Features requests and limitations
Dear Zoho CRM Team,
As you might remember, i've sent you couple of requests recently regarding so many problems i got when i tried to use Zoho CRM not only as notepad/contacts database, but as real sales automation tool.
I'd like to discuss this with you and other customers. I discovered these ones:
1. I can't get rid of my currency name in English when i want to put just price of the product somewhere. I always get that "RUB" abbreviation while not only it's not correct to put English currency name in Russian version, but it's also not always needed. Very often we just want to get pure number and just can't!
2. I can't send a products info using automation tools. I have all these variables available, can put them into the template, but that just don't work. That's really weird.
3. Furthermore, i just can't use templates with length more that 32000 bytes for automation tasks. Is that year 1996 or 2013 today?
I have gigabytes of free space in my subscription plan and just can't use it anywhere. Meanwhile, i can use huge templates for Mail merge templates, but can't use these templates for automation. That's weird too.
4. As you might know, lots of companies around the world do not sell products, they sell services. Services have a bit different pricing, vendors and so on.
Just a little example: each service have a setup fee. I added a new "currency" field into the "price info" section of Products. But i can't see and use it anywhere(!). It's just not displayed, it's not allowed to edit it and on. What for you allow to add fields to the product layout?
5. That's related to the third item: most of such software allows to autogenerate documents and autofill/populate them with predefined values.
For example, we want to generate a common Agreement with customer, put into it all his data (like name, phones, addresses and so on) and attach it to the Account's page. But we can't do even the first part of the tas.
I tried to use templates for that and got that problem with 32000 bytes lenght. Stuck. Even my old billing system written in Java can do this easily.
I've discovered these "misfeatures" just in 30 minutes. I gave up trying to use Zoho CRM again in that case, because i was afraid i would found tens of other limitations and would just waste my time.
So that seems i can't really use Zoho CRM as automation tools just because it doesn't allow to do anything except what it was designed for. But sales process is completely different in other countries and for other products/services types.
You answered you would take into considerations these "misfeatures" and (may be) would fix them or add them in next updates.
We've never seen your RoadMap. Do you have any public one?
Are you going to make Zoho CRM REALLY flexible tool or just nice, colorful tool with fixed functionality?
I'm wondering why didn't you make it using something like Zoho Creator for internals? So any customer would build his own business processes in a way he wants.
Most of the standalone software for sales,accounting, support and so on have their own built-in language to describe and build all processes inside it. I can even force them to play chess with me when i want, just using internal language.
With Zoho CRM i'm just stuck in all these limitations. That's a pity.
Thank you in advance for any comments/suggestions.