7 Years of Zoho CRM Plus

"It'll be seven years of Zoho CRM Plus this Saturday," our product manager said earlier this week on Cliq, our workplace collaboration app. What followed was a barrage of and congratulatory messages, as the team was excited. But maybe a more accurate representation of our feelings would be:   , we are grateful to you, our customers. We could not have achieved this without your continuous support and belief in us. Thank you!

When we started work on CRM Plus and launched it in 2014, unification of apps wasn't a vision that was shared across the industry. Before CRM Plus, businesses had to choose between separate best-of-breed software, which offered depth of features, but only offered limited integration with other apps and did not scale as a business size grew, or all-in-one software that was often bloated with unnecessary applications and lacked depth of standalone best-of-breed apps.

With CRM Plus, our goal was to provide customers with a customer experience platform unlike any other, with robust, unified functionality, where each component is a best-of-breed solution, but they all come together into a single holistic tool. We wanted to give users a powerful mix of both breadth and depth of features. The platform has had a lot of improvements since then. After extensive research, relentless engineering, and successive product updates, we hit a milestone in 2018 when we launched an even better version of CRM Plus as the unified customer experience platform for businesses. We've been going from strength to strength ever since.

Some interesting facts about CRM Plus

• • All the components are built and hosted on the same underlying Zoho infrastructure.

  • All our applications are developed in house by our engineers. We haven't acquired a single piece of software in our 25 years in the software business. And, this reflects in CRM Plus as well, where every component of the platform is built ground-up.

  • The best unified features that you'll ever come across. It's easy to set up and manage different components from one interface. All our software is built on a common identity access management platform with built-in single sign-on, making unified user management and license management simpler and more practical.

  • CRM Plus is a pre-integrated offering. That's how we are able to add tremendous value at a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) to our customers.
  • CRM Plus is the true essence of unification. To be honest, most unified solutions in the market are simply point solutions that are stitched together. It's not truly "unified" if all the apps in your platform have to be accessed separately and don't talk to each other. 

So what's on the road ahead?

While we don't want to ruin all the surprises in our upcoming product update, here's a sneak peek at some of the new features that'll be available in CRM Plus in the coming months.

• • Strengthening the marketing side

Yes, we heard you. CRM Plus has always been appreciated for bringing together just the right set of features for sales, marketing, and service to function as one. But if there's one facet of the platform where customers want to see expansion, it's marketing, and the coming release will deliver on that front.

Are we complementing the existing marketing apps with new ones or is it something even bigger? Here's a hint: We are bringing in a host of new tools to help you manage your marketing with confidence. Let us know what you think it is in the comments.

• • Enhancing remote collaboration functions

Remote collaboration is here to stay. As more businesses start adopting a hybrid work culture, the need for remote collaboration software is only going to increase. What if your CX platform could help you work remotely, access contextual customer data, and collaborate in real time in a cliq? We got you there. Stay tuned!

• • One universal window for tracking your team's performance

Wouldn't it be nice if you could get a detailed report about your employees, pulling all their data into one place? What if it included their performance, interactions with customers across apps, customer ratings, and every other minute user detail all in one window?

• • Deeper unification features

We're bringing in a lot more unified features, so more components combine to give you the power of multiple apps in one.

That's all for now! We would like to thank you once again for your constant support throughout the years and for being part of this seven-year journey of consistent investment in unifying customer-facing efforts. We'll continue giving our all to help businesses deliver amazing customer experiences. We can't wait to share what's next for CRM Plus.

You can share your CRM Plus experience with the hashtag #7yearsofZohoCX on Twitter and Facebook, or let us know what think about the platform in the comments below.

Here's to delivering many more happy experiences. Over to you in the comments!