Obvious shortcomings in Zoho CRM (to me anyway)
Hi, I have just started using Zoho, I have previously been using Sugar CE and still have it running mainly because I am finding some really dumb stuff in Zoho that makes me wonder if this is really the right move.
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I decided to give Zoho a go because I know other people that use it, and it also seems quite reasonably priced. Also I was starting to find Sugar really quite slow and clunky, just the process of adding updates to a call was really quite labour intensive and I am starting to find my sales guys are not updating it as much as I would like because they were finding it so unpleasant to use.
I am currently only using Zoho to track about 200 leads, but what I am finding is the product isn't flexible enough for my needs, therefore I am afraid to start using more of it and investing time in building up my data if I am going to keep encountering difficulties.
Here's a few things I have found, there may be solutions but it's just my take on Zoho for starters:
- Going into sheet view only seems to display 50 leads, why not all of them?
- I have built a web form to capture leads from my web site but I can't assign leads to a campaign, I have to manually do it. If I try and add a hidden field to specify the campaign, because it's in a different module (not the leads module) I can't select the campaign to associate the leads with. So every time I get a web lead I have to manually assign the campaign - this is crazy! I tried to use the automation but this also doesn't allow me to assign a campaign - this cross table/module linking type stuff is crucial, I can't believe it's missing?
- I need more flexibility with where the web form auto responder email gets sent to, when I was looking at the pro trial version I could send it to an email address that was not a Zoho user, but it also sent it to the lead "owner" - I would have liked to suppress the email to the lead owner. However now I am on the paid standard version I can only send it to the lead owner and not the non-Zoho address. Why put in restrictions like this?
- It's not immediately obvious what all the little differences are between versions until you start using it. I had Zoho Mail integration up and running in the pro trial, so it was reading my emails from my Office 365 account, now I am on the standard edition I have lost that, not a great loss as I still have the outlook plugin, BUT I am still getting notifications that it's getting new emails (and it's marking my emails as read in outlook). However I can't de-configure Zoho Mail as I don't have access to that option now. I have logged a support ticket but why limit it again?
- Clicking to select all leads only selects records being displayed, not ALL records across multiple pages (doh!). Even Sugar gets this right.
- Viewing a campaign, I can only see 10 assigned leads, I have to keep clicking next page, there is no way to export leads associated with a campaign. In the end I created a quick filter to display leads based on a "lead source description" custom field I added into the leads module and populated via the web form with a hidden field, but why make it so hard? Again Sugar did this fine.
- Scheduling call backs is a nightmare - I scheduled a bunch of calls for the future but couldn't see them listed anywhere, then when the date passed they all got marked as "completed" even though I never updated them. In the end I had to schedule "activities" and mark them as calls, but when viewing activities it displays the lead name but not the company name. I created a custom view to include the "related to" field, but this only gives the lead name not the company - again I need that "cross link" with the lead module to pull out the company name and display it.
- Zoho "feels" like Sugar in many ways (e.g. contacts and leads), it's like they took all it's concepts but haven't quite finished implementing it yet. I do like the way it's much quicker and easier to enter updates, Sugar feels clunky and click-heavy by comparison, but I keep finding things that I can't do in Zoho that seem obvious to me and it surprises me that Zoho has been going so long and yet still feels incomplete.
I hate to think what I will find if I start using it for account management, parts lists, quoting and invoicing. Maybe someone here can re-assure me? Am I being dumb or is this stuff really basic CRM requirements?
Paul
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