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Zoho SalesIQ
- Free forever plan
- 90+ integrations
- Apple and Android mobile app
- Zoho product ecosystem
- Limited customization
- Complex UI
Zoho is a full suite of software that includes many different business applications. In this article, we’ll be talking about Zoho SalesIQ, a versatile and affordable chatbot solution scalable for any size business.
Here’s everything you need to know!
SMB Guide’s Verdict for Zoho SalesIQ
We rate Zoho SalesIQ 8.75 out of 10. It offers a lot of versatility and useful native integrations in addition to AI chat and live agent messaging, but it’s got some hiccups in terms of onboarding and training.
It’s loaded with features, analytics, and cutting-edge communications for the price. Here is what you need to know about Zoho SalesIQ features, usability, and expert reviews.
Zoho is a scalable suite of tools for marketing, sales, and customer relations. Get a basic chatbot with the free plan, or scale up to the Enterprise level for an AI-driven chat client.
At SMB Guide, we use a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria to ensure our reviews are detailed, unbiased, and deliver value to our readers.
| Factor | Rating (out of 10) |
|---|---|
| Pricing & Plans | 10 |
| Real-Time Messaging & Canned Responses | 9 |
| Live Chat AI & Natural Language Processing (NLP) | 8.5 |
| Customizable Chat Widgets | 7 |
| Visitor Tracking and Analytics | 9.5 |
| User Interface and User Experience | 7.5 |
| Integrations and Compatibility | 10 |
| Customer Support | 7.5 |
| SMB Guide Rating | 8.75 |
Pricing & Plans
Plans start at free and scale up to $20/operator, and AI features are included only with the top-tier Enterprise plan.
Free
Zoho’s offers a free option with limited features
Price
- Free/3 operators
Features
- Visitor insights (10K visitors/month)
- 100 chat sessions/month
- 1 brand
- Canned replies
- Basic visitor information
- Voice note
- File sharing
- Mobile SDK
- Credit card masking
- Integration with Zoho apps
- Integration with CMS and ecommerce platforms
- Desktop apps
- Daily reports (scheduled)
Who it’s for: Free is an attractive price for any small business on a budget, and features like a CRM add value beyond a standard chatbot app.
Basic
Zoho’s basic plan has expanded features and is priced per operator.
Price
- $10/operator/mo
- $7/operator/mo/annually
Features
- 1 operator license
- Visitor insights (50K visitors/month)
- 1000 chat sessions/month
- 1 chatbot
Everything in FREE plus:
- Advanced visitor information
- Email signature chat
- Messaging channels
- Departments
- FAQs
- Articles
- Chat routing
- Chat transfer
- Group chat
- Proactive chat triggers
- Lead and company scoring
- Business hours
- Branding
- Visitor-side chat history
- Audio call
- Screen sharing
- Third-party integrations
Who it’s for: The Basic plan is very affordable for small businesses and offers more features and chat sessions.
Professional
For just a few dollars more, Zoho’s most popular Professional plan has even more features.
Price
- $17/mo/operator
- $12.75/operator/mo/annually
Features
- 1 operator license
- Visitor insights (100K visitors/month)
- Unlimited chat sessions
- 5 chatbots
Everything in BASIC plus:
- Custom widgets
- Block IP
- Conversation monitor
- Weekly and monthly reports (scheduled)
- Real-time reporting
- Apple TV app
Who it’s for: The Professional plan is a very affordable price for small to medium businesses and offers more features and chat sessions. However, at this price, AI-powered chat is not included.
Enterprise
The Enterprise plan is where Zoho really gets interesting, and because the minimum is one operator, it’s affordable enough even for a solopreneur.
Price
- $25/mo/operator
- $20/operator/mo/annually
Features
- 1 operator license
- Visitor insights (100K visitors/month)
- Unlimited chat sessions
- 5 chatbots
Everything in PROFESSIONAL plus:
- Chat translation
- Answer Bot Zia
- Hybrid chatbot
- Tags
- Smart suggestions Zia
- Company profile enrichment Zia
- Profanity management
- Integrations with Cloud Telephony and PBX systems
Who it’s for: The Enterprise plan has big-business features at a startup price. What business can’t afford $25 per month?
Zoho SalesIQ is a complete customer engagement platform, that helps businesses to efficiently engage their website visitors & customers, at all times.
Real-Time Messaging & Canned Responses
Zoho SalesIQ allows you to create simple rule-based chatbots with canned scripts and complex actions. With the top-tier Enterprise plan, you can use the AI bot to search different databases, websites, and articles for more complete answers.
When you set up a rule-based conversation, it looks like a decision tree:
Live Chat AI & NLP
Zoho’s SalesIQ bot uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) in 17 languages and answers users in their own language. You have the option to offer visitors a live chat option when operators are available.
Supported languages are Chinese, Danish, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Europe), Dutch, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, English, Czech, Turkish, Polish, and Korean.
Customizable Chat Widgets
I signed up for the Zoho SalesIQ free trial, which includes all the Enterprise plan features. Here’s how that went.
The first screen started with a welcome and the code snippet with instructions to add it to my website, plus a product tour video and an invitation to chat.
After that, there were no further instructions. Do you have to deploy the bot live as you’re building it? I had to poke around quite a bit to find answers.
In settings, I found the bot. Navigation was not as intuitive as I expected, and many users had the same experience.
Once I found the bot, editing the text and choosing actions was simple.
Next, take a look at other options, like proactive response. You can set actions for the bot to invite a conversation under specific circumstances.
You can also set idle chat reminders and chat timeouts for when a user does not respond.
Then you can opt in to live chat handoff if your operators are standing by.
And fallbacks for when no operators are available.
Setting up a standard bot seems pretty easy, so I checked out “Zobot.” Zobot? On the first screen, a video explained that this is the SalesIQ bot, an automated AI sales assistant.
The first choice is the platform and type of bot builder. I went with Codeless Bot Builder.
Describe your bot, choose a brand (I only had one, my user name), and make decisions about channels and bot working hours.
On the next screen, you continue configuring your bot by defining:
- Audience (all visitors or certain visitors based on criteria you set?)
- When the bot initiates chat
- Response interval
- Idle chat handling, reminders, and timeout
- Hand off to operators
- Bot conversation actions
Finally, you can add text, actions, videos, and more to complete your chatbot.
The whole process is simple, but there is a learning curve, and you have to figure out where to find what you want. I found additional information in the help center, such as scripts for different kinds of bots.
One thing I did not find anywhere is options to change the appearance of the bot.
Visitor Tracking and Analytics
Zoho’s dashboard has a variety of native reports, but there is a learning curve.
- Measure website performance
- Analyze ROI on lead generation
- Improve team performance
- Set alerts on key performance metrics
- Manage your team’s workload
- Integrate with other Zoho products and other popular apps for more analytics.
User Interface and User Experience
User reviews have cited some difficulty in learning to use Zoho’s enormous catalog of integrated software and integrations, and my experience bore that out.
It was easy enough to set up a bot, but I had to figure out where to start on my own. Once in the bot builder, there were no helpful links to templates or help articles.
A beginner would likely struggle to learn on their own.
Integrations and Compatibility
Zoho offers many in-house products, like CRM, Email, Analytics, API support, and a huge list of integrations in these categories:
- Zoho apps
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer support
- Telephony
- CMS
- Ecommerce platforms
- Data provider and enrichment
- Translation
- Social media and instant messaging
- Analytics
Customer Support
While some customers complained about poor customer service in the past, current enterprise customers report great customer service.
Contact options are live messaging, open a ticket online, and Tenfold & VoiceBase support.
Zoho — Unique Features
Zoho’s best-selling feature is the native apps, which include:
- Zoho CRM
- Zoho SalesIQ
- Zoho CRM
- Zoho Desk
- Zoho Assist
- Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho Analytics
- Zoho Sites
- Zoho Bookings
- Zoho Checkout
- Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho Voice
What the Experts Say About Zoho SalesIQ
- Capterra rating: 4.5/5 (92 reviews)
- TrustRadius rating: 8.5/10 (40 votes)
- G2 rating: 4.4/5 (274 reviews)
We use it every day. I love the tracking it gives our digital marketing efforts. We’re in the process of rolling the chatbot out on our site and it works great. It took us a little bit of doing to figure out, but we’re extremely pleased.
Peter F., Owner – Verified Capterra review
In today’s business, monitoring website visit has been increasingly important in improving business brand image, helping achieving more efficient business operation and understanding potential customers. Being able to monitor what web page customers look at also makes our marketing and technical support team more efficient. Marketing team can gather data and find our most popular products while technical support team can increase efficiency by uploading the most commonly asked technical questions.
Neil C., Sales Consultant – Verified Capterra review
Zoho SalesIQ Alternatives
Zoho SalesIQ is a great program with a lot of features and integrated tools. Is Zoho the answer to your communication needs? If you’re not sure, here are some alternatives to check out.
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4.0
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4.3
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3.9
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Free - $79/user/mo
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Free
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$39/user/mo - $139/user/mo
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Freshchat
Freshchat is an AI-powered chatbot loaded with features, and it’s easy to set up and use. Freshchat’s higher-tier plans include a few unique features such as IntelliAssign – assignments automatically assigned to team members based on skills, performance, and load.
Zoho, on the other hand, offers a few features Freshchat doesn’t have: abusive content management, company profile enrichment, and agent-to-agent chat
Freshchat offers a free version with limited features for up to 10 agents. Pricing tiers start at $19/month/per agent after a 21-day free trial. Freshchat’s pricing is higher than Zoho at every level above free.
Start your free trial of Freshchat today
ChatSpot
Chatspot and Zoho both offer a full suite of business tools plus chatbots and AI bots. Chatspot is part of Hubspot’s suite of tools.
They both offer free plans, but ChatSpot’s AI chatbot is available with the free plan, whereas Zoho only offers AI chat with its Enterprise paid plan.
When you get to full-featured Enterprise paid plans, Hubspot is $3,600/mo, while Zoho charges $20 per month, per operator. I would say Hubspot offers better customer service and more customer training, but if you need more than the free plan, you will pay for it.
Start chatting for free with ChatSpot
Intercom
Intercom is a live chat option designed to assist agent communications and hand-off to human operators as necessary. Like Zoho, Intercom’s AI chatbot is bundled with a suite of integrated products for an all-in-one solution.
Intercom and Zoho each integrate with several social media channels and email, Zoho also offers instant messenger support, and Intercom does not,
Intercom plans that include their chatbot are priced per user, starting at $99/user/month plus $0.99 per verified chat or higher.
Other options: Best Zoho SalesIQ Alternatives
Getting Started with Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho is a useful set of tools, including an AI chatbot at an affordable price. Zoho SalesIQ is a great fit if you’re in the market for sales tools, CRM, and chatbots.
Start your free trial of Zoho SalesIQ today!
FAQs
What is Zoho?
Zoho is a cloud-based integrated business and productivity suite that offers a ton of features for a very low price, including CRM, encrypted email, marketing tools, and chatbots, both scripted and AI.
Who is an operator?
Anyone on your team who communicates with your website visitors is an operator. Depending on the size and nature of the business, this might include customer service reps, sales reps, social media people, or the business owner.
You get 3 operator licenses with the free plan, and the paid plans are priced for one operator. Businesses with bigger teams can add all the operators they need.
How does the visitor tracking add-on work?
Each pricing plan has a tracking limit. The Free plan includes 10K visitors per month. With any plan, if you exceed the visitor tracking limit included in your plan, you can extend it with the visitor tracking add-on.
The limits are fairly generous, so if you find your business regularly exceeds them, you may want to consider leveling up.
Zoho SalesIQ is a complete customer engagement platform, that helps businesses to efficiently engage their website visitors & customers, at all times.
Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho SalesIQ is a complete customer engagement platform, that helps businesses to efficiently engage their website visitors & customers, at all times.
Product Brand: Zoho
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