Great customer service starts with understanding your target audience. The better you are at connecting with your clients, reaching out to them during the consumer journey, and tracking their experiences, the more effective your CX strategy becomes. That’s why most successful customer satisfaction campaigns start with a CRM.
Customer Relationship Management tools give you the technology you need to track customer interactions, develop deeper insights into your target audience, and even plan future opportunities. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the biggest names in CRM technology: Zoho and Salesforce.
Both widely regarded as top contenders for customer relationship management tools, Zoho and Salesforce support countless companies worldwide. The question is which one should be using?
Zoho CRM: Features
Zoho CRM is a leading customer relationship management tool, created by the Zoho team. Promising exceptional ease-of-use and a variety of features, Zoho CRM promises companies all the tools they need to track potential deals, increase sales, and nurture leads.
With setup wizards to get you started, and a clean, easy-to-understand interface, Zoho CRM is well-suited to companies just getting started in the CRM space. The more you explore the Zoho technology, the more amazing opportunities you’ll discover. For instance, there’s around 100 custom reports, integrations with Microsoft Office, and G-Suite, and excellent scalability. Features of Zoho CRM include:
- Sales automation: Lead and deal management, contact management, and workflow automation features.
- Process management: Sales process building, processing rules, and journey orchestration.
- Omni-channel communications: Email, social, telephony and self-service tracking.
- Canvas: Drag and drop page creation and automated campaigns
- Report: Custom reporting with predictive forecasts and trend tracking
- Performance management: Gamification, forecasting, and territory management.
- Predictive intelligence: Zia AI lead and deal with predictions, and voice analytics
- Collaboration: Integration with Google and Microsoft productivity tools, video conferencing, chat, and presentation tools.
- Security: Team access control, GDPR and HIPAA compliance
- Developer platform: REST APIs, widget SDKs, and customisations
- Marketing automation: Customer segmentation and Google Ads integration
- Sales enablement: partner portals, invoice generation and quote generation
Though the sheer number of tools included in Zoho CRM might take a while to get used to, the product is intended to be easy enough to grasp for even smaller business users. There’s also a range of affordable plans designed to make CRM technology an option regardless of your business size.
Salesforce Features
Salesforce is probably the best-known CRM software in the world, popular for its intelligent approach to sales, service, and marketing. Salesforce is substantially more complex than Zoho, but it also has a host of fantastic training tools and support features available to help ensure you can make the most of your investments.
Salesforce also offers a huge variety of automation features, to help make your teams more efficient in delivering amazing customer support and service. With the recent Slack acquisition, Salesforce can also offer a convenient environment where team members in any environment can share ideas, screens, and information in seconds. Features of Salesforce include:
- Comprehensive AI insights and sales suggestions with Einstein
- Shared deal tracking and collaboration tools through Slack
- Knowledge management with access to a shared storage system
- Intelligent automation with the option to upgrade with Salesforce Pardot
- Endless customized reports with lead scoring and sales forecasting
- Comprehensive mobile app with access to custom reports
- Integrations with OneDrive, Google Drive, OneDrive and more
- Field service support for mobile staff members
- Automatic scheduling and intelligent routing for deal opportunities
- End-to-end data tracking across multiple tools
- Access to additional services through Salesforce tools like Customer 360
- Customisable agent workspaces
- Extensive support for growing teams
Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM tools for a reason. Although there may be more to figure out in this platform than you’d expect on Zoho, you also get a wider selection of solutions to help you thrive. Salesforce, for instance, has local support teams in countries around the world, as well as access to networks of third-party consultants.
Zoho CRM vs Salesforce: Which is Better
There’s never any one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to choosing the best CRM technology. As you may have noticed in the feature overviews above, both Zoho and Salesforce CRM have a lot of overlapping functionality. Both allow users to track conversations and interactions with customers across a range of channels and design meaningful, insightful reports.
Both Salesforce and CRM will also offer a wide variety of tools to help teams collaborate and communicate, though Salesforce does have the added benefit of the Slack acquisition in its corner.
Zoho CRM is intended as a more accessible and convenient tool for CRM access if you’re a smaller business, just getting started in the industry. Not only is the technology affordable, but it’s surprisingly generous too, even on the free package options. There’s plenty of guidance to get you started, and everything is easy to use.
Salesforce is perhaps the better choice for larger companies, and brands in the process of massive growth. Salesforce might take a little more time to get used to, but you’ll quickly discover just how beneficial the comprehensive features can be. There’s an avid community of users available to help you learn about the technology, so you’re not going it alone either.
Salesforce is more expensive to implement and support than Zoho, but it’s extremely versatile, with tools and extra features for almost every need. You can even use things like Salesforce Einstein to unlock deeper insights into your customers. Of course, Zoho has its AI assistant too (Zia), but many people still consider Salesforce to be a little more advanced.
Zoho or Salesforce? You Decide
Both Zoho and Salesforce offer plenty of functionality for today’s growing companies. With each of these solutions, you’ll find a host of capabilities designed to make you more competitive in a changing marketplace. Zoho CRM provides a simple and accessible entry point to the world of customer relationship management, for businesses of all sizes. The flexible ecosystem is easy to use, and it’s great for creating custom reports.
Salesforce might be a little more challenging to get used to initially, but it also has a wide variety of features and advanced reporting options you can’t get elsewhere.
