These days, delivering the amazing customer experiences your customers are looking for means investing in the right technology. You need the perfect contact centre tech to manage conversations across a range of platforms, analytics for customer journey insights, and of course, a CRM.
There are plenty of Customer Relationship Management tools to choose from, including high-tech solutions with in-built AI and deal management. Today, we’re going to be looking at two of the biggest contenders in the marketplace, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot.
Both of these solutions provide companies with the tools they need to start investing in better customer experiences. Here’s what you need to know if you’re choosing between the two.
Zoho CRM: Features
Zoho CRM is a convenient and easy-to-use CRM software, offering companies everything they need to accelerate sales and increase leads. With this technology, companies can automate their sales routines, update marketing campaigns, and create optimized workflows to reduce time wasted on repetitive tasks. There’s also lead management, deal management, and contact management too.
Zoho CRM promises companies an easy way to upgrade their customer experience strategies, so they can focus on building their business quickly. Features include:
- Salesforce automation: Deal management, lead management, contact management, and workflow automation for better performance
- Process management: Sales process building, processing rules, and journey orchestration
- Omni-channel communications: Customer journeys across email, social media, telephony, and customer self-service portals
- Canvas: Drag-and-drop editor for pages and automated campaigns
- Reporting: insights, analytics, predictive forecasts, and trend predictions
- Performance management: Forecasting, territory management, and gamification
- Predictive intelligence: Lead and deal predictions with Zia AI from Zoho. Voice analytics and macro suggestions for improving workflows
- Collaborations: Presentation tools, video and audio conferencing and chat
- Security: Profile role and team information control. Support for GDPR and HIPPA
- Customisation: Customize your dashboards with layouts, filters, and unique views.
- Developer platform: Widget SKDs, REST APIs and custom functionality
- Marketing automation: Customer segmentation, lead nurturing, Google Ads integration and event management tools
- Sales enablement: Partner portals, integration with G-Suite and Office 365, partner portals, and invoice or quote generation
The Zoho CRM environment is extremely comprehensive, with a wide range of features constantly updating to deliver more support. You can adjust your CRM according to your needs, change views and filters, set up marketing automation strategies, and collaborate with colleagues on deals.
HubSpot CRM: Features
HubSpot CRM is a component of HubSpot’s wider “Hub” solution, which includes tools specifically designed for sales, service, and marketing. The CRM part of the HubSpot ecosystem is actually free to use, so anyone can access basic features like visibility into the sales pipeline, deal tracking, and company insights. Of course, if you want more advanced features, you’ll need to look at getting a premium plan.
HubSpot’s free CRM service starts with a reporting dashboard, company insights, deal tracking, and pipeline management. You’ll also have email tracking and notifications, meeting scheduling, live chat, and prospect tracking. Premium options come with advanced features like:
- Forms and landing pages
- Email and in-app chat support
- Ad management
- CMS hub starter for site-building
- Chatbots and basic bots for automation
- Mobile automation
- Reporting dashboard
- Custom messenger integrations
- Form follow-up emails and email health reporting
- Ticketing, shared inboxes, and meeting scheduling
- Productivity reports including time-to-close and tickets-closed reports
- Canned snippets and email templates
- Ticket pipelines
- Drag-and-drop marketing editor
- Website themes and local website development
- 1:1 technical support
The exact features you get from HubSpot CRM will depend on which “Hubs” you want to invest in. The Starter CRM suite, for instance, comes with all of the features mentioned above, along with a range of extra tools, like operations hub data syncing and contact management. If you have specific requirements for things like sales support or marketing, you can invest in premium packages for those hubs individually.
