Wrapping up 2025 on a high note: CRM Release Highlights of the year

Dear Customers,

2025 was an eventful year for us at Zoho CRM. We’ve had releases of all sizes and impact, and we are excited to look back, break it down, and rediscover them with you!

Before we rewind—we’d like to take a minute and sincerely thank you for trusting us for your businesses. This journey of 20 years with you in it, really made it what it is—Momentous!

Click on the below image to view our CEO’s vision for the next decade.

Now, let’s recall those 2025 releases!

Zia played a transformative role this year:

1. With the introduction of  Zia Agents: A standalone agent-building studio, came agentic experts pre-built for Zoho CRM. You just need to deploy, educate, and employ: your growth advisor, personal assistant, sales coach, quote specialists, and more are just a click away. 🧞‍♂
   
2. Up next, AskZia. AskZia, our conversational AI assistant got a massive do-over. Powered by LLM, AskZia can respond to you—literally! It can bring insights to the table, dissect with human-like analyses, help you with solutions and lookup references on CRM features, execute actions like module creation, drawing of workflow rules, and creation and co-creation of reports, based on your prompts.
   
3. Zia LLM to act the nerve center. From drafting contextual emails to generating insightful summaries, Zia LLM can be chosen to be the AI model for Smart Prompts, without needing any keys. Your salesforce, enabled with our in-house power!
   
4. Talking about Zia enabling your sales force, let’s also take a look at conversation summaries. With conversations overflowing through the pipeline, keeping up with recency and relevance in context is quite a hassle. Zia can summarize your conversations exchanged in various channels, and interpret events, sentiments, and behaviors, so that you can make the next move, your best move.
   
5. Furthermore, we enhanced our Churn Predictor for accuracy. You can learn if and why your customers are going to churn, backed by factors pointing to it. With usage data from Google Analytics and soon from MixPanel, you can bring in customers’ behaviors and indicators to contribute to churn prediction.
   
6. To close with, let’s look at QuickML integration. Zoho CRM and QuickML already had integration facility called the Custom AI solutions. This year, we enabled a deeper integration with Custom AI Studio. Upon the existing AI solutions, you can tailor your intricacies and your business’ precise needs to leverage your ML pipeline effectively.
   

Zia was all about tailoring solutions for your business needs and aiding them with functionalities. But, CRM, as such, got a range of enhancements—big, small, and everything in between.

When it comes to relationship management, user maneuverability paves the way to get things done. This year we brought so many enhancements that improve usage, convenience, and collaboration.

1. CRM for Everyone: The Customer-centric approach that put customers and their data in the center and helped converge all customer-facing teams around. Using Team Spaces and Team Modules, businesses can collaborate, give and take data and deliverables harmoniously without any duplication, dependency, or delay.
   
2. Next Gen UI gave meaning to what was built for Everyone. With Folders and sub-folders, requests and controls, Admins can organize and manage data distribution among organization modules  and team modules efficiently.
   
3. New module views like Grid View, Split View, Timeline View, and Chart View helped users see their data the way they’d like. These categorization offer great clarity and direction to their pursuits.
   
4. The CRM calendar got a fitting face lift with a focus to collaborative schedule management.
   
5. Zia Intelligent Character Recognition is a quicker way to digitize data in physical form into Zoho CRM. Data entry is no longer a day’s work.
   
6. Envisioned your template design for Canvas? Simply upload the creation, Canvas is enhanced to convert as a template.
   
7. Adding elements and formatting them to look appealing can drain the designer at work. The new Canvas components Flex and Grid will help relieve this fatigue. Now, create adaptive and responsive templates without any exhaustion.
   
8. Interaction view in records’ timeline depicts your customer’s journey across touchpoints and interactions with your business. You’d have the entire story in just a scroll.
   
9. Connected records for context management. As customers’ data grow across CRM modules, users can connect records related to the customer.
   
10. Enabling the formula fields with “Now” function to auto-refresh. This way, all those values, you’d want to be current and updated whenever your view can be achieved. If you’d like these forever-refreshing values to stop executing, you can also freeze them based on conditions.
    
11. Choose the data you’d like to rollup and formulate how you’d like them to be summarized using the custom rollup option.
    
12. Design what you’d like to print from CRM using Canvas Print View. From Shipping labels to Mailing labels, Canvas Print view can help generate brand-bearing labels easily.
    
13. Finally, Zia generating syntax for formulas. Brief what you’d like to achieve, Zia is equipped to build and generate formulas. For formulas with lengthier syntax, this update gives a great relief.
    

The unrevealed secret of winning deals is to quote faster and efficiently. This year we optimized CPQ and deal management such that you can be quick to quote!

CPQ updates:

1. Select multiple offerings in one go when you determine configure actions.
   
2. Identify duplicate line items when a CPQ rule targets the same action entity.
   
3. Clone product configurations and price rules for every new quotes that you are building.
   
4. Zia’s suggestions makes selling intuitive. Based on pattern, frequency, and fashion, Zia can suggest product configurations that could best fit a quote.
   
5. Criteria can be added for price rule configurations, paving way to offer personalized pricing structures to select customers.
   

 

Guided Selling:

1. Select custom module when you setup your guided selling flow.
   
2. Choose Guided selling rules for secondary lookup fields.
   

Deal management:

1. Team Selling and Deal Split is a major upgrade to 2025’s  list of items. Enabling deals to be shared among other players and splitting their responsibilities as percentage, helped sales leaders assess their collaboration and reward their contribution.
   
2. When converting your leads in bulk, you can choose only those fields that are essential for mass conversion, offering convenience.
   

Automation has been businesses’ aide even long before AI rose for public consumption. Today, even with the rise of Agentic AI, routine, recurrent, and event-based predictable automations are continuing to function without diminishing power and it is because it is Basic 🤌🏻 . To what is already efficient, we have added more power this year.

1. Automation across team modules. With multiple teams onboarded, processes commences or stops or diverts based on user events. With team module fields participating in automation infrastructure, efficiency is easily achieved.
   
2. Connected workflows to achieve automated actions based on events in the connected records. It gives your business process autonomy.
   
3. Approval process got great flexibility this year. Edit records queued for approval, assigning of process admins to pivot approval flow, mandating  approval from all users in a team or roles for big transactions, and seeking approvals from top-down are enhancements that streamlined approvals.
   

Business is a number game. Decision makers rely on these projected numbers to stake their money on. In 2025, CRM got an interesting line of updates that have to do with numbers, reporting, and analytics.

Sales Forecasting:

1. Zoho CRM is for Everyone. But, not everyone that uses Zoho CRM would sell. Apportioning target or tracking the performance of those who have no role to play in the pipeline isn’t valid. That’s why, we have enhanced the Forecast feature with the ability to include or exclude roles, territories, and users from participating in the forecasting activity. No more misinterpretations of lack of performance.
   
2. Forecast is about predicting the future revenue. But, basing this anticipation on the expected revenue will lead to disappointments. The quoted amount is almost never the closing amount, there will be external factors affecting the final price. The deal owners or their superior are the best people to predict the fluctuations and suspect a difference.. They can propose forecast adjustments to the projected revenue, so that decision makers can make informed decisions.
   
3. A forecast report is the direct reflection of the sales reps’ performances. That too, when it comes to forecasting for a period, when consistency in achieving targets isn’t met, Zia can spot these deviation and notify the sales managers of the anomalies. From seasonal dips to suspicious change of pace, sales managers can identify the change of course week-by-week and act on them.
   
4. We saw about how team can share deals and accomplishments. In addition to splitting their contributions, revenue from participating deals can also be split and recorded in the forecast report of the players of the deal team.
   

Analytics:

When you have a lot of data at play, you’d want it to be presented as a visual. Analytics play a major role in understanding the impact of data. We brought the following representations to tell different stories.

1. Treemap chart to depict large hierarchical datasets as nested tiles.
   
2. Waterfall chart represents how data fared through a sequence set of variables. Positively influencing variable will ascend and the negatively influencing variable will descend.
   
3. Sankey chart to represent flow and trajectory of data across stages.
   
4. Butterfly chart to compare and contend two participating entities across various attributes.
   
5. Cluster chart to represent otherwise stacked data as distinct bars, enabling easy calibration of plot values.
   

Reporting:

Drawing context from reports with large data sets can be challenging and time-consuming. By creating category columns, you can easily organize report data into groups or categories for quick inference and analysis.

So, we come to the point where we’d like to see our Customers succeed. This year, we engineered a massive improvement to our CX portfolio:

🎉 Presenting them in order:

1. ABM for Zoho CRM help give undivided focus to the most valuable customer accounts in your CRM database. Identify high contributors, enrich them with market intel, segment them with customers’ subjective and objective parameters, nurture them with personalized solutions, and close deals. This extension provides growth opportunities for your business and helps convert your customers as evangelists.
   
2. When customer journey can tell a lot about customers’ experiences, getting them right is very important. The revamped Journey management tool CommandCenter 2.0 is built to delight your customers at every step of their way. With smooth interface, accessible controls, unbounded stages, easy capture of Signals and contextual actions, Journey Builder in CommandCenter lets you design your customer journey right from their Zeroth moment.
   
3. What your customer say about your business reflects how they feel about your business. This year, we expanded the scope of our Voice of Customer solution. It is no longer only about customers, rather the consumer market itself—and, act on them!
   
1. With VoC attributes supported in Advanced filters of participating modules, finding and acting on those customers that feel a certain way was made possible.
   
2. With VoC in Kiosk,  users can lookup customers records based on their response and behaviors.
   
3. With configuring any module as a data source, you can bring in All reviews—known and unknown, in addition to direct responses given about your business in the external world into analyses.
   
4. WhatsApp integration is already a way of business communication in Zoho CRM. We brought the ability to initiate chats manually, reply as threads, and preview audio messages sent by your customers.
   
5. LINE for business integration is new this year! LINE is a popular messaging service used by a substantial number of users in East Asia. To be able to reach out to the customers in that area and further nurture them from within Zoho CRM is a capability that became dear to many!
   
6. While LINE for Business integration pleased many, WhatsApp integration is still a service many business rely on to nurture their prospects and customers across the globe. Having WhatsApp as a follow-up action in Cadences, will only boost the acquisition and conversion rate for your business.
   

End of the day, accurate and authentic data makes all of these possible. Zoho CRM had key enhancements in this aspect this year.

1. Data migration, by itself is a herculean job. Miss one file, the whole database could jumble. Adding them anew or importing them separately will steal away its integrity and accuracy of it. And, so we brought the ability to Upsert missing data into migrated datasets. You can choose if you’d want to overwrite data accrued in place of the missing data or replace with original data, all while preserving its original timelines.
   
2. Next,  GraphAPI integration. In addition to the existing IMAP and POP options, you can now integrate your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API. Going forward, this integration sets you up to access even smarter, faster, and more connected experiences when it comes to Microsoft services.
   

1. Client Script support for notes, subforms, list pages in Canvas, and Portals. Customize your business-specific actions from within your web browser.
   
2. Catalyst solutions provides ready-to-use, customizable solutions to streamline bulk data processing in Zoho CRM.
   
3. Users can now execute client scripts anywhere in Zoho CRM using Client Script Commands, which are accessible via the command palette or personalized keyboard shortcuts. These commands enhance productivity and user experience.
   

 

And, a host of MarketPlace extensions listed specifically to work with Zoho CRM.

There—those are our highlights for 2025. 

With Zoho CRM completing 20 this ‘25, these enhancements added all the more power to our milestone records.

🚩 We closed  the year with 300,000+ businesses trusting us

🚩 We are recognized as industry leaders by Destination CRM

🚩 POSTMAN called us Winner of the 2025 Developers’ choice award

🚩 Recognized by industry experts like Gartner, Forrester, Nucleus Research, IDC, and Info-Tech research group.

🚩 Winning accolades by Gartner, Capterra, and G2 consecutively

All of these were possible only because of your trust. We thank you with all our hearts. Within us, we carry a passionate yet humble determination to solve your problems and grow with you for decades to come. 

Join our stride. Let’s walk side-by-side!

Sellect by Zoho CRM

The CRM Show: Powered by Zoho

I am Saranya, signing off :)

Along with me, is the entire team from Zoho CRM wishing you a Happy New Year 2026!

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