Zoho SalesIQ Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

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!

User Interface

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-hand side, you have a menu with all the different options, such as a Chats overview, Visitors overview, Reports (analytics in Zoho SalesIQ) and Resources (such as Canned Replies, FAQ’s 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.

There is one drawback of using Zoho SalesIQ – if you want to create large chatbots, the flow can become really huge and the overview becomes not great.

Also, if you want to create larger chatbots (let’s say: automatically reply to 50+ questions), the flow of your chatbot can become huge and it could be hard to have a good overview of your chatbot.

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.

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.

Each visitor on your website that talks to your chatbot becomes a lead, and when they leave any contact information (such as their email address) they will 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.

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.

Moreover, you can also create a chatbot by connecting Zoho SalesIQ to Dialogflow. Then you can just use the intents and answers you define in Dialogflow. However, it is not possible to detect the intent of the user with Dialogflow and repond with a flow inside Zoho SalesIQ.

I should also mention that they have a direct connection with ChatGPT, that you can use in your chatbot flows.

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:

Channels

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

• Website
• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• LINE
• WeChat

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, they don’t provide any direct integrations with Make (formerly known as Integromat), Zapier or Google Sheets.

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

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.

Zoho SalesIQ 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.

Analytics

Zoho SalesIQ provides a basic analytics dashboard that shows you the number of visitors, average visit duration, number of 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:

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.

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.

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