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I describe the usual use cases for Zoho CRM that I mostly work with as related to sales flow. Most of my clients are involved in that; the lead system allows leads to flow into our system, which are then converted to contacts, accounts, and have deals with organizations. There are tasks against them, which include different automations, calls, and meetings you have with them. Additionally, another flow involves running more campaigns to close more deals and bring in more leads using campaigns, forms, and different kinds of ads that you integrate with Zoho CRM.

One specific project of mine was related to a mortgage system that integrated with a third-party loan management system application. The data flowed in from their third party to our CRM, so the sales and accounting teams used Zoho. The contacts acted as different kinds of persons; I stored referrals, customers, and clients at organization levels in the contacts. That was an example of a lot of custom things I worked on.

The features or capabilities of Zoho CRM that I have found the most valuable and useful so far include its API documentation, which is really good, vast, and better than any other application. The widget API documentation is also really good, as well as the client script API documentation. Additionally, I would say blueprints in Zoho CRM are really good compared to other applications. These big functionalities give Zoho CRM an edge, and even basic functionalities that exist in other applications are a lot better in Zoho CRM.

I think Zoho CRM's automation capabilities are really good and better than almost any other application. These automation capabilities have been useful specifically within sales and marketing tasks because I do a lot of things such as sending emails using workflows and text messages using workflows. I can trigger campaigns, schedule calls, and tasks using workflows. I can create tasks against a user and schedule meetings, so most of the tasks happen using automations such as workflows.

I think areas of Zoho CRM that need to be improved or enhanced include the permission structure, which can be easy to set up custom permissions within Zoho Creator using different filters and running scripts at runtime, but those events and triggers are not available in Zoho CRM. As a result, applying custom permission structures for all modules such as leads, contacts, accounts, and deals can get quite difficult. Doing it in Zoho Creator is a lot easier compared to this.

I feel that Zoho CRM's AI-powered assistant, Zia, is not that good right now. If they provide an API documentation for it and allow me to give custom prompts within the API to get responses back, it will be really good. However, currently, Zia can mainly be used as a knowledge base, but it doesn't perform well in that capacity and lags in many areas.

I have been working with Zoho CRM for approximately four years.

I would rate the stability and reliability of Zoho CRM as a nine out of ten.

The level of stability and reliability in Zoho CRM is crucial for me because sometimes bugs appear unexpectedly, disrupting the business flow. If everything is working perfectly and suddenly there are bugs for one or two hours, it can significantly impact working hours. I need to go back and check everything, but I'm glad there are logs and timelines for tracking and associating missed events.

I would rate the scalability level of Zoho CRM as a nine out of ten. There are not many improvements needed at the moment, but they are adding more features to it. The existing system is functioning correctly, so I would say there aren't significant improvements necessary.

I do not often communicate with the technical support of Zoho CRM.

Negative

I did not use a different solution for the same use cases before Zoho CRM; I started from Zoho CRM. When I began development, I transitioned from custom solutions to Zoho CRM.

My experience with the initial setup of Zoho CRM involves having all the data in place and all the modules already set up. I typically want to add extra fields and set up all the conversion systems while understanding the business flow of my client. If a custom module is needed, I create it and integrate it into the whole flow process. Most of the time, it involves just the four basic modules related to the sales flow, along with some blueprints, workflow automation, cadences, and widgets for better UI. This is easier than Zoho Creator, where I need to create everything from scratch, but I can still do a lot of customizations too.

Potential challenges other users might encounter with the initial setup and deployment of Zoho CRM include focusing on the permission structure. Users often want a single permission structure to reflect in every module, but they must set it up separately for each module. Custom criteria for restricting access can become complicated, requiring complex methods to apply what should be a simple permission structure.

I have seen a return on investment with Zoho CRM specifically from the sales flow. Using Zoho CRM, my clients close more leads and deals with the campaigns and user investments in leads, so I would say the sales flow is probably the most significant return my clients can get.

Regarding third-party integrations with Zoho CRM, most of the integrations require scripting in Deluge, which is pretty good and simple. I can use functions for that, and if that's not possible, I can always call the Catalyst function directly from Zoho CRM too. It's really good.

I assess the analytics and reporting features in Zoho CRM as pretty basic. For reporting, I always prefer using Zoho Analytics rather than the basic reporting capabilities in Zoho CRM. The analytics and reporting within Zoho CRM are enough for my needs.

I am aware of the pricing and licensing of Zoho CRM and remember that Zoho CRM is priced separately, but I recommend going with Zoho One. However, I think their maximum level subscription is around forty dollars, which is really high because I can get Zoho One for around forty dollars, and that includes most of Zoho's applications. It is more beneficial to buy a bundle rather than separate services.

I mainly focus only on Zoho products within my career, but when there are integrations or queries regarding something outside of Zoho, I can handle that as well. If asked for an integration that fits into Google or Microsoft, I can do that, but my primary focus remains on Zoho. Zoho products are deployed on the cloud in my organization.

The main use case for monday.com is to track project progress from start to finish, beginning with the sales team and continuing through the onboarding process. It helps keep our teams aligned and organized, and we are also able to produce a variety of reports to determine where we are with KPIs for each team.

A specific example of a project I have tracked using monday.com is using it as a capacity plan for capacity planning, task management, project management, and some amount of finance calculations. My use cases are mostly capacity, project management, and collaboration, and we are also able to track tasks, stakeholders, resources, and any material needed for the deliverables.

For daily tasks, I use monday.com for collaborative projects, requests from team members, onboarding new hires, peer coaching, and event planning. It allows all of my work to be transparent to our organization, and it saves me and our people leaders hundreds of thousands of dollars and time and hours per year through templates and automations. monday.com is one of my favorite project management tools.

The best features monday.com offers include automation to move and fill items without much manual work, thereby saving a lot of time, working from templates to keep things moving quickly, tagging and pinning others to increase transparency and communication, and the bright and warm colors and easy navigation create a pleasing user experience.

Automation has had the biggest impact on my workflow because we are able to automate small, tedious, and time-consuming tasks, thereby saving a lot of time. Additionally, monday.com calculates the amount of new and returning clients, which is very useful. It allows us to create forms that our clients can use and personalizing the platform based on our needs, setting up automated workflows for tasks and team collaboration.

Overall, monday.com has positively impacted my organization because task management is easy to set up, easy to replicate, duplicate, and modify. Collaboration has all the standards by now: tagging, linking, messaging, and many more. Boards enable fast organization of tasks, repositories, responsibility, and tracking with dates and notifications, while automation enables fast actions that provide no real value if done manually. Being able to auto-create, auto-close, and many others makes it easier to follow processes and make fewer mistakes, and also saves a lot of time.

We have seen a reduction in errors from twenty percent to seventy percent, and we save a lot of hours, having been able to save five to six hours per day through automation of tedious and time-consuming tasks.

monday.com has saved us time by allowing us to have all our program information in one place. It has also helped us greatly with collaboration with our program partners who need to use our data. It has saved us a lot of time, cost, and has also reduced error through automation.

One way monday.com can be improved is by enhancing the notification system, which is not trustworthy for me, as some notifications are very overwhelming. I also see a need for more tools to input data automatically and more functionality without having to do APIs would be great.

Additionally, I think more calculation capability within the columns would be great.

I have been working in my current field for six years.

My advice for others looking into using monday.com is that it provides great project and task management with robust tools including automation, where automations work great if you learn how to use them accordingly. Once you put in the work at the beginning, it can save you a lot of time and reduce errors, and the templates are also great as they give you ideas on how to start, thereby making it smooth to learn and easy to use for non-technical users. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.