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Peter,

I am writing to express my concerns with the ongoing development of Zoho CRM.

You may recall that our company is an enterprise user with 31 seats of ZCRM.

As our company grows we want to be able to leverage the capabilities of a robust CRM system to help us do our jobs better.

Unfortunately, I continue to see the development team work on features that do not improve the core functionality of the CRM software. There are sloppy integrations with other cloud apps that end up creating false hopes and frustrating your users.

The integration with Google calendar is effectively useless because you cannot synchronize your CRM calendar both ways. What is even worse – you cannot even synchronize your ZCRM calendar and Tasks with ZOHO’s own products. What good is it to have a calendar app that you cannot synchronize in real time with your phone and with the market leader? In fact, what good is it if you cannot even synchronize in real time with Zoho Calendar?

The same problem exists with Contacts. The way you have things set up CRM contacts do not synchronize with Zoho Contacts or Google Contacts. The system Zoho has developed GUARANTEES bad data in at least one place. What kind of programmer would intentionally create a system the does that?

The integration with Zoho Projects is also silly because it does not allow you to seamlessly import information from a potential into a new project. All you can do is access the Contacts list to add people to the project team. And then when you do that, you do not link any of the project correspondence back to that user. The new ability to show a project in a contact record is a help, but it does not really address the core need of having all correspondence in a single location. Again, it doesn’t do any good to intentionally set up a system that will deliberately exclude customer interactions from a CRM system.

From a Sales Standpoint, one of the most basic metrics that companies track is their win ratio. In other words, what percentage of potentials is converted to orders? I find it stunning that Zoho CRM does not have the ability to produce a report that shows this information, much less be able to break it down by product, salesperson, market segment, etc. This is critical information for companies to have to analyze their effectiveness.

It has been almost 2 years since ZCRM told me personally that the development was working on a way to track dates in the background so that workflow and reminders would be truly functional. Today you still cannot get a date based workflow to trigger unless you actually either create a new record or open a record and existing record on the exact day you want a workflow to trigger. So if you want to have workflow trigger if a certain date is met – such as 2 days before a forecasted closing date – you are completely out of luck (unless you happen to remember it on your own – which defeats the purpose of having a workflow)

The latest display of silliness is the rollout of the Zoho Writer interface for creating mail merge templates. Why on earth would a company develop a tool that requires that you do everything perfectly the very first time? There is no way for a user to edit a mail merge template once it is saved. If you made a mistake when creating the template there is no way to fix it. In fact, you can’t even open it up and LOOK at it to see what you might have done wrong. You have to guess at what is wrong and then try to correct it by hoping that you guessed correctly.

Our company has held off on using the Outlook or Zoho Mail add-ins because we have seen all of the issues reported in the forums.  It is very discouraging to see people voicing the same concerns over and over again. And then instead of seeing product updates that address the concerns of the users we instead see integration with things that no one is asking about.

The response to posts in the forums continues to be disappointing. I challenge you to go to the ZCRM forum right now and select the option for Unreplied Posts. I started paging back through the list.  There are over 150 posts with no response from Zoho going back to the beginning of 2011. I kept clicking the older posts button and gave up after 10 pages. And the sad thing is that often it is other users who reply to the posts when no one from Zoho bothers to pay attention to their users.

Don’t get me wrong. 80%+ of ZCRM is excellent. I am very frustrated because I want the other 20% to be great as well. But what I see is that the development team refuses to be candid with their users, has no rhyme or reason for what they are working on or when features are released. I and other users have asked the development team to at least give us a Priority List of the items on the roadmap. They can’t even do that.

I would be happy to spend as much time as it takes walking you and members of the development team through the frustrations we run into on a daily basis. I think that part of the problem is that it appears that no one is actually working with end users to observe how they are using your product. You don’t understand why these things are important because you don’t understand how we do business. And that is a sure way to developing a product that does all kinds of neat things that programmers think are cool, but have no use in the real world.

I bet if you put out a call to your user base you would get many volunteers who would give you the opportunity to shadow them and let your team see what users want your product to do. I would be right there at the front of the line.

Please, get your development team to be more responsive. Answer your user’s questions when they are posted in the forums. Give us clear feedback on what you are working on. Don’t use Facebook or MySpace or some other social media site. Use your own site. That is where your users are.

The longer this goes on, the more you risk becoming irrelevant. Our company chose Zoho because we believed that you had a good foundation, a good API to integrate with our other applications, you met our immediate needs and you convinced us that the development team would be continually improving the core product. At this point I question whether or not it makes sense to give Zoho the benefit of the doubt anymore.

I hope that you and the development team can restore my faith.