Twilio vs. Zoho CRM Plus

Twilio is well suited to sending SMS reminders to prospects on the lead-up to sales appointments. This has helped us improve attendance rates for these meetings. We also use Twilio to communicate with these prospects post-meeting to make offers on products and services and for feedback on their meeting.

Incentivized

Starting with campaigns, once we send the campaign out, prospects who open it are moved into the sales funnel; the sales team then calls or emails the prospect. Our VOIP works in conjunction with Zoho CRM Plus, so phone calls are logged into the contact. And generates another call, letter, or appointment with the client on the Zoho calendar. Emails are sent through Gmail since Zoho CRM Plus does not work with Gmail. The client's email must be copied and pasted into Gmail. (responses are tracked in the Zoho CRM Plus). Once the sales team meets with the client and starts the process, it turns into an "opportunity" where all stages in the sale are tracked. We mail merge the contact info to the correct letter template, then download it into "Word," where the letter is proofed and corrected as necessary (Zoho merge does not allow you to work in "Word" 2019). When finalized, it is then uploaded back into Zoho CRM Plus under the Opportunity. The sale then continues through the process, and once signed off on, all the details of the job are logged into the Zoho CRM Plus. When the job is completed and closed out, Zoho CRM Plus automatically sends the client a thank you email. The client will then can biannual automatic emails reminding them to set up their bi-annual inspection.

• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

Incentivized

• I use Zoho Social the most. There is a feature called "Bulk Scheduler". By uploading a spreadsheet with a number of posts I can schedule out up to 300 social posts to our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google accounts at once. Then on the specified day and time, the posts go live. I typically only do a couple of weeks at a time so that I can keep the posts relevant to topics we are concerned with.
• Pemco sells surgical instruments to hospitals. The end users are the surgeons. Surgeons may have privileges at multiple hospitals. In order for us to accurately reflect the information about our doctors and hospitals, Zoho CRM Plus has a "many-to-many" feature. This allows doctors to be associated with multiple hospitals, and hospitals to have many doctors associated.
• I use the territory management feature to track sales by representatives. This is also a feature unique to Zoho CRM Plus. This helps us track commissions for the reps.

• Authy does not support the "push button" multi-factor authentication from your application's native apps. This means if you want to use Authy, you still need to use TOTP based codes.
• Not really a shortcoming of Authy, but it does nothing to help with multi-factor authentication using text messages - those are still sent to your platform's messaging app.
• Authy doesn't always display how much time is left before your current token expires, making it difficult to know how much time you have left to enter the current code.

Incentivized

• I think that Outlook integration with Zoho CRM is horrible. You have no control over where the emails get attached and IMAP does not always work as it should. One reason we are considering leaving the platform.
• Having all emails show up on an account vs having to go to each contact would be great. It used to do this but no longer with IMAP.

Incentivized

We are happy with Twilio because the price per message is low. The API is not difficult to implement and the documentation is very complete. Twilio as a company keeps you well informed of issues that happen. They also offer free online workshops or conferences to make notices of new laws, etc.

Incentivized

Overall the product API is extremely well documented so it is very easy to build a product with their technology. The website is a little bit cumbersome to use as they have greatly expanded the number of products that they have over the years, but the dashboard UI has not been improved much since.

Incentivized

I personally started off as a CRM novice. But in a matter of 2 months, I was writing my own custom workflows, playing with modules and fields, and training my sales and operations teams to manage leads and accounts. Simply put, the system is intuitive after a brief introduction. The level of customization is staggering until you change your mindset. Zoho CRM Plus excels where you're able to attack your goals as problems already solved in the platform — you just need to locate the feature to make what you want to happen... happen! I equate it to the Adobe Creative Suite. You don't pick the fun filter before you lay out what exactly you want to draw. With that mindset intact, you can dial in the system to meet your and your team's needs based on your proposed SOLUTIONS, not just leaning heavily into a single feature to "force" some ROI.

Incentivized

The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.

Incentivized

Good interface to connect with different API systems for communication through different channel[s]. Twilio has good market coverage of the client across the globe for generating revenue through multi-channel approach. It works with [a] programmable feature that makes life easy for every user. Automated call is one of the advance[d] feature[s] of this tool.

Incentivized

Every account representative I have worked with has been extremely helpful and nice. You can tell the account reps and support staff truly care about the product and want to provide you with the resources that you need. The response time is also fast for support inquiries and that has been a massive help for us.

Incentivized

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

Incentivized

We have looked at some of Twilio competitors, like Infobip, Sich and Bandwith. Prices on all of them for voice minutes and SMS are way cheaper than Twilio. But none of them seem to offer as many features and ease of use as Twilio. Specially from an API point of view

Incentivized

Zoho CRM is very customizable but compared to Salesforce it is a lot more buggy. Support is lacking but you get what you pay for. Overall we are happy but only because we are not paying a fortune!

• We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
• We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
• We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand

Incentivized

• Cut down our CRM costs by 50% + without losing any functionality that we needed.
• Helped us increase our win percentages by helping us following our unique sales and marketing processes. (doubled sales bookings up until COVID and then still grew 10% in the COVID year)
• Helped us in managing our partnering programs.