Zoho CRM - Autumn '22 update

As the seasons shift, there are a few things you can be certain of enjoying in autumn: the vibrant colors of trees, the crunch of the leaves underfoot, the anticipation of the upcoming holidays, and more. To the plethora of things you do in the fall season, you can now add one more to the list: read the Zoho CRM autumn update.

Our team is hard at work year-round to make sure that Zoho CRM is constantly updated with the most cutting-edge features and enhancements to existing functionality that elevate the tool’s overall capabilities, as well as keep us ahead of the curve in the CRM market. We wanted to take this time to give you a quick update on everything that’s new in Zoho CRM. So let’s look under the hood, and check out all the updates we’ve added for you!

Omnichannel communication  

Call bar enhancements for built-in telephony  

The introduction of our built-in telephony system has given businesses looking for robust telephony services an alternative to third-party applications that may or may not have satisfied all of their requirements. To build upon and strengthen this new functionality, we’re happy to add two additional functionalities to the phone menu that are available when you enable the integration.

Namely, the new functionalities are as follows:

  • View calls in conversation – This lists all ongoing calls, along with additional information, such as the call duration, who initiated the call, and whether the number is associated with a lead or a contact in your CRM account.

  • View calls in queue – This is a dedicated space where you can keep an eye on all incoming calls and how long they’ve been in the queue, so you can stay informed about who is making calls to your business.

WhatsApp Business integration for Zoho CRM 

With two billion active users every month and 175 million people reaching out to brands through the application, WhatsApp opens the gateway for brands to carve out spaces for themselves by offering meaningful experiences on a platform that countless customers use extensively.

This gateway is now open to you via Zoho CRM’s integration with WhatsApp Business. You can use your existing Facebook Business manager account or create a new one, and integrate with WhatsApp Business directly in Zoho CRM.

  • Stay on top of all incoming messages – When interested prospects or customers reach out to your business through WhatsApp, you get notified in real time through Zoho CRM’s SalesSignals.

  • Manage conversations with ease – Handle your conversations effectively by setting up canned messages for certain recurring questions your customers might have, or have your users send out personalized replies when the situation calls for it.

  • Share key collateral with the click of a button – Interactions between businesses and customers often involve sharing documents and collateral, like quotes, purchase orders, sales orders, and invoices. You can share these directly from your device, Zoho CRM, or from a wide range of cloud drives.

Responsive templates for your email needs 

Decades go by and one thing stays the same: Email is still the most popular business communication tool available for reaching out to colleagues, engaging with clients, and even marketing to them.

Moreover, in today’s mobile-first world, it’s important that the emails you create and send are done so with the mobile users in mind.

To address this very need, Zoho CRM’s email templates have now been made mobile-responsive. Now every email you send from Zoho CRM is automatically optimized to the device your customer is using to open the email.

Sales force automation

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) goes into pilot access 

These days, the quality of every interaction between a brand and its customers is judged according to the level of personalization involved. This applies to every aspect of your customer engagement process, like nurturing, interactions, and now even the way you generate and deliver deal-critical collateral like quotes.

Zoho CRM has and will continue to help you automate a wide range of your sales process, but one of the most important aspects that has been missing is the ability to create and deliver quick personalized quotes to your customers as your team works on various deals.

With CPQ, you can accelerate your sales cycle and maximize the chances of closing your deals by delivering accurate and personalized quotes to your customers.

  • Configure – Build product lists and combinations that can easily be pulled into your quotes based on the needs of your customers.

  • Price – Define the pricing rules for the different products you offer: flat or slab-based pricing, direct or volume-based discounts, and even freebies that need to be included based on products added to your quotes.

  • Quote – Quickly and accurately create quotes that are error-free and personalized to the needs of your customers based on the product and price configurations you’ve set up in your system.

 

 

CPQ in Zoho CRM is going into pilot access and it will be opened to organizations that are using the Enterprise edition of Zoho CRM and are using the native Inventory modules in the first phase.

If you do decide to test out this feature, we request your honest feedback so that we can continue to refine and grow this feature to meet the needs of organizations like yours.

Custom module support for scoring rules 

Being able to create multiple scoring rules have given businesses the freedom to build multiple and unique scoring models for their leads and contacts, so that different departments can score and prioritize their engagements easily. We’re taking this one step further with the introduction of custom module support, which enables you now to extend the power of unique scoring models to your custom modules as well.

Sort order preference for picklist field values  

To collect specific pieces of information from customers or keep track of critical business information in CRM, picklist fields were a great option to address these needs. 

To help you make the most of the picklist field values, we now enable you to sort your records based on picklist values in two additional ways: the entered order or the alphabetical order. These sorting options will be applied in record creation and edits, list views, reports, and dashboards.

Parallel transition support for Blueprint 

As your business scales, keeping certain processes consistent and repeatable is vital to great customer experience and business success. Blueprint was the go-to tool that let you build processes that scale, pay enough attention to your prospects and customers at every step of the process, and ensure that everyone is held accountable. 

To help your businesses implement more comprehensive and efficient processes, we’ve now introduced parallel transitions in Blueprint.

You can now have multiple transitions between two states, with each parallel transition being a different action that needs to be performed by a user or a team. Only when all the parallel transitions are completed will a record move to the new stage you’ve defined. This gives you the power to build more comprehensive processes and better control over the actions that need to be performed between the different stages of your process.

Note: This feature is being opened in phases.

Filter support for lookup fields 

Lookup fields are an important facet of Zoho CRM, enabling you to link records across different modules with ease. To give you better control and make it easier to link the records you want to link, we’re introducing filters to the pop-up menu when selecting the lookup values. 

Now, when you’re trying to select the record to associate through the lookup fields, you can filter them using a particular field or a combination of fields to find all the relevant records that match the requirement before associating the right one. This makes it easier for users to find the right record to look up, saving time and effort when associating records.

Criteria support for better segmentation 

Managing consistent and personalized interactions with customers post-purchase is key to long-term retention. With the introduction of RFM segmentation in Zoho CRM, businesses were empowered to identify their wide spectrum of customers, ranging from those most valuable to those most at-risk. 

Using this information, you were able to create personalized campaigns and offers to get your happy customers to spend more, while at the same time convincing at-risk customers to give your business one more chance. 

Now we’ve added another layer of granularity with which you can further refine your customer segments. You can now specify the criteria of records from the contributing module that should be considered by Zoho CRM when the segmentation is performed. You now have better control over your customer segments, giving you more opportunities and avenues to deliver memorable post-purchase experiences to your customers.

Zoho Finance module support for segmentation 

In addition to supporting criteria for the contributing module when segmenting your customers, another layer of control we’ve given you is the freedom in choosing the contributing module on which to run your segmentation. 

Along with the numerous native CRM modules you could leverage, you can now use the modules created as a result of your integration with the Zoho Finance suite as contributing modules for segmentation. You can now directly use your customers’ purchases and payments to split them across different buckets more appropriately, and come up with highly personalized cross-sell, upsell, and re-engagement campaigns for each segment.

Mail merge functionalities available for Apple and Android tablet browsers 

For a workforce that is always on the go, it’s important to have access to powerful features at your fingertips. And one of the most important functionalities is the ability to send personalized documents out to prospects and customers at the click of a button—whether they’re quotes, invoices, contracts, or any other sales-critical documents.

Now your field team can achieve this via their handheld devices—both mobile phones and tablets. Zoho CRM now lets you create and manage mail merge templates, merge documents, and configure required post-merge operations with the same ease on your mobile device browsers. 

Personalization is now available in the palm of your hand with Zoho CRM.

Reason for loss fields  

A wise man once said, “Life ain’t about how hard you’re hit; it’s about getting back up.” Mistakes and failures are common in life and in business, but the most important part is being able to identify what went wrong and learn from these mistakes.

In your business, you may win or lose deals, but it’s vital that you’re able to identify and document the different reasons that end up causing a deal to slip through your fingers. The “reason for loss” field that has been available in Zoho CRM is now a picklist field, enabling you to list out and pick from a wide range of possible reasons you feel your deals have been affected. 

This further enables you to systematically measure and analyze which of these factors are more common than the others and enact corrective measures. By making this field a picklist, you can even filter out records based on the reason for loss to examine them more in detail and understand the context behind each loss.

Enhancements to data sharing 

It could be for a number of reasons—collaboration, having access to important information, or keeping your team updated—but sometimes you’re required to share records in CRM with other roles or, at times, even with an entire group of users.

  • Condition-based data-sharing rules – With condition-based sharing rules, you can create sharing rules based on specific criteria, giving you greater flexibility in setting up rules to share the exact records required—based either on specific criteria or on the record owner—with other roles or groups within your CRM. This method is more automated, more accurate, and saves time.

  • Sharing records with roles and user groups – If you have specific records you wish to share with a particular role or a larger group, you can do so with the latest enhancement. This enables you to select individual records to be shared with different roles and user groups that are defined in your Zoho CRM account.

User experience  

An expansion to the Canvas palette 

Canvas for Zoho CRM was a milestone in our efforts to help businesses truly make Zoho CRM their own. It has enabled them to customize the look and feel of Zoho CRM to suit different roles and industry needs within the business, allowing for more personalization, an improved user experience, and greater adoption when deployed across the organization. 

We’re constantly working on improving this game changer with enhancements and improvements—some of which we’d like to introduce to you today:

  • Image support for Canvas – We now have a dedicated image element, so that now you can upload images directly from your device rather than simply via URLs. You can also access all the images you’ve previously added in Canvas so you can reuse them across different modules through the dedicated My Images tab.

 

  • Add and reuse components in Canvas – Tired of recreating your favorite designs for similar sections across different modules? Worry not, because you now have the option to save specific component designs as “reusable components,” which can then be reused across different modules or templates.

 

  • Add styles to presets in Canvas – We’re expanding this feature to include the different elements in Canvas, too. If you’ve created a style you like for different elements, these can be saved as presets that can be used for the same element across different modules. Customizations at the click of a button!

Email composition UI enhancements 

Last year’s update to Zoho CRM’s email experience brought much-needed quality of life changes with how you write and send emails in Zoho CRM. A floating email composition window, preset font styles and sizes, different from email addresses and associated signatures, and Zia’s spell-check and auto-completion were some of the latest additions to your email experience over the last year. 

You can now freely resize the email composition window and move it around to easily refer to CRM record as you write your email. Additionally, the attachments section can be collapsed, giving you more space in the composition window to work on your emails.

 

Thanks for tuning in 

There might be new features that change the way your business works, or enhancements to a feature you often use that you’ve been looking forward to. There’s something for everyone here, and we hope this update brings you something that you were looking for.

 

That wraps up this announcement. We hope you’re as excited to log in and try out all these new features and enhancements as we were bringing them into Zoho CRM. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on all these new additions, so please leave your feedback in the comments section of the blog and across our social media channels!

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