So I've had almost a week now to tinker around with the CRM options. At this point, I feel confident in saying that it's a good balance of price and features, and there is support, albeit very slow for a company who's customers are other all running businesses on their platform. However, I'm comfortable enough with the system and the pricepoint that I believe I'll be sticking around for a pretty long time. I am also very happy with the clean, uncluttered appearance. Visually, it fits in pretty nicely with the other web apps we use (such as Google's apps), but still has a pretty familiar CRM feel. It's a nice balance.
HOWEVER...
The software feels like it was designed with a very narrow view of how businesses run themselves. Possibly designed with a specific kind of business in mind. For example, there is no support for custom modules, meaning that if you have a specific kind of data or event you need to track, it either has to fit neatly into the predefined modules, or else you have to twist existing modules until they kind of work for your specific purposes. And I mean it when I say "kind of". It's not going to be clean, that's for sure, as there is no way to change the names of predefined form fields within the modules. Hiding unwanted data can be dubious too. For example, within the "Potentials" module, which we renamed to "gigs", we have no use whatsoever for the probability tracking, and revenue projections. While we were able to hide much of that information on the Potentials page, we couldn't get rid of it in the Stage History section. And we're constantly being told about what Gigs (or "Potentials") we "Won". This, again, is a useless term for us and like a lot of this stuff, it's potentially unnecessarily confusing for new employees.
We can work around all that, but frankly shouldn't have to. Businesses vary greatly in what data they need to track and how they track it. These are customizations that, frankly, are a no brainer. At the very least, we should have near total control over form fields in the existing modules, even predefined ones. But realistically, even custom modules are offered by most of the other CRM suits out there, so why not this one? In fact, had we been using custom modules in SugarCRM, Zoho would've been nixed immediately because there wouldn't have been a way to bring in that data.
All in all, the system is pretty decent at the price point. But, come on Zoho, give us more control over customization; all your competitors do.