[fakedang]

Why would a small customer bother with building their own Zoho solution even? I mean, if an SMB did that, I'd call them morons.

Zoho has its flaws, but for small businesses, Zoho is a godsend. If an SMB doesn't want to pay for Zoho, I'd seriously ask them to recheck if they're making any money whatsoever.

Moreover Zoho is one of the few platforms out there that's really intuitive. Do this, do this and that, and you're good to go. Compared to setting up something like Zendesk or Freshdesk or Xero or QuickBooks , etc.

[gboss]

I agree that Zoho is more intuitive than Zendesk and 10-20x cheaper, but that’s a really low bar. However, when we evaluated Zoho this past spring to replace our b2c 60-100 seat month Zendesk contract, we found Zoho to be really disjointed where every app was configured and looked different. The pricing and lack of contract was great but it seemed like different things were tacked together like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app. When our new contract for Customer Service expires I’ll check them out again but I think they need to standardize and simplify the look and feel of there apps and merge some if they want to move up market. For small businesses with a shoestring budget they’re a no brainier though!

[fakedang]

> like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app.

Unfortunately, truth be told, most software is like that. Take Salesforce for instance - same issue. Granted, Zendesk niches at this painpoint you mentioned (and I've seen some enterprises switch from Zendesk to Salesforce and face the exact same issue as above), but their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope. UI-wise, Zendesk is still the best.

[giarc]

Small customers do weird things. I had a tiny Saas company and we had approached a local business with a few locations. Our software was in daycare management and would have automated a bunch of their processes. The owner loved the product but didn't want to "rent" our software (ie. pay a monthly fee). She wanted to pay us once and install the software on her computers. Literally if we had said "here's a CD-ROM to install" she would have paid us money. This isn't an example of a customer that might vibe code their solution, but simply to show that customers do weird things and have weird requests.