TL;DR: Stay away from Zoho Corp! And sorry for the super long rant 😂

Introduction

I was hoping to start my building in public series with something more positive, but I hope that sharing this “learning experience” may help others. The last 10 days of my life have felt like a slow-moving nightmare, caused by my encounter with such extreme systemic incompetence that I have difficulty believing it was even real. I’m writing out the details of what happened in order to:

1. Attempt to preserve my sanity, and
2. To warn others

Here we go… and it’s allright if you skim through, not sure how this got so long 😀

The systems and encountering Zoho

By far the majority of my time on Sovereign Landing has gone into working on “the front”, ie. this website that you’re on now. An online business is more than just the front – it needs all the less visible boring background systems to keep things going. Things like emails (regular email inbox for customer service), a few different automated email systems, payments, customer relationship management (CRM), and many other small things.

I had been using A LOT of different systems in my eCommerce career so I have a pretty good idea of how these things generally work. Sovereign Landing is not an eCommerce business though, so I had to venture out a little farther when looking for the right technical solutions and partners. That’s when I encountered Zoho.

They advertise a “full operating system for a business” under their Zoho Suite: lot of different subsystems a business might need. It comes with everything and the kitchen sink. Having a “one stop solution” to everything really appealed to me, especially as it should mean that the time (and headache!) spent on integrating all of these different systems would be minimized.

Start small & easy and go from there

I knew I needed to configure the customer service inbox, create a few email opt-in forms with automated email notifications, and set up a simple customer sign-up form. It should be a couple of days of work – at maximum. Maybe a day in optimal conditions – and I might even be able to launch this business!

How wrong was I… when diving into the Zoho systems, I found out that absolutely nothing worked “out of the box”. At first I thought it was maybe just my rustiness (it’s been a few years!) and I reached out to Zoho support for help for the first time. This was on June 2nd, 10 days ago.

On top of eCommerce, I’ve also worked at Service Desk (IT customer support) for years, both as a support agent and a manager, so I know good support when I see it. I also know… the other kind of support. This was the other kind – hardcore bad.

The problems start – minor issues, majorly bad support

The first issues I ran into were just little things: customer signup form formatting issues. It was not easy to make it pretty or customer friendly, but I managed, sort of. I wanted to change the font in the drop-down menus as it was really small and had ugly jagged edges. It seemed plain hostile, and a miniature font is especially difficult with mobile. I also had two other less important questions/suggestions about the forms, and I shot all three questions to the support.

With my first question unanswered, and the other two other questions completely ignored, I decided not to pursue this further. It was clear that I wouldn’t be receiving any real answers, and these really were just minor issues.

Moving on from forms to Zoho main product – the emails!

I thought to myself that maybe the forms are not Zoho’s main business and went on to configure other stuff. At this point my options within the free trial were getting too restrictive, so I signed up for the Zoho One full subscription, and chose to pay extra for premium support. I was hoping that maybe the premium support could actually provide me with… support, you know?

I won’t go into all of the details what has happened (it’s a lot) between June 4th and June 12th (today), but let’s just describe it all as an EXTREME case of systemic incompetence. I have real trouble believing how a professional email service provider can make configuring a simple shared inbox this difficult? Unlike perhaps forms, email is the core product of Zoho – they’re known mainly as an email service provider.

Feeling like the first beta tester, with totally backward product logic

This systemic incompetence isn’t restricted to just these two cases – any of the Zoho Suite products I’ve tried, they either do not work out of the box or are unconfigurable to be taken into actual use. It’s either the functionality or the styling, often both. With Zoho, I constantly feel like I’m their very first beta tester. I really can’t understand how anyone else before me has been able to use these products.

Just one example: their email opt-ins have two fields: email and “name”. Ok, what name does this form want? My first name? My first and last name? My nickname? Judging by the default configuration in their automated signup confirmation, it is the first name – makes sense. Except it doesn’t. When testing, that “name” maps out to “last name”, because… well, just because.

No instructions – a screensharing meeting request

I had been fighting with these kinds of super strange system “design choices” for over a week, and meanwhile the main thing – email configuration – was moving nowhere. It should have been a really simple thing to explain by email (failing any actual product UI design to not have this problem in the first place!), but for some reason the support wanted to do this by screensharing call.

Observations about Zoho

Through my interactions with the Zoho Premium Support, here’s what I’ve observed:

1. The support does not use their own systems
2. They don’t even have access to test the systems they support
3. They are barely or not at all trained at what those systems are supposed to do
4. There’s a lack of clearly defined systems/process from customer feedback to product improvements
5. The support doesn’t seem to be backed by the rest of the organization
6. The engineers and designers seem to be hermetically sealed from the customers
7. There seem to be very deep product design and support issues running throughout the whole organization

If anyone at Zoho happens to be reading this, please don’t think of firing any of the customer reps who wrote the above replies to me. Instead, arm them with better training and direct access to engineers – and better yet, take your engineers and upper management and put them in direct contact with the customers. That would help you see & solve what’s really going on at Zoho Corp, because the current picture isn’t pretty.

The road to recovery

This whole time with Zoho, almost 10 days now, has been just an absolute nightmare and I’m pretty much back at square one. I’ve started configuring some systems with other providers but this will take some time. Fortunately there was a lot of design work (signup form questions etc) that I was able to do within Zoho – work that I can take to professional service providers, so all is not lost. Perhaps not even my sanity! 😀

Have you used Zoho? Experienced “the same but different”? Recommendations for what other (non-Google) systems to use? Please comment below, because I really am in dire need of help 😂

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Next day edit (June 13th): It’s funny. Since writing this post, I’ve gotten more done in 24 hours than in the previous 10 days combined. Funny how light you feel when no longer carrying a certain Indian elephant – bit like first running a marathon with a refrigerator on your back, and then without. Perhaps this experience wasn’t a complete waste of time after all?