One-click conversion of leads made easy work of populating accounts, contacts, and pipeline fields as sales opportunities advanced. I experienced some buggy interactions with the back button (attributable to AJAX calls), and though inline editing is available for many fields, the constant page updates required for most tasks would benefit from some smarter AJAX injection or an eventual Adobe AIR desktop client. In all, the browser-based interface was adequate. I would prefer to receive alerts for calendar items and events - another missing feature. My home page offered anticipated features such as a calendar and task menu, quick links to recent items, and customizable data views (both tabular and graphical). The record de-duplication utility also proved handy as there is no checking for duplicates on record entry. I was able to import existing records (CSV/XLS) and match my fields to Zoho's - but transforming the data en route is not possible.
You either permit full read/write/delete access or deny all. I would also like to see a "read only" option added, since data access is currently an all-or-nothing proposition. Following this, a separate interface for data sharing was needed to set default permissions and customize access rules - again, for every module.ĪdventNet should streamline this process by consolidating the settings into a quick-tick permissions grid. But here again configuration is tedious: For every profile, for every module, and for every page there's a different screen for setting the field-level permissions. Tabbed access to sales and service modules makes for easy navigation, and security is implemented at the field level across the package. Because neither roles nor users can be created on the fly or added en masse, initial setup would be cumbersome for a large organization. Getting started with Zoho CRM involved setting up the roles within my company hierarchy and creating the users to match. And, although AdventNet offers the aforementioned office productivity tools, no easy mechanism exists for weaving them seamlessly into the CRM application - with the exception of spreadsheets, which have been newly integrated into some of the CRM modules. There is an Outlook plug-in for manually pulling e-mails into the system, but this is more kludge than well-integrated solution.įor companies looking to integrate CRM with other systems, the absence of an API makes Zoho a non-starter.
Zoho CRM also lacks support for inbound e-mail, which means that marketing campaigns will be an intensively manual process. The ability to automate escalation based on time-based triggers is also conspicuously absent. Rules-based task assignment is present, but hindered by the absence of queues, an essential feature for large sales and service teams.
It's missing field format constraints that help ensure data integrity (for example, by ensuring that e-mail addresses are formatted properly, that ZIP code and phone numbers contain only digits, and so on). It lacks basic audit logs essential for tracking changes to record. Zoho CRM falls short of enterprise requirements in a number of ways. Ultimately, its features don't go far enough to meet the needs of larger organizations. But while Zoho CRM boasts a feature set that rivals some pricier solutions, it lacks the depth and polish of top-flight competitors. There's little wonder why the product has already garnered so much attention.įurther, AdventNet offers a suite of complementary applications including word processing and spreadsheet, HR, project management, reporting, and invoicing that bring Zoho, on the surface at least, into competition with the likes of NetSuite. The kicker is a sticker price of only US$25 per user per month - a rate well below any other hosted application vendor, and $100 cheaper per user per month than the sultan of SaaS,.
Building on a Professional edition that combines sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules, Zoho Enterprise aims to meet the needs of corporate customers with such features as organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.
AdventNet's Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a new, low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering that may be impossible to ignore.