Presenting Zoho CRM Plus: The new gold standard in frictionless customer experience

After a lot of diligent work behind the scenes, we're proud to announce the latest version of Zoho CRM Plus, the most powerful, unified customer experience platform on the market, built to transform and empower how you cater to your customers at every step of the process.

This unified CX platform connects your sales, marketing, and customer support operations even more deeply, allowing information to flow from one department to another across the entire customer lifecycle. To accomplish this, we've created a single platform for all of your customer-facing teams: the interface, admin panel, setup process, search bar, and user provisioning have all been unified across departments to give marketers, sales reps, and support personnel a holistic view of every customer.

Seamless Omnichannel customer engagement 

Zoho CRM Plus doesn't just allow your customers to reach out to you through the channel of their choice, it also helps your business teams switch across channels at will. Your sales reps can convert website live-chats to phone conversations, support agents can make or answer calls from within their ticket interface, and your marketers can convert social media interactions into tickets to get problems solved faster.

Pick up chats while you're on Desk

Quickly convert tweets to tickets

Convert website chats to phone conversations

Automatic, contextual customer assistance with ASAP

The ASAP plug-in for Desk brings your business's help center closer to your customers. With the plug-in, customers will be able to quickly find answers sourced from your business's knowledge base, raise tickets directly, and even chat with your support agents from within your company website or mobile app.

Cross-team collaboration using Blueprint

Blueprint lets you build and automate processes that run across your sales, marketing, and support teams. Take your daily sales orders, for example: You can set up a Blueprint for your sales orders that involves both your sales and support teams so that approving a sales order in CRM will automatically create a ticket in Desk, and conversely, the sales order will be marked as "Delivered" in CRM when the delivery is completed in Desk. This keeps all your teams on the same page, which allows them to communicate clear and timely information to your customers.

Zia and the power of AI 

In addition to creating a unified experience for users and customers alike, we've also expanded and extended the capabilities of Zia, our AI-powered intelligent assistant. Last year, the launch of Zia brought data-driven insights and powerful, timesaving automation to sales and marketing. Now, Zia is entering the support space, empowering agents with advanced AI tools that will increase efficiency gains across the board:

Sentiment analysis

Unhappy customers are bad for business, so support agents need to take special care and act quickly. However, until each piece of customer communication gets read, how can your support team know which tickets to handle first? That's where Zia comes in. To ensure problems get prioritized appropriately, Zia can now analyze the tone and sentiment behind your customer emails or support requests.

Customer ticket auto-tagging

Zia analyzes your tickets and automatically tags customer responses with specific keywords. These keywords are then grouped intelligently so you can identify which tags are trending, offering your team an advanced indicator of problems before they become major crises.

Anomaly prediction for sales and support 

Zia also analyzes past sales activities and ticket response rates to predict performance over time. Zia can give you an idea of whether you're doing well, under-performing, or have even exceeded expectations. Then, by comparing her predictions against actual performance, Zia can identify anomalies and notify the right people.

Automated customer responses with Reply assistant

Zia can read through your customers' questions and suggest answers that your support agents can include in their responses. Zia can also pull up relevant articles from your business help center which you can then send to your customers.

Big-picture dashboard by Zia

Zia's main dashboard in Desk collects your trending ticket tags, support anomalies, ticket sentiments, sentiment trend analyses, and a lot more. With this information, managers and decision-makers get a comprehensive picture of what's taking place across your support touchpoints.

Zia Voice

Businesses can now use Zia Voice to access contextual customer information through simple chat and voice messages. Ask Zia about your monthly sales trends across specific regions and she will generate insightful reports. You can also run correlation analyses on multiple variables, across different departments. For example, you can correlate your marketing spend with the effect on sales revenue and support ticket volume.  

Zia Voice is now also available as an SDK, allowing businesses to use Zia with their own customers. This means your customers can get their questions answered directly by Zia. For example, if a customer wants to find out about faster delivery options, all they have to do is Ask Zia.

Unified analytics across your business

Zia wouldn't be such an intelligent assistant if she didn't have access to the deep analytics built into all of our apps.

Sales

Get insight into your sales revenue using pre-built dashboards and smart components. See KPIs for important sales metrics, get complete visibility on your sales pipeline using Funnels, and compare your performance between key sales metrics using Comparator.

Marketing

Zoho CRM Plus also gives you insights on your social media activities with metrics like audience growth, post engagement and performance, reach, and impressions.

Support

View your overall customer happiness rating, see the longest support threads, as well as unassigned tickets.

Sales, Marketing, and Support

The most powerful new component of Zoho's business analytics offering is our set of dashboards that run across multiple apps, such as CRM, Desk, and Social. These dashboards track critical business metrics across multiple data sources, blend the data for you, and showcase it in any of 300+ pre-built templates that can be customized to target your key performance metrics.

What better way to end the year than by giving businesses the tools they need to achieve exceptional customer experiences. If you'd like to let us know what you think of the all-new features available in Zoho CRM Plus, please reach out on social media and use #ZohoCX. We'd love to hear your feedback. We're also available to chat in the comments below.

Hope you close this year on a very successful and productive note. Here's to all the great customer experiences coming your way!