Announcing Big Features for Bigger Businesses in Zoho CRM and Zoho Support

Today we are unveiling the biggest update of the year for our Zoho CRM and Zoho Support products. For the past several months, we have been focused on enhancing our product capabilities so we can address the needs of bigger organizations better. We are already known in the industry for serving our SMB customers well. But we’re not going to stop there.

First off, the Zoho CRM improvements we are announcing today include exciting updates like territory management, custom modules, deeper social integration, custom functions and enhanced integration with Zoho Campaigns.

Supporting bigger sales organizations with Territory Management

Bigger companies have complex organizational structures. The most common example is companies with sales teams aligned along both geographical limits and another variable, like company size or product line.

The new Territory Management functionality helps companies better mirror their complex organizational structure in Zoho CRM. More importantly, it is done securely – so only the right people have access to sensitive company information. The sales team for the Northeastern region can see all deals happening in their territory, regardless of product, but they can’t see what’s going on in the Central region. Likewise, the General Manager for the Widgets division can set sales targets and see deals for her products across all geographical territories, but she can’t see what’s going on with the Gadgets product line. Of course, the VP Sales and CEO can monitor the sales forecasts for both products and for all regions with just a few clicks.

Territories is a term we use loosely – while it is typically used in a geographical sense, you can configure territories in Zoho CRM to map to any particular segmentation your sales team might be based on, like Commercial vs Federal Government vs Local Government; Military vs Education; Named Accounts vs Mid Market vs SMB. 

Custom Modules let you track anything you want inside Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM comes with standard modules to track the most common elements of your sales process, like Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities (Potentials), Cases, Activities and Campaigns. Now, Custom Modules allow you to extend Zoho CRM and capture any other additional pieces of information you might want to capture in your sales process. For example, you might want to create a Travel module where you can track the cost of acquiring and servicing particular accounts. Custom modules behave pretty much like any of the other modules – you can define custom fields, layouts, workflow triggers, create reports on them and correlate with data in other modules.

A complete view of your customer – including their social media interactions with your company

We know how important it is for bigger companies to provide personalized service even when they might be serving several thousand (or more) customers at a time. With our enhanced social functionality, you can now capture customer interactions from Facebook and Twitter right within the Zoho CRM contact detail page. Every time a customer writes on your company’s Facebook wall or mentions your @handle in Twitter (or your company does it from your official account) those interactions will be captured for your sales team just like emails. So if a customer complained or praised you on Twitter you’ll be able to see that when you visit their contact page in Zoho CRM. Those interactions always remain there, so you can keep a detailed history of your brand’s interaction with your customers. 

Connect your CRM data with external system more easily with custom functions

Our webhooks functionality is great, and custom functions take it to a new level. Now you can connect Zoho CRM to an external system through a workflow trigger and a custom function, so that you pass on data to the external system through application interface powered by Deluge Script and then update your CRM record based on data that external system has passed back to you. For example, when you create a new order, the custom function sends a request to your accounting system. If the account is carrying a balance, it sets the order status as Pending Finance Authorization in your CRM.

Custom functions also allow you to modify a record’s related information in other modules. For example, when you mark a new order as Closed-Won, you can now roll-up that amount to that record’s parent account, thereby keeping a running total of how much money that customer has spent with you.

Better information from your email marketing efforts for your sales team 

When Zoho Campaigns was launched, we focused on providing the best Zoho CRM-to-Zoho Campaigns integration possible, so it is easy for you to synchronize your customer lists and keep in touch with those customers through email.

With today’s release, we take that one step further. There’s more information about marketing campaigns for your sales reps to work with, right inside CRM. This way your sales team can better prioritize their sales efforts and have more meaningful interactions with your prospects and customers.  Learn more about Zoho CRM and Campaigns’ integration.

Territory Management, Custom Modules and Custom Functions are included in our Enterprise plan. The enhanced social functionality is available now for the Enterprise plans and will be available shortly for our Professional subscribers as well. The Zoho Campaigns two-way synchronization functionality is available in all of our paid editions.

Next, for Zoho Support we have two important updates that enable you to provide a better customer support experience for your customers through the phone and wherever you go.

An entire call center, right within your browser

Phone remains the most critical support channel for most companies. However, dealing with PBXs and SIP protocols is never fun. Our newest update, powered by our partnership with Twilio, makes it easy for you to define your own IVR menu and associate IVR options with support agents, so you connect your customers with the right person right away. Sometimes customers would rather leave you a voice mail rather than wait in line for a few more minutes. Now any voicemail they leave you gets added as a ticket inside Zoho Support for your agents to follow-up on it (in the order in which it was received, of course), and close that ticket.

Bigger companies rely on formalized customer support training and coaching programs as an important tactic to improve customer satisfaction. With today’s release, Zoho Support customers can now record all customer calls, whether incoming and outgoing, so that you can review them and better train your support agents. Learn more about our phone functionality.

Provide great customer support even while on the go 

As companies grow, providing great, around-the-clock customer service becomes more important – and even expected by customers these days. And that’s why having great mobile access to tickets and customer requests is so important. Today we are announcing two mobile apps for Zoho Support – one for Android and one for iOS devices. Now your agents can get instant notifications on their devices when an important ticket gets and update and provides help from wherever they are. If they are not available right then and there, they can re-assign the tickets to a colleague, and even involve other colleagues in the conversation to get help – all without leaving the app.

Our enhanced phone integration is available on both Professional and Enterprise editions. However, while the Professional edition supports only one phone number mapped to one department, the Enterprise edition can support multiple numbers each associated with a different department.

If you still haven’t had enough, we have several upcoming webinars that explain all these great updates in further detail. But all of these updates are available now – right now. Go try them out. We hope you find them useful. After all, we built them with you in mind.

Rodrigo