any stated objections from a customer. 

In comparison, my close rate for Zoho has been 0.86% - I've provided propositions to 116 Customers to date. When I ask each and every one of those prospects the real reason they decided not to take up Zoho CRM, 97 of them indicated that having the Last Name as a required field was a deal-breaker for them, as most of them start their customer journey on a first-name basis and receive last names later down the track. 

So I ask again, Zoho. When will we see the Last Name field removed and replaced with "First Name" required field instead? 

As someone who works closely with a team of Software Dev's internally, many of us simply just suggested swapping the payload handle and placeholder from {last_name} to {first_name} if removing the "required field" value was too hard. 

Zoho, users have been asking for this for over 10 years. I read articles that dated back to 2009. has it really taken 12 years to implement a fix to this? 

Yours Truly, 

- A very good salesperson who's biggest challenge to date is selling a CRM that requires the last name field.