Our organization has been using Zoho CRM for about a year now. We took our time up front to develop the user screens, establish best practices and customize the implementation to fit our work practices.

When we were researching CRM providers we also considered Salesforce.com, Highrise, and Landslide for SaaS solutions as well as Goldmine and Microsoft CRM for non-hosted solutions.. We felt that Zoho CRM was by far the best value solution for our needs.

Here are some of my observations about our experience so far.

The Good - The system does a fairly nice job of linking the key customer information. Most of the data and linking issues we have experienced are due to lazy data input practices. And with the recent implementation of an Audit log we have been able to trace these bad practices to individual users and work on getting them corrected.

The Good - The platform has been easy to customize to our company's specific needs. My primary function is Sales development, yet I have been able to handle the lion's share of the administrative tasks without having a formal IT background.

The Bad - Some of the functionality does not work as advertised. We have been struggling for 8+ months to get some of the workflow rules and related alerts to work properly.

The Bad - Unexplained issues occur and disappear like gremlins. They are difficult to diagnose and difficult to correct. One such recurring bug is that when sorting Potentials in a custom view then opening an individual potential record creates issues when trying to navigae tot he previous or next records in sequence. This glitch comes and goes and we cannot figure out why.

The Immensely Frustrating - Zoho customer service. I think in general Zoho is doing a reasonable job of fixing issues as they come up. But they do a LOUSY job of communicating back to the users. The purpose of having these forums is to provide 1:many communication. However, from my experience Zoho customer service will contact you individually to resolve a problem, but then not post anything to the forum about the resolution. That means anyone who is watching that discussion never gets the info about the fix.

More Immensely Frustrating - Zoho also does a lousy job of telling the users about upcoming releases and giving users a general guide to the time frame for rollout (Despite repeated calls for this from the user community).

The Good - Zoho is continuing to do development on the product. And those developments are generally useful and positive. I am very confident that Zoho will continue make improvements on the product and it will continue to become more useful for our organization.

The Good - The Zoho API has been very easy for our IT people to work with. We have had almost no problems getting Zoho CRM to interface with some of our internal, proprietary systems. This has allowed us to continue to use a number of familiar tools and still harness the power of the CRM platform. User adoption was very high and training was really quite easy. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that people could still enter data in systems they already knew and they were not faced with a lot of "change".

After the first year I would grade the Zoho CRM experience about a B to a B+. I was hoping for it to be a Solid A. In general it works well and the customization is very useful. I think what keeps me from giving Zoho CRM an A right now is the poor communication by the Customer Service team and the failure of the product to live up to the marketing hype. The service is solid and the core app works well. But I think that Zoho is over-promising in some areas. 

All in all, I feel that we made a pretty good decision. I do recommend the service overall. The advice I give to all existing and potential users is to be polite, yet persistent when it comes to Zoho Customer Service. Don't be afraid to call or post things in the forums. Like I tell our company's customers - if you have a problem please tell us about it. We can't fix something if we don't know it is broken.

Generally speaking, they get problems fixed pretty quickly. You just may not know about it when they do.

Chuck