As a user, I use the product to manage client relationships. We have long-term relationships with clients, so keeping up with all the information and our conversations about their necessities and needs is really useful. We want to have a record of the proposals we send to the clients and our negotiations before the project is initiated in one place.
The best thing about Zoho CRM is that it is integrated with other Zoho applications. Before using Zoho, I worked with different systems that were not integrated. Zoho charges only one license. With that license, you can access 55 different applications. It's really easy to connect Zoho CRM with Zoho Campaigns. For example, if I want to have lists and make follow-up campaigns, I can do that. There’s another application called Zoho Flow, which allows us to connect Zoho with third-party applications. It is really easy to do. So, the ability to connect Zoho with other applications that our business needs is really useful.
Zoho CRM’s customer service can be a little difficult to reach sometimes. They have a very large community. We can find answers in the community blog. However, sometimes we see articles of people asking for a new feature, and it has been sitting there for two to three years without an official answer or letting us know when we should expect the feature to be launched. The product could improve its customer service.
I have been using the solution since 2020.
Overall, the solution is very stable. I remember having trouble with the connection once or twice. The connection is a little bit slower, very early in the morning. We could not connect to our emails and Zoho CRM two years ago. It happened once. In general, the product is very, very stable.
Something that I like about Zoho is that they are very transparent. They have a page where they publish all the new reports. If I feel that the connection is a little bit slow, I can check their page to see if there are any issues.
Close to 1000 people use the solution in our organization. We expect to almost double the number of licenses by the end of 2024.
The initial setup was very easy. The solution is really intuitive. I had very less knowledge of CRM before I started using the product. I knew it in theory, but very little. When I started using Zoho, it was very intuitive to understand what each module does and what was the use of every single module that Zoho CRM offers. The navigation from one module to another doesn't change much. It's nice because once you understand how to navigate in one of the modules, the navigation for all the other modules will be pretty much the same.
I work with companies here in Europe. Compared to other solutions, I would say Zoho CRM is very, very affordable because we can use different applications with one license. I'm from Brazil, so I know companies in Brazil. Zoho is charging almost the same price in Brazilian currency. For a lot of companies in Brazil, it's not a very cheap solution. One Zoho One license costs $444 for one year. The cost benefits are way more if you compare it with having a Zoho CRM license separately.
We chose Zoho CRM over other products because it gives us the ability to connect with different applications. It is worthwhile to have one license for 55 applications. It is one of the main advantages of the product. The product is very customizable. Zoho has its own programming language.
If someone wants to use the tool, I would ask them about the size of their company. Zoho has a different solution, which is a basic application called Bigin. It is less customizable. The process is very intuitive, very simple, easy to use, and is meant for small companies. A small company can consider Bigin. If I were a freelancer, I would have considered Bigin. CRM is the way to go if a company wants to scale.
Even though the tool has to improve its customer service, I like Zoho’s vision. They're very careful in how they launch new features and the quality they provide while launching them. It is something that I value because I have worked with other solutions like Jira and other applications. Sometimes they launch a feature, and it doesn’t really work. We can find some bugs when navigating the new solutions, but Zoho is very careful.
Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.