Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Zoho drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Zoho and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Zoho is a privately owned firm based in India. It provides more than 50 separate tools within its Zoho One Suite. Zoho was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor and an Overall Value Index Leader, ranking second in this evaluation. Zoho was a Value Index Leader in the Product Experience category and in Adaptability and Capability.

Zoho’s offering consists of applications that each focus on a specific business problem but link together into bundles aimed at particular departments or teams. Zoho is today associated with the small-to-midsized business market, but it is likely that its tools have viability in a larger enterprise. Within CX, Zoho has put forward a medley of service tools that include customer relationship management, service management, interaction channel management and some communications capabilities. All of these tools connect to similar ones for marketing, sales and back offices, creating a seamless way to get a complete view of a customer life cycle.

Zoho’s areas for improvement lie mainly in its approach to TCO/ROI. It could move up the rankings by providing more and better tools for buyers to evaluate long-term costs, especially with regard to the effects of integrating multiple applications across teams.

This assessment was based on Zoho’s customer experience management (CXM or CEM) products available in October of 2022. Updates since then include enhancements to its artificial intelligence (AI) to better predict customer churn.

Zoho, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.