A Review of Zoho CRM for iPhone & Desktop

I’ve been keep­ing a close eye on a cloud com­put­ing CRM pro­gram called Zoho CRM for a year or so now.Zoho CRM is a lot like Sales­Force but is a lot cheap­er and has less fea­tures. How­ev­er, it may not be long before Zoho because a pos­si­ble threat to the expen­sive Sales­force giant. Ben­e­fits of Zoho If you are look­ing to go to the clouds for your busi­ness (online appli­ca­tions as opposed to soft­ware installed on your desk­top) and you do not need a lot of bells and whis­tles, Zoho CRM will pret­ty much do the job. It is free for up to 3 users. I’d rec­om­mend the enter­prise ver­sion, which is around $25 a month and gives you four unique users. You can access your data from any­where around the world in real time. It also has a good email add on, inte­gra­tion to Quick­books and syncs with Out­look. Zoho CRM also syncs with a Google Apps account. By the way, I’d high­ly rec­om­mend Google Apps for your busi­ness, IF you are try­ing to get away from Microsoft Exchange and a ded­i­cat­ed serv­er. The New iPhone and Android Version For over a year, Zoho has promised Zoho CRM on an iPhone, Black­ber­ry and oth­er mobile phones. They have final­ly pulled through and cre­at­ed a Beta ver­sion. It is not an ​“App” but a mobile-brows­er ver­sion: m.zoho.com/crm# The appli­ca­tion, as I expect­ed it to be is quite bug­gy. How­ev­er, it is also awe­some! It does not work well with Google Cal­en­dar at the moment and some of the func­tions are a lit­tle ​“sticky” or don’t work well yet, but I expect in a few months, Zoho CRM for iPhones and Androids will be a great tool for small busi­ness users. I do not fore­see a Zoho CRM iPhone App in the near future, as that would be very expen­sive and this com­pa­ny is slow at devel­op­ing. The Bot­tom-line I real­ly wish I could ful­ly rec­om­mend Zoho CRM for my cus­tomers both for mobile and online usage. If you hap­pen to be tech-savvy and don’t mind over­look­ing a few minor bugs, then you should try this pro­gram out. It is an excel­lent start. I’ve already sub­mit­ted a few of my request to Zoho, so we’ll see if they begin to fix those bugs. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.