Last year we (team of 3 within a 15 person company) enthiousastically started using Zoho. We were looking to expand it to everyone in our company.

 

Sadly, in the coming weeks we will stop using Zoho because of one major issue we have with it. Zoho has poor integration with MS Office, which makes it a show stopper for us.

 

Integration issues for us:

 

1. Syncing of ALL contacts (Outlook - Zoho) amongst ALL team members is simply not possible. Zoho's Outlook plug-in will only allow a user to sync those contacts from/to Zoho of which he is the Owner. Several of us (Sales Manager, Head of Operations, etc..) need to have a complete list of contacts in their Outlooks, as it's then synced with their smartphones.

 

2. Mail merge with MS Word is not possible. We tried exporting into Excel various lists and then do it, but it remains a big hassle as compared to other SAARS based CRM packages.

 

3. E-mail marketing with Outlook/Exchange is not possible. I realize integration with Zoho mail is coming, but that would only partly resolve our issues on e-mail marketing.

 

Why do we insist on proper integration with Outlook / MS Word?  Simple, we (and a vast majority of midsize companies I would think) are very used to working with MS Office, have invested considerable sums of money and time into setting it up and our people like using it. It's simply not worth the hassle, time and money to switch everything to SAARS solutions. 

 

Zoho CRM's product roadmap so far has given no indication that it will develop better integration with MS Office and as such, we will have to stop using Zoho. Sadly.

 

Maarten