Zoho Corporation, the Chennai/US based technology company, previewed Zoho CRM for Everyone, a new set of capabilities aimed at democratising to its existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is to all teams involved in customer operations activities throughout the customer journey.

At the company’s annual event - Zoholics24 - in Austin, US, Zoho also announced strategic updates across collaboration solutions. This comes on the heels of 78 per cent YoY Migration Growth Away from Top Competitors. Zoho brings AI, workflow automation, and industry-specific capabilities to its collaboration tools, accelerating momentum and driving better outcomes for global businesses managing asynchronous work

Zoho CRM for Everyone provides three capabilities - team modules; requester profile and refreshed user experience.

It allows sales teams, the primary custodian of customer relationships, to communicate and coordinate from a single place various customer deliverables across areas like solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy.

These capabilities stand to improve visibility for every stakeholder in the customer journey, mitigate gaps in coordination, reduce turnaround time, and improve the quality of the customer experience.

Zoho CRM For Everyone enables account managers, for example, to pull in a solutions engineer to coordinate a great product demonstration for a customer.

A specialist can track the step-by-step rollout of the onboarding experience for each customer. A marketer can perform win-loss analysis for specific deals.

A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies. All of these different activities can be managed within the CRM with deep customer context and cross-functional visibility.

Prashanth Krishnaswami, Head of Market Strategy, Customer Experience, Zohoz, (left) and Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist (right), addressing the media at Zoholics24 in Austin, US

Prashanth Krishnaswami, Head of Market Strategy, Customer Experience, Zohoz, (left) and Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist (right), addressing the media at Zoholics24 in Austin, US | Photo Credit: T E Raja Simhan

They may all use different core applications for deep work but can now converge on the CRM for managing shared responsibilities towards the customer, said Prashanth Krishnaswami, Head of Market Strategy, Customer Experience, Zoho.

Zoho CRM For Everyone not only opens up CRM access cross-functionally, but also empowers every team to manage their own workflows autonomously within the corporate IT framework. It is the first true democratisation of the CRM paradigm. Over the following weeks, Zoho will add more capabilities to Zoho CRM For Everyone that make CRM the nucleus of all customer operations and enable a wave of CX transformation.

Traditionally, the CRM system has been built by IT and built for sales workflows. Over the years, it has accumulated a wealth of customer context, but access to the CRM is strictly rationed, and teams are forced to operate on their own islands with limited context. This is fundamentally antithetical to a great customer experience, he said.

“Zoho CRM for Everyone breaks down those silos for the first time, enabling different teams in a sales process to contribute productively by reducing CRM complexity and encouraging participation,” he said.

Zoho also announced extensive updates across its collaboration portfolio to accelerate momentum in this age of flexible, asynchronous work. On the heels of a 78 per cent increase in migrations from top competitors to Zoho’s collaboration solutions, Zoho is driving new AI, workflow automation, and industry-specific capabilities across core collaboration tools.

Together, these developments promote unified project management and support productive asynchronous collaboration for global businesses whose employees, customers, and partners operate on different timetables, he said.

“With its latest developments, Zoho continues to strengthen its broad, tightly integrated software applications portfolio to further enable seamless workflow collaboration, which drives better user experiences, productivity, and process efficiencies. End-user companies can leverage Zoho solutions for holistic collaboration spanning both asynchronous and synchronous capabilities that reflect how people perform their work,” Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist, said.

“Companies today are working on multiple devices and networks, in and out of the office, in varying time zones, making collaboration extremely difficult and time-consuming to manage,” We’ve developed a tightly integrated set of collaboration tools powered by platform-layer services like AI, unified search, and process automation underneath—all in an effort to help businesses be more productive,” he said.

New AI capabilities

Zoho Projects, the company’s powerful project management platform, has introduced Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities powered by Zia, Zoho’s in-house AI engine. Using colloquial voice commands, users can now enlist Zoho’s deep, unified search engine to source information stored across Zoho’s apps, significantly reducing the time employees spend extracting contextual information.

(Zoho sponsored the writer’s trip to Austin)

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