Our mission is to be the world’s most trusted advisor in helping people plan for their health care. We started about 11 years ago; it was just Alex and I. Our first recurring expense was with salesforce.
We have grown from one user to 10 to 20 to 40 users. You know what salesforce was getting from us from a revenue standpoint grew quite a bit yearly. We built the whole company in the spirit that if we do that, how will it work in the salesforce? They wanted more money every year. We’re getting our annual increases; our billing terms were changing from monthly to quarterly, and now they want to pay annually. Then they started adding and requiring that we purchase these other things we didn’t need. We’d have a renewal coming up, and then they’d say, oh, and we also require that you buy an x, our account manager ultimately came to us and said, you can’t leave; you all are in the top three or four percent of our users.
Like the pain around moving will be high. Therefore, you should pass 18% more, not because we’ve done anything to improve the product or our customer service, but because of wall street. And so, that’s when we started evaluating and learning about Zoho.
Zoho has excellent documentation on its website on how to do a migration, which was really important for us because we had ten years of data in our legacy CRM in salesforce. The main thing was making sure that the page layouts were right. That the processes were all going to be right in Zoho, and then it was as simple as downloading data out of salesforce and uploading it into Zoho. Our estimated five years savings is well over half a million dollars. We were saving a hundred thousand dollars in the first year. We always think that opportunity cost is not like Alex, and I am each making forty-five thousand dollars more this year. It all comes in the headcount for our team and, ultimately, now that we have a technology of our own. We can use that money to improve our technology for our down inclines.
Of all the Zoho products right now, we’re using Zoho CRM, Zoho campaigns, Zoho connect, and Zoho desk. We are being able to have all the information that we have in Zoho CRM. Our account pages are critical; without them, I wouldn’t be able to do my job, and then the Zoho desk, since we use that every day for incoming questions, we probably have 40 – 50 incoming tickets a day, which is helpful for us to be able to keep track of what are the issues that are coming up? Who’s working on those? How quickly are we getting this resolved? Make sure that we’re getting timely responses back.
All of our workflows go through Zoho, which is very helpful because if any of us, there are three people in my team, is out on vacation or in a meeting or somewhere else, we can view everything that’s coming in. It’s very easy for me as a team leader to prioritize the workflow. Also, our people feel better, you know, it feels better to use, and when people say, well how does it work better? It’s a bit hard to describe because you’re it just does. That means Zoho connects me with examples of something that has much more functionality than we used to. I’m in a peer group of other organizations that are like ours and share best practices. About 18 months ago, I’d recommended it and told a few of those peers that we’d work with salesforce, and then six months later, I learned that three of them went ahead and moved forward with salesforce. And so, I was a little relenting to tell them that oh, actually, we fired salesforce, we’ve moved to Zoho. And now, interestingly enough, those three are coming to me with the same frustrations we have with the sales force, and so they want to learn more about Zoho. Absolutely it’s like a band-aid; you got to rip it off, but I would definitely wholeheartedly move to Zoho again.
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