Business Choice Awards 2019: CRM

It's always nice when readers back up the editors. Our picks for the best customer relationship management (CRM) tools have the same two vendors on top this year as those selected by PCMag readers in our most recent Business Choice survey.

Zoho CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud Lighting Professional are both 4.5-star Editors' Choice products, each with just about every possible feature we could want and desire in keeping up with customers. But when readers weighed in, it was clear only one would earn a Business Choice award.

That award for 2019 goes direct to Zoho. This is the first time the brand has had enough response to make it in our CRM survey results. (It happens; last year's winner, Sugar CRM—which has taken this award home four times—didn't get enough response to make the cut this year at all). Zoho's lead is clear in every single category we asked people to rate. Its overall satisfaction score is 7.4, ahead of Salesforce at 7.1, which isn't a huge lead. Our other major category of how likely a respondent is to recommend a brand says it all: CRM got a 8.0, while Salesforce only got a 6.9.

That same question is used to come up with the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is a measure of how good the word of mouth is about a brand, and it lead to Zoho getting the only positive number NPS of the lot. Every other vendor had a negative, meaning more people talk smack about them than say something nice.

There's only one area where Zoho CRM appears deficient—31 percent of Zoho users needed tech support. That's not great, considering only 16 percent of Oracle and NetSuite users needed tech help. (One vendor did worse: Act! at 39 percent.)

Other standout scores for Zoho include an 8.3 for reliability, an 8.4 for integration with email providers, and an 8.3 in integration with social media. The best: an 8.5 for Zoho's iOS and Android mobile apps, which offer offline access and lots of in-the-field options for users. Read our review of Zoho CRM for details.

It's interesting to note that Salesforce, which came in second, had a nice bump up from its overall score of 6.8 last year. Oracle and Microsoft Dynamic both dropped, helping Salesforce edge up. Despite its problems, Act! also had a nice uptick from 6.3 overall to 6.8 overall this time around. But SAP dropped, going to a 6.4 from 6.8.

Ultimately, none of these products score particularly high overall, even the winner, which probably says more about how people feel about software that is thrust upon them by their bosses than anything else.

WINNERS: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)

Business Choice seal

Zoho CRM
The Editors' Choice pick for CRM now gets to share the Business Choice pick from readers. Its mobile efforts have certainly paid off, as have Zoho's integration with email and social networks. Readers rated it the best for reliability, lead capturing, custom reports, and workflow—a sweep of all the categories that matter when you're working in the field.

Looking for expert opinion? Read The Best CRM Software.

The PCMag Business Choice survey for CRM was in the field from May 13, 2019 through June 3, 2019. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodology.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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