Zoho CRM Plus Review: 9 Essential Services in One Suite

Platform gives much space for team collaboration

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Zoho CRM Plus Review
CRM ReviewsInsights

Published: April 22, 2021

Anwesha Roy - UC Today

Anwesha Roy

About the Company

Zoho is an India-based SaaS provider that offers solutions for IT services, financial operations, collaboration, HR, and customer experiences. CRM Plus is the company’s flagship customer relationship management platform, launched in 2014. It was among the earliest movers in this space and continues to be a compelling product, despite a crowded market landscape. Companies like Bose, Air Panama, and Star Health Insurance use Zoho CRM Plus, which is primarily targeted towards large companies and enterprise-scale organisations.

It should be noted that CRM Plus isn’t Zoho’s only product in this segment. The company also offers Bigin, which is a sort of entry-level but fully functional edition of Plus, for small businesses. Let us explore the features of Zoho CRM Plus in more detail.

Inside Zoho CRM Plus

Essentially, CRM Plus brings together 9 Zoho services to deliver an end-to-end CX management suite. This includes:

  • CRM for sales pipeline management and automation
  • SalesIQ for tracking visitors and intelligent live chat
  • Projects for managing sales and marketing projects
  • Desk to optimise your customer service helpdesk
  • Campaigns to automate marketing activities
  • Analytics for cross-functional insight generation
  • Social for marketing via social media
  • Survey for collecting customer feedback
  • SalesInbox for managing sales emails dedicatedly

Together, these services provide the following capabilities.

Managing your omni-channel presence

Zoho CRM Plus connects with all major customer channels, such as telephony, email, social media, and chat. Omni-channel data is collected and analysed by Zoho for rich insights and contextualised actions. When a customer takes a purchase-oriented action on any channel, you will receive alerts, thanks to the SalesSignals feature.

Collaborating with team members and other departments

Sales and marketing teams can collaborate with each other right from within the platform, through real-time messages, video calls, group chat, and in-app file sharing. There’s no need to switch to Slack or Zoom to check on campaign progress or review a sales milestone. Calendars, task lists, milestones, reports, and other project management tools are also shareable.

Zia, The Intelligent AI Assistant

Like Einstein for Salesforce for Freddie for Freshworks, Zia brings AI assist capabilities to Zoho CRM Plus. it adds contextual alerts across the CRM dashboard, suggesting the perfect time to contact customers, analysing ticket sentiment, and more.

Improving marketing and sales, and support productivity

Zoho CRM Plus has several ways to help teams work smarter, not harder. Blueprint lets you capture the end-to-end sales pipeline (including offline touchpoints) so that all processes are executed without errors. You can set up automated workflows to reduce manual efforts, and even automate a portion of customer service to free up your contact centre agents. One productivity enabler we particularly liked was the email inbox segmentation that automatically prioritises messages and cuts through the clutter.

Mobile applications

Here’s where Zoho CRM Plus decides to diverge from the tried and tested route of single-interface mobile apps. Instead, it comes with dedicated tools for various functions, including a separate app for Projects, CRM, SalesIQ, Social, Reports, Survey, Desk, Campaigns, and even a card scanner.

Why Zoho CRM Plus Makes a Difference

Zoho CRM Plus effectively brings together the three cogs of any successful CX strategy: omni-channel marketing, intelligent sales pipeline management, and efficient customer service. As you use the software, Zia will learn from your actions and get incrementally better at making suggestions. Data is collected from across all your touchpoints, feeding into the unified analytics module – which is why CRM Plus is more than just an operational tool, and definitely adds to your strategic capabilities.

On the admin side, Zoho CRM Plus is relatively easy to set up and there is a centralised panel to help you scale. The one-invoice billing model for a total of 9 services also helps.

What We Think

Zoho prices its software according to your location; in India, it costs $39 per user per month or INR 2,900. In the US this typically goes up to $50 per user per month. Interestingly, Zoho CRM Plus follows a flat-fee pricing model, which means there aren’t multiple tiers to choose from. Your total invoice value will depend on the size of your company and the number of users, all of whom will receive the exact same feature set.

While this could be a challenge for smaller companies that may not need all 9 services, there’s always Bigin to fall back on. Keep in mind that Bigin includes only email making and web form-based engagement, sales pipeline management, basic deal management, and integrations, without any of the other bells and whistles.

 

 

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