Obvious shortcomings in Zoho CRM (to me anyway)

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.

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:
  1. Going into sheet view only seems to display 50 leads, why not all of them?
  2. 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?
  3. 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?
  4. 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? 
  5. Clicking to select all leads only selects records being displayed, not ALL records across multiple pages (doh!). Even Sugar gets this right.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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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