Zoho CRM – Part 1: Overview and SFA (Image Heavy Post)Zoho CRM is a an SaaS CRM offering claiming affordable yet full featured CRM functionality. The company offers 3 editions

• Zoho CRM Free Edition: here is what we like, its free and nicely featured and hosted. Wow!
• Zoho CRM Professional Edition: After the 3rd user you have to start paying and a few restrictions such as email volumes are listed.
• Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition: All the good stuff from the previous versions with role based security.

You can find details on each edition here.

There is a wealth of information on the Zoho website including an online demo, videos, screenshots and a price comparison calculator.

We are going to run the app through its paces and give you some commentary on the functions.

Home Page

The home page of ZohoCRM is well organized and offers a simple view of upcoming events tasks and other relevant data needed by a sales, marketing or customer support professional.

User Settings

User stetting such as skins, a feedback form, administration settings and help are conveniently located at the top right portion of the screen. This is an expected location for this type of function. We like the skins. Who doesn’t?

Tabbed browsing

Like most modern web applications Zoho CRM organizes its modules as tabs across the top of the screen. Overflow modules are represented by a small chevron at the end of the list.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are located directly under the tabs and provide easy access to common application tasks. We like the fact that it uses the same UI concept as the tabs with the chevron at the end of the list for overflow shortcuts.

Sidebar

The sidebar is a collapsible accordion style (think left side of MS Outlook) approach.  Included are a global search function, recently viewed records, quick create (which is just a duplicate of the shortcuts), calendar, tell a friend  and a world clock.  All the panels are interactive and can be collapsed vertically and horizontally.

Sidebar: Search (Global Search)

Searching all modules or specific ones for specific records is a snap with the simple right from the home page. It is a little dissapointing that there are not more options for global search. Testing was limited but it does not appear possible to find attachments by name or to search the contents of a document.

Sidebar: Recent Items

Similar to a breadcrumb feature, this function follows your activity throughout the application ensuring you never get lost.

Sidebar: Calendar

The home page calendar allows users to click on a day and navigate to the calendar view. Calendar objects are called events in the system and support multiple relationships to accounts, contacts, leads and many other modules where events are relevant. We like the fact that the calendar supports recurring calendar events. The calendar does not have an easy way to establish a meeting with a duration. The absence of this feature requires the user to select a start day and time and end day and time. The implementation would be improved with a start date, time, and duration.

Sidebar: Tell a friend

This is more of a marketing engine for ZohoCRM. It is annoying but nevertheless non-invasive.

Sidebar: World Clock

How many times have you tried to schedule and appointment with someone in another country and wondered, what the heck time is it there? Well, the world clock can answer your question right on the home page. This probably will not be a feature that will help you hit quota but it certainly is a eye catching gadget.

Main Content area of page

The main content area provides summary visibility into relevant system data through a portal type metaphor. The classic view appears to be a static or default set up while the customizable view allows for more control. The customizable view allows users to create custom views of frequently used modules, dashboards or custom reports. The portal approach is nice and pretty common among modern CRMs. We would like to see the home page content have layout control where panels could be organized in a 3x layout. Also it would be nice to have a bit more control over the panels themselves.  Twenty inch monitors or greater are becoming more and more common. It would be nice to be able to utilize the screen real estate.

The Classic View

A Custom View (there are many possibilites)

General System Views

The system should feel familiar to anyone who has used Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. They all use a list view, detail view, edit view, subpanel construct. To explain:

• A list view is a list of records that relate to a query or module.
• A detail view is the summary of a particular record
• An edit view is the data entry screen
• A subpanel is a related module or object to a particular record such as a note or meeting

Lead to Opportunity Process

An easy way to test a CRM’s SFA flow is to walk through a simple flow such as receiving a lead, working the lead, converting the lead.

Lead Edit View (Data Entry)

The only two required fields in the Leads module are the Company and Last Name fields. Data entry is fairly straightforward. We did notice that there is no field validation for phone numbers and the small calculator icon next to the annual revenue number does not seem to make sense. All the expected fields are there by default such as lead source, campaign source, and industry.

Lead Detail View (Summary View)

The lead detail view organizes the lead data in a easy to read format that matches exactly the to the edit view. Users will appreciate the symmetry. Zoho CRM brings some very nice “cool features.” Namely, the in place edit function. Simply mouse over a specific field you want to change and click the edit button and you can edit only that record. This will save time, clicks and server resources. Also, Google maps functionality is located next to the address and conveniently opens into a separate browser tab.

Lead Subpanels

The related objects to the lead are straight forward and easy to use.

Subpanels are:

• Attachments – attached one or more files simultaneously
• Products – attach products to this lead
• Open Activities – pending calls, meetings, and tasks
• Closed Activities – historical calls, meetings, and tasks
• Mails – send emails. Notes – attach ahoc notes

We like that attachments, mails, and notes are separated although notes and mails could probably be the same panel. Open activities automatically move from the open subpanel to the closed subpanel upon completion of the activity. Another nice function is that the user interface automatically scrolls to the related subpanel upon save. This very nice usability feature and helps to avoid user confusion. The email client is simple to use supports templates, rich text editing and spell check.

Lead Conversion

The lead conversion process creates an Account, Contact and Potential (Opportunity). It is not required to create the Opportunity at the time of conversion. Workflow alerts can be sent to the Lead owner and Account owners as needed. Upon conversion you are navigated to the Account Detail View. To convert a lead, simply click on the “Convert” button from the Lead Detail View.  This will navigate the user to the conversion screen where they can enter opportunity values.

Unfortunately, we had previously entered in Microsoft as an account with the same information but the system did not catch that Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft is the same company.  This indicates that there is only the very basic duplicate checking functionality in Zoho. Also, if a user knew that Microsoft already existed in the database there is no way from this point to attached the conversion to the proper account.  The user must back out and fix the problem in the lead screen then start the conversion again.  This will frustrate sales people and needs to be improved.

Account View

The Account Detail view continues the paradigm. The number of subpanels increases to accommodate the opportunity management (Potentials), quoting, sales orders and invoicing process.

Subpanels are:

• Attachments – attached one or more files simultaneously
• Products – attach products to this lead
• Open Activities – pending calls, meetings, and tasks
• Closed Activities – historical calls, meetings, and tasks
• Mails – send emails. Notes – attach ahoc notes
• Contacts – List of contacts related to that account
• Products – lists of products and pricing organized by price book
• Quotes – build quotes by line items from price books
• Sales Orders – can be converted from the quote
• Invoices – can be converted from the sales order
• Member Accounts – support for company hierarchy (parent child only)
• Cases – support for customer service problem resolution

Generally, the layout of the screens are simple and easy to understand. It is hard to imagine getting lost in this application. All of the data collected in the lead process is properly brought forward during the conversion. It is now easy to continue working with the Potential.

Potentials (Opportunity Management)

Again, continuing with the paradigm the Potential screen is fairly generic. The related sub panels bring some interesting functions to the forefront.

First, a Stage History panel that shows the deal moving through its stages.

Second, a competitors subpanel that allows for quick entry of competitors. It does not appear that this is multidimensional. Meaning, there is not a way to select from a list of competitors. Thereby making it more difficult to ask questions like show me all deals where we lost and the competitor was XYZ corp.

Third contacts associated to the deal and their role. This is a nice feature but should allow for contacts who are not tied to the account to be associated to the deal. A common example: A consulting firm is running the selection process and is both a contact for this potential deal and has role of influencer.

Managing a deal through its stages to closure while maintaining a fluid activity management scenario is straight forward with ZohoCRM.

Conclusion (part 1)

The good.  The List View, Detail View, Edit View, Sub Panels style interface is familiar and now an openly used format.  The system is generally fast which will help with adoption and overall sanity of users.  Contact, Account, Leads and Potentials all function in an expected way with a few exceptions which were uncovered during the walkthrough. The in place editing of the records from the detail view is excellent.

The neutral.  Module searching is robust but requires the user to create and save a view to use the functionality.  The wizard driven approach is easy but feels clunky.  A better approach is to allow users the choice to search various fields and filters and save only if they use that view frequently.  Forcing the other scenario is not cool with the users man!

The Bad.  Duplicates are easy to get into the system.  A duplicate merge function does not appear anywhere in the UI thus, making it easy to get duplicates in the system and hard to merge them together.  Leads, upon conversion disappear from the interface.  If you navigate back to the Leads module you can see converted leads but there is no indicator of the lead on the newly created contact.  Sales people like to know where that lead is coming from and what has been done with that lead up to the point of pass or conversion.  Additionally, contacts might actually be a lead more than once which also has an impact on the “quality ranking”.

Final thoughts (Part 1)

Zoho for SFA is pretty darn good.  The product is free for the first 3 users which is definitely nice.  Pricing is reasonable and the application seems extensible.  It definitely has a “me too” vibe as it looks nearly identical to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.  However, their pricing will make you do a double take.

In part 2, we will look at the rest of the functional modules and in part 3 we will look at the admin tools.

CRM Review: Zoho CRM (part 1) 4.051