For the past two years, I have been telling every customer who will listen how great Pulse is in Zoho CRM. I have explained how it is innovative, useful, and in my experience unique among CRMs. In my office, we use Pulse to follow our most important Leads, Contacts and Potentials.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to follow a critical new Contact, and found that the "Follow" button had disappeared from the records I owned.
I immediately reached out to tech support, and was told in a very off-hand manner that "Pulse
is designed for the purpose to track the updates of other user records," and that "
If you have the access to view records owned by other users, you will see the 'Follow' option for that record."
Well, this was certainly true now, but it is blatantly false to say that this is "how Pulse is designed." Right at the top of the Pulse screen it says "keep track of your follow-ups. Your follow-ups, not just the follow-ups of other people. That is how Pulse is designed and that is how we have always used it. Removing the "Follow" button from the accounts users own didn't somehow make Pulse true to its original design. It broke one of the most useful tools in Zoho CRM.
I responded to tech support explaining my dissatisfaction, and received a reply telling me that Pulse will be replaced by Feeds. A few days later, I saw the message at the top of the Pulse window saying Pulse "is a complete replacement of Feeds."
There's only one problem. Pulse isn't any sort of replacement for Feeds. It misses the most important element that makes Pulse such a useful tool. Lack of this element threatens to make Feeds all but useless.
What is this element? In short, selectivity.
The brilliance of Pulse is that it does one thing well. Pulse lets me track my most important records and tell immediately if they have been updated within a time-frame I define. It is, in short, the ultimate tickler system, and as such it works beautifully.
Feeds does not do what Pulse does. Feeds is not selective. Right there in the tech support email I received, it says "
Here after the records owned by the same user will be auto followed up." When I checked out the new module, sure enough--F
eeds automatically tracks every record I own. Who wants to track every record they own? Who wants to drown in a tsunami of irrelevant data? To grow my business, I need to focus on my most important Leads, Contacts and Potentials.
Feeds is trying to be Facebook for CRM. I don't need Facebook for CRM. I need Pulse. Regrettably, Zoho has crippled their most innovative tool, and is planning to remove it entirely.
What does everyone else think? Are you on-board with the replacement of Pulse by the new Feeds module, or do you want to keep the unique features and focus of Pulse?
Speak up, because this is happening now. We have very little time before Pulse goes away entirely.