Item: Zoho Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Jeff Gellman

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Analytics as dashboards and reporting tools in several parts of our business: salesperson performance, Company Sales performance, and tracking all departments against KPIs. Without this tool, we would have to track all of our activities twice: once at the time of performance and again into some repository where we can perform typical reporting functions: rollups, contribution graphs, calculation of commissions, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick simple display of graphics to get visual feedback.
Very good at being able to pull data from multiple sources.
Automatically provides the ability, in most cases, to drill down within the presented graphics.

Cons

I'm guessing it's out there somewhere but I really could have used a 'quick start guide' or guided start.
Once I figured it out, it makes sense how to make sure the right data is provided in order to make dashboards quite flexible--- but without examples, I found it quite a challenge
The initial organization of Analytics is NOT intuitive. Once in context, the organizational features make sense, but (at least initially) it would have been most useful if the organization of Analytics reports in Zoho Analytics had saved me a lot of time.

Return on Investment

A single transaction data entry saves huge amounts of time while still providing KPI performance reports on demand.
Access to multiple data resources saves errors and time.
The ability to create 'user choices' in Analytics output means that one user's efforts provide functionality for multiple departments and multiple tracking functions in a single dashboard/report. Thus, far less time and money is spent on reporting that is customized to each department.

Usability

Apart from the initial learning curve, the product is incredibly flexible, given relatively little prior experience with heavy-duty (and costly) reporting tools. This functionality is applied in several ways within EACH department as part of Zoho One. The ability to generically track multiple entities with complex relationships between them has made it relatively easy to see the performance/trends of many different departments-- including tracking KPIs, tracking commissions, and tracking aggregated corporate production from many other sources. Because Analytics pulls the actual fields/data from our Zoho Apps (CRM, DESK, etc.), the product is far easier to use than a generic report external reporting product (which would require translation of activity within Zoho to a report product outside of Zoho).

Scalability

Our greatest benefit is the ability to pull from multiple sources without having to "design" reports that know nothing about how Zoho operates on a transactional basis. While I can confirm that we saved tons of time and dollars by using an integrated Analytics tool, I can't speak to its scalability or use of AI.

Alternatives Considered

Over 5 years ago, I started down a path to use Tableau as an analytics tool and quickly became dismayed--- it was hard enough to translate all the entity relationships from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk (and software we used before that) into Tableau. Even worse, as an agile small business, things internally were constantly changing with product changes, policies, etc., and the maintenance requirement made me question if I was better off just trying to work in spreadsheets (if not SQL as well). This would mean, however, that the solution MUST include some way of getting the data from Zoho into the third-party analysis tools. Eventually, I gave up trying to keep up with all the internal corporate changes to products, prices, and policies. Zoho Analytics (at the cost of ZERO!) made much more sense as it is already equipped to look at multiple native data sets.

Key Insights

Do you think Zoho Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Zoho Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Zoho Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Zoho Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zoho Analytics again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Sheets

Likelihood to Recommend

The tool is incredibly useful and allows for plenty of detailed, unique calculations with reporting--- however, an overview of how the source data info is stored AND how the basic elements of a report/dashboard are structured relative the resulting output values/fields would be helpful. Even just some examples where different breakouts are used would have made learning much faster.

Zoho Analytics Feature Ratings

Comments

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Learning/Using Zoho Analytics.

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