Name: Zoho SalesIQ Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing
Item: Zoho SalesIQ
Rating: 3.9
Author: Joren Wouters

Zoho SalesIQ is a chatbot platform that you can use to create chatbots on your website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Line and Wechat.

But should you use it to create your chatbots?

Let’s find out!

If you want to create a chatbot on your website, Zoho SalesIQ is definitely an option you should consider.

With their platform, you can create custom chatbot flows and share help-desk articles with your customers.

Zoho SalesIQ offers both free and paid plans, starting at $11/month for a monthly subscription. This makes is a solid choice if you’re on a tight budget.

Pros

Easy-to-use Flow Builder
Store User Input
Built-in ChatGPT integration
Built-in Live Chat
Publish chatbot on 6 channels
Website widgets

Cons

Can't auto reply with chatbot flows
No good overview with larger Chatbots
No marketing possibilities on Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp

Go to Zoho SalesIQ

3.9

Plans Cost

$11 to $27 per team member

Introductory Offer

Free plan with live chat and up to 100 chat sessions per month

Standout features

Flow Builder, Live Chat, Website Widgets, Affordable Pricing

How to use Zoho SalesIQ

When you log in at Zoho SalesIQ for the first time, you see a real-time overview of all the visitors currently on your website:

On the left, a menu shows all options. These include:

Chats overview
Visitors overview
Reports (analytics in Zoho SalesIQ)
Resources (like Canned Replies, FAQs, and Articles).

With Zoho SalesIQ, you can create two types of chatbots:

Answer bot, this is a chatbot that can recognize the intent of the user and automatically reply with default answers or helpdesk articles
Zobot, this is a chatbot that consists of a custom flow

When creating an Answer bot, you can only determine with what kind of resources you want to reply with:

And what the chatbot should do if it can’t find an answer to a question:

This can be helpful if you just want to get started with chatbots, but if want to create a more advanced chatbot with a custom flow, you need to create a Zobot.

When creating a Zobot, you can use the Visual Flow Builder in SalesIQ:

Here, each chatbot has its own flow that consists of multiple elements. When clicking on an element, you can change it:

And then you can immediately test those changes by using the “Test this out” feature in the Flow Builder:

What I really like about this feature, is that Zoho SalesIQ also shows where you currently are in the flow by making the flow green.

So in general, the flow builder is really easy to use and it’s also easy to set up your chatbot.

And you can also use these bots together. So in your Zobot you can also use your Answer bot to automatically answer question.

There is one drawback of using Zoho SalesIQ – if you want to create large chatbots, the flow can become really huge and you lose the overview.


Flow Builder Create chatbot dialogs with a visual flow builder.
Ease of use How easy is it to use the platform? On a scale of 1 to 5.	4
Ease of setup How easy is it to set up your chatbot? On a scale of 1 to 5.	3.5
Test chatbot Is it possible to test the chatbot before putting your new flows or changes live?

Chatbot elements

Zoho SalesIQ provides the most important elements to create a good chatbot, such as:

Asking for user input (and saving it in a custom field)
Showing buttons that the user can click on
And validating user info (email, phone and date)

Furthermore, Zoho SalesIQ also provides a calendar element that you can use to schedule meetings through slots:

And they also provide an element to share the location of the contact:

It must be said that these elements work for the website channel, and are not working in the same way on other channels.


Image Can you send images via your chatbot?
Video Can you send video via your chatbot?
Audio Can you send audio via your chatbot?
Attachment Can you send attachments via your chatbot?
Gallery (Horizontal List) Show a gallery of cards inside your chatbot. A card consists of an image, title, subtitle and button.
Quick reply Can you add quick replies to your chatbot where users can click on?
Button Can you add buttons to your chatbot where users can click on?
Collect User Input Can you collect input from users and store it in fields?
Condition Make checks in your chatbot flow based on if-then logic. For example, if the user has not given their email, ask for their email.
Delay Use delays between messages in your chatbot
Start automation Can you refer from one automation to another and thereby reuse your automations?
Split traffic Can you split your trafic inside a chatbot flow? Often used for A/B testing.

Contacts

Within Zoho SalesIQ, you can see all your contacts in one overview:

Within this overview, you can see all the contact information, custom fields and tags of that contact.

Every visitor on your website that talks to your chatbot is a lead. If they leave contact info, like an email, they become a contact.

And when someone gives their contact information, Zoho SalesIQ automatically tries to find the company linked to that contact:

This is a really useful feature, especially for companies that operate in the B2B market.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to create user segments based on custom fields and tags.


Contacts overview Can you see all the contacts that talked to your chatbot in one overview?
Custom field Store information from your chatbot users inside fields. For example, you can ask for someone's email and store it inside the "email" custom field.
Tags Add tags to users in your chatbot flows to organize and categorize contacts.
User Segments Can you create user segments based on custom fields and tags?

Zoho SalesIQ AI Features

With Zoho SalesIQ, you can automatically recognize keywords and understand the intent of the user, by using their FAQs feature.

Here, you set up the phrases you want to automatically reply to and reply with an answer:

Likewise, you can also reply to small talk of the user and connect an answer to a helpdesk article.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to reply with a chatbot flow, but only with a default answer or helpdesk article. In my opinion, this is drawback, because this limits how you can have a conversation with your customers.

Furthermore, you can also detect entities in Zoho SalesIQ, which are called Business Terms in Zoho SalesIQ. By using Business terms, you can learn Zoho SalesIQ to understand that two words have the same meaning. For example, you can learn it that a “Phone call” is the same as an “Audio call”:

Unfortunately, you cannot use entities to send different answers for an intent. For example, someone has a question about physical stores. Then if that person says “What are the opening times”, it would be great if you could reply with “For which physical store do you want this?” and if they say “What are the opening times of store X”, you automatically reply with the specific opening times. But, this is not possible with Zoho SalesIQ.

Additionally, Zoho SalesIQ also offers a direct integration with ChatGPT, that you can use in your chatbot flows.


Keyword recognition Trigger chatbot flow based on certain words or phrases a user says to the chatbot.
Intents Trigger a chatbot flow by understanding the intent of the user.
Entities Capture specific information from sentences. For example, if a user says "veggie pizza", the chatbot can understand it's not a regular pizza, but a veggie pizza.
AI Knowledge Base Can you train your chatbot on a knowledge base (like your website or articles) and then your chatbot automatically answer questions about it?
NLP integrations Does it have a direct integration with NLP platforms, such as Dialogflow?
LLM integrations Does it have a direct integration with LLM platforms, such as ChatGPT and Claude?

Live Chat

Zoho SalesIQ has a built-in live chat, that allows you to hand over the conversation from the chatbot to a support agent and manually resolve any problem your contacts might have:

Also, you can set up specific routing rules to determine what type of user should be assigned to what department or specific live chat agent:


Built-in live chat Does it have a built-in live chat, so you can hand over a conversation to a support agent?
Live chat integration Does it have a direct integration with a third-party livechat application?
Auto-Assignment Rules Can you set up rules so that conversations get automatically assigned to agents in livechat?

Channels

With Zoho SalesIQ, you can create a chatbot on 6 channels:

Website
Facebook Messenger
Instagram
WhatsApp
LINE
WeChat


Website Can you publish your chatbot on your website?
Facebook Can you publish your chatbot on Facebook?
Instagram Can you publish your chatbot on Instagram?
Whatsapp Can you publish your chatbot on WhatsApp?
Telegram Can you publish your chatbot on Telegram?
SMS Can you publish your chatbot on SMS?
Slack Can you publish your chatbot on Slack?
Email Can you publish your chatbot on email?
Wechat Can you publish your chatbot on WeChat?
Line Can you publish your chatbot on Line?
Merge contacts across channels Can you merge contacts across channels, when the same person contacts you over multiple channels?

Zoho Chatbot Integrations

Zoho SalesIQ has over 40+ direct integrations with other applications, such as:

All Zoho platforms (Zoho Bookings, Zoho Campaign, Zoho CRM, etc)
Google Analytics
Salesforce
ActiveCampaign
Zendesk

And much more!

Unfortunately, ZohosalesIQ doesn’t integrate with Make or Zapier.

On the other hand, it is possible to connect to other applications using webhooks.


Direct integrations How many direct integrations does it have with other applications?	11-50
Zapier Direct integration with Zapier, one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
Make Direct integration with Make (formerly Integromat), one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
Make API Calls Can you call an API inside your chatbot flow to send or get data from other applications?
Webhooks Can the platform send automatic notifications of all the messages and events going on in your chatbot?

Marketing

The marketing possibilities of Zoho SalesIQ are mostly focused on websites.

You can create your own website widget and determine the branding and colors of your widget:

Also, when setting up your chatbot, you can determine on which pages it should appear and for which website visitors:

Unfortunately, on all other channels, there are no marketing possibilities. For example, it is not possible to automatically reply to Facebook/Instagram comments and send WhatsApp message templates. I think this is a drawback, because it makes SalesIQ unusable for marketing chatbots on those channels.


Broadcasts Send a message to all or a part of your chatbot users at a specific date and time
Sequences Send messages on a pre-defined schedule with a certain time interval between those messages
Rules Trigger events based on if-then logic. For example, if email is given by the user, send it to your CRM.
Website widget Embed your chatbot as a widget on your website (with your own branding & colors).
Send proactive messages on website Can you send pro-active messages on your website with your chatbot?
Facebook Ref URL Can you create a URL that goes to a specific flow inside your Facebook chatbot?
Auto-Reply to Facebook Comments Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Facebook Posts
One-Time Notification Send one-time notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
Recurring Notifications Send recurring notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
Facebook Ads Start a conversation with your chatbot when someone clicks on a Facebook Ad
Auto-Reply to Instagram Comments Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Instagram Posts
Instagram Story Mention Reply Send auto replies to Instagram users who mention your Instagram handle in their Instagram Stories
WhatsApp Message Templates Can you initiate conversations with Message Templates on WhatsApp?

Zoho Chatbot Pricing

Zoho SalesIQ comes with a free plan, that gives you access to its live chat and 100 chat sessions per month.

If you want to create a chatbot and want more features, you need to go with their Basic plan. This plan costs $11 per operator and comes with 50K visitors, 1000 chat sessions, 1 chatbot (a Zobot, not an Answer Bot), proactive triggers, chat routing and the website channel.

The next plan costs $19 per operator and comes with 100K visitors, unlimited chat sessions, 5 chatbots (Zobots, not Answer Bots), all channels and real-time reporting.

Lastly, they also have the Enterprise plan, which costs $27 per operator and comes with 200K visitors, chat translation (for live chat), 10 chatbots (Zobots) and an Answer Bot.

Each price refers to a monthly subscription. If you take a yearly subscription, the price is reduced by 20-30%, depending on the plan.

On each plan, they give a 15-day free trial and they even provide a 30-day money-back guarantee.


Free trial Does the chatbot platform provide a free trial?
Free plan Does the chatbot platform provide a free plan?
Price per month What is the lowest price per month to create a chatbot with this platform? In US Dollars.	$11
Monthly pricing available? Is it possible to pay monthly?
Money back guarantee Is there a money-back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with the platform?

Analytics

Zoho SalesIQ has a simple analytics dashboard. It shows the number of visitors, average visit duration, page views, average pages per visit, and average time on a page:

Likewise, they also provide analytics on the devices of visitors, the countries they are coming from and their sources.

Moreover, they also provide an overview of the questions that could not be answered by your chatbot:

zoho-salesiq-unanswered-questions — Source


Dashboard Dashboard that provides general analytics of your chatbot.
Flow analytics Can you analyze how users are going through your chatbot flows?
User input Get the input from users that your chatbot didn't understand.
Sent messages The number of messages that were sent by your chatbot.
Open rate The percentage of chatbot users that opened a message inside your chatbot.
Click rate The percentage of chatbot users that click on a button inside your chatbot.
Conversion rate The percentage of users that converted through your chatbot. For example, the percentage of users that gave their email address
Fall back rate The percentage of interactions where the chatbot did not know an answer to a question.
Agent analytics Can you analyze the performance of live chat agents?
Custom event tracking Can you create custom events and analyze how many times these happened?
Custom dashboards/reports Can you create your own dashboard or reports?

Templates

Zoho SalesIQ doesn’t provide any pre-built templates that you can use to get started.

Likewise, it’s not possible to create your own templates and share these with others.


Number of templates How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?	0
Make template Can you make templates yourself?
Share template Can you share self-created templates with others?

Support

Zoho SalesIQ has extensive documentation and a complete video course on how you can use their platform.

Moreover, they provide customer support via email.


Tutorials Does the chatbot platform provide tutorials on how to use its platform?
Documentation Does the chatbot platform provide documentation on how to use its platform?
Customer support Does the chatbot platform provide customer support?

Is Zoho SalesIQ Worth It?

So, should you buy Zoho SalesIQ to create your chatbots?

Yes, if you want to create a chatbot on a website, I recommend trying out Zoho SalesIQ.

It has a visual flow builder, you can ask for user input and store it inside custom fields, you can personalize the conversation by using conditions, you can understand the intent of the user, has built-in live chat, you can publish a chatbot on 6 channels, they provide a native website widget and all of this for a pretty low price.

But there are also some drawbacks of Zoho SalesIQ:

When creating larger chatbots, it could be hard to have a good overview of all your flows
It is not possible to understand the intent of the user and reply with a chatbot flow
No marketing possibilities on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Zoho SalesIQ do?