Slack vs Zoho SalesIQ: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: I'm Cam, senior director in our company, anywhere between 20 and 25 employees across the world at any given time. I couldn't go a day without Slack. That's five stars for me. Before Slack, we actually had to use two different software options. We used Sococo for our virtual meeting offices, and that served a purpose. It was good for a little bit, but then as we got bigger, we also had to use Skype. And so a natural progression was moving on from both of those into one that offered the same exact offerings, if not even more, and that was Slack. So previous to Slack, Sococo, Skype, and a couple other different instant messaging systems, all provided by Slack going forward. Everything from the pricing to the ease of deployment to how quickly we could get up and running, and just how generally available Slack is, whether it's desktop or the app, and from a mobile phone, you could have a web browser, anything you wanted to. You're never away from Slack, technically. And so, while that might not be a good thing for the work-life balance, it definitely made it much easier to deploy than anything else we researched, and we got forward. And now, it's just part of everyday life. The reason we chose Slack, one of them at least the biggest one was how quickly we could move everything from previous options or previous programs we used to deploy the day of. So I think that was on a scale of one to five, five being the easiest. It was a five. If not, even higher than that. It was as easy as possible to deploy Slack, get everything set up from our exec team, and then trickling it down. It took maybe a matter of a half hour to get everybody on board and inside of Slack, and it's still even faster now. So that was probably the biggest factor to getting us over to Slack in the initial phase. Recommending Slack, or if you're choosing between Slack and something else, just try the free version of Slack and understand that that is good enough to probably get you in the door and keep you in the door as well. The paid version and the other offerings from Slack make it even more integral to your business, so I would highly recommend giving it a shot. Just in general, the ease in which you could get started and the ease in which you could continue going forward without skipping a beat in your business needs, whatever your business needs might be, it's Slack and Slack going forward.

Daniel: Hey, I'm Daniel. I'm a Product Marketing Manager in the SAS industry, and I give Zoho SalesIQ a three out of five. We use Zoho SalesIQ to engage with the visitors on our website. Simply put, that means people being able to chat in, get responses, able to get support if they need to, or ask pre-sales questions. And also, something that's pretty cool is being able to proactively engage with people based on a set of rules. For example, someone's come to the website for the second time. We may want to give a little pop up and say, "Hey, welcome back. Any questions this time around?" Or, "Is there anything that caught your interest?" Something along those lines. What I really like about SalesIQ is its simplicity. For most the basic functions that you need, it's really simple, really easy to use, and you can basically just log on and let it go. You get a little notification when there's a chat, and you can respond to it, and then, boom, close it, get back to your work. For most the basic stuff that you need, it's really simple, fast, easy chat tool. What I don't like about Zoho SalesIQ is that I found it to be not as robust as some of the dedicated chat tools, meaning there could be some other ones out there that only focus on chat, and they have options where you can set hierarchies with bots, for example, really easily, but just drag and drop where it says, "Hey, ask this person this." They respond one of these things, ask another thing. Just very easy, user-friendly ways to segment people and push them into a different box or different responses based on just a couple of easy factors. And with SalesIQ, they have something called Zobot, and that requires some kind of coding in their specific language. And basically, just took a lot longer and a lot more brain power to try to wrap one's mind around than just simply dragging and dropping, what you see is what you get, type editor to create a chat bot. There's also a couple of little bugs that can be really annoying. If you are chatting with someone and you get a second chat coming in, it will automatically take you out of that chat and put you into the next one. So, imagine not looking at the screen for a second, and you're typing, "Yes, happy to help you out with that. The refund is coming soon." And it has, in the meantime, you didn't notice, let's say, the sound, it switched you over. You wrote, "The refund is coming soon," hit Enter, and then, now, that new chat person sees, "The refund is coming soon," which is a little awkward. Obviously, you can work around that, but there's just a few little things like that that make you think that this isn't as streamlined as it could be.