Hello everyone!
I wish all of you a joyful and prosperous 2025! As we welcome 2025, I’m excited to share a recap of the year 2024 and highlight some of the coolest new features and enhancements we’ve added to the Zoho CRM platform. Last year, we announced over 100 new features and improvements across the Zoho CRM core platform and 170+ marketplace extensions.
- Kiosk, a no-code customization tool that allows you to build custom self-service UI interface for data retrieval and update on-demand. Here's a series of use cases and scenario-based learning material on how to use Kiosks effectively.
- Cadences, a powerful automation tool that allows you to build seamless sequential and personalized customer follow-up processes.
- Accessibility controls, which promote inclusivity and empower people with disabilities to take charge of their CRM and leverage up to 18 controls in order to achieve their unique needs.
On that note, besides new features, we have had a gamut of enhancements, big and small, over the past year focused on streamlining existing capabilities for sales force automation, enhancing customization, empowering teams, increasing user adoption, besides leveraging AI across the board.
Sales force automation
- Forecasting: You can set your organization's fiscal year to follow the 4-5-4 calendar and other widely used 52-week fiscal year formats. You can also choose a top-down or bottom-up model based on whether organizations want to make more optimistic or realistic projections.
- Granular and contextual record management: Cross-module filtering and dynamic criteria in lookup filters facilitate granular record management. The system also provides better lead management by letting you view a lead's history in contacts, accounts, and deals for a more contextual follow-up process and also allowing you to check for duplicate leads directly within the Contacts module. Besides, our revamped record timeline extends to three years and supports notes, filters, and email statuses.
- Workflows: Workflow rules can be triggered in response to actions associated with mentions of competitors within your email communications. Additional enhancements to workflows include the ability to reschedule existing scheduled actions, using the date formula field in workflow execution, and more.
- Activities: You can import data into the Calls module. You can also email associated contacts right from related modules such as Vendors, Cases, Accounts, and Deals.
Product Customization
- Besides creating a blank Wizard from scratch, you can Generate Wizards quickly, in which the system helps you create and connect screens out of selected fields and sections from a layout. Additionally, Summaries in Wizards are handy in getting users to review all the data they've entered into a wizard before finalizing it.
- Validation rules help you quickly validate individual fields, allow the record to be saved upon reviewing an alert, and decide where the error messages will be displayed.
- Subforms: We offer better sub-form operations whereby you can directly Add, Edit, Remove, Filter, Sort, and Clone rows on the subform's detail page. You can also add multiple records to a sub-form via lookup and set permissions (view, create, edit, and delete) for an entire sub-form.
- Webforms can be accessed as links or QR codes and be seamlessly integrated into blogs, emails, and social handles.
- Translation engine supports various regional languages.
- Kanban views are extended for Meetings, Calls, Tasks, and Appointments. You can also achieve multiple perspectives to record prioritization with multiple Kanban views per module.
- Copy Customization works across DCs and for previously customized accounts.
- Canvas is extended to Create Record forms, so that your record UI is consistent across record creation and retrieval.
Leveraging AI in Zoho CRM
We are happy to announce that our in-house Large Language Model (LLM) is ready to cater to our customers' business needs. Our LLM is secure, accurate, and efficient for various business needs. Please give it a try! On that note, our top AI updates in Zoho CRM include the introduction of
Zia LLM for Smart Prompts (to begin with),
Record Summary to view a comprehensive snapshot of important details of a record and the ability to build custom AI solutions with Catalyst’s
QuickML capabilities in CRM.
Additionally, we released several enhancements in Zia to simplify key operations and generate powerful insights for decision-making.
Other Features
Process management: Non-mandatory (optional) fields have been included in Blueprints to allow for more flexibility in meeting various process needs. You can also
mandate Kiosks in Blueprints in case you want to ensure that your customized on-demand Kiosk flows are performed as part of a bigger organization process as part of compliance.
Reports and Analytics: Improvements in
Reports include an increase in the export limit, inclusion of Export Report as a permission in User Profiles, Email templates for reports, and the ability to
categorize report data into columns to facilitate smart decision-making and easy comparisons. A new quick-view filter allows users to filter the processed report using fields from the participating records. Dashboards also have significant improvements, including the
ability to lock shared dashboards and options to display large numbers on charts in shorter formats as well as the introduction of additional fields as
"component filters" to enable various consumers of a dashboard to filter data based on their unique needs without disturbing the initial dashboard configuration.
Mobile: Significant mobile updates include the following across iOS and Android apps.
- Dedicated mobile UI based updates: Users now have a Dynamic Display in Zoho CRM for iOS where mobile users can decide how they want to display fields in the mobile list view. With Zoho CRM iOS app's record sharing feature, users can easily share important records with the entire organization or specific users, roles, or groups.
- Top improvements that complement the web app: Mobile users can now access advanced filters that they saved on the web application, optional fields in Blueprint are extended to the mobile apps and users can manage workloads with Assignment Threshold Alerts on iOS.
CRM Core Integrations:
Marketplace Extensions:
Latest Marketplace extensions include ABR Merge Duplicates for Zoho CRM, Google Address AutoComplete for Zoho CRM, WebAmigo - Lead Enrichment for Zoho CRM, and more.
Go here to learn all about our new extensions for 2024.
Finally, CRM for Everyone
We have also launched CRM for Everyone (#CRM4E Early Access mode). With #CRM4E, our goal is to democratize CRM for by getting all customer operations teams aboard the CRM system (Teamspaces), empower them to create their own processes (Team Modules) and promote seamless coordination among them (Via Requests). Learn more about this
Early Access release here. We are keen about making further improvements and updates to this release in 2025.
And that's a wrap!
With the updates in 2024, our CRM has become more complete in its fundamental capabilities, and aspires to be single source of truth for multiple teams (
CRM4E).
We hope these amazing features prove valuable for your organization. Thank you for your continued support—we're excited to keep building this incredible journey with you as we strive to make Zoho CRM the world's favorite CRM. Stay tuned for updates, and feel free to share your ideas or suggestions. Here's to a fantastic new year for all of us!
Cheers,
Vaagdevi Ravishankar
The Team Zoho CRM
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