Zoho CRM
by Martin Neumann ~ April 11th, 2007
Zoho CRM 5.0, web-based Customer Relationship Management software for managing your customer relations in a better way. You can use the the Zoho CRM software for your organization-wide sales, marketing, customer support, and inventory, functions.
Zoho CRM is a classy bit of software that runs online (it’s hosted for you) or comes as a packaged version. Seeing we’re well into Web2.0 I’m going for the hosted version.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is basically as it implies - it manages the customer relationship. That includes keeping detailed customer details for easy access and marketing campaign. It’s a marketers’ delight as you can run your campaigns, offer customer support and generally manage the whole customer management experience from the one place.
The Analytics and reporting tools are second to none and to top it all off you can get it to work with Outlook - and myself being a big time Outlook user, this is a big plus.
The tabbed interface makes it easy to navigate to the section you want.
I’ve only touched on a few of it’s features as really, you have to take a few hours and really dig deep to understand how powerful this application is. Regardless, I was so impressed with it that I’m seriously considering using it full time in my own business. Yes, there’s a bit of a learning curve involved but it’s pretty basic and a few hours should do the trick.
Another big plus: it’s FREE! You have full access, with all the features enabled for up to 3 users.
My only concern is how they will be able to offer this service for free in the long term. Yes, they charge for more users - but I’m guessing that there would be many single users.
I wouldn’t want to invest so much time in this app only to one day come to it and have to pay a cost that’s too high my my small budget - but those in the know tell me it’ll be free and stay free for the smaller user for a long time to come. The money will come from the add-ons.
June 6th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Nice write-up on Zoho. I tried it but was more impressed with other CRM alternatives out there with a few more features (Highrise, Heap, Pipelinedeals, SugarCRM). I recently posted about them (and using CRM in law firms) on my blog; have a look if your interested.