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Resources | |
Feature availability | Currently supported for CRM accounts in US Data Centers |
Editions | CRM Enterprise & Ultimate, CRMPlus, Zoho One |
Default credits added | 15,000/Month - Enterprise | 20,000/Month - Ultimate |
Usability | For Workflows, Blueprints, and Custom Buttons |
Customers often need a way to extend their CRM functionality through various means. Functions, a simple way to write code, can define business logic on top of the CRM offerings.
Often, functions become bloated as the business needs grow. Invariably, they become big monolithic blocks of code. Their maintenance, re-use, debugging, etc., become a challenge.
Moreover, when you want to offload the series of operations to be orchestrated by functions, based on various business scenarios, customer touch points, or any third party application’s status, etc., it becomes even more cumbersome to make the functions work.
This is where Circuits in Zoho CRM come in very handy. Through Circuits, you can orchestrate the business flow through functions asynchronously offloaded from the CRM layer, still meaningfully hooked into the salesforce automation. It offers a great platform to write a typical step-function with easy using drag-and-drop(DIY builder) interface, adding great value to the business users.
Circuits offer a cascading structure to different states in a business process, allowing you to write functions that each individually feed their output into the next one, or any other one you pre-define. Not just that, it allows you to reroute, park for a certain period, or feed it in batches to enable just about any sort of action.
Circuits offer the following benefits that allow developers to focus more on business logic:
- Low-code - Create a circuit effortlessly with the visual drag-and-drop interface, which makes it easier for the users with minimum coding knowledge.
- Developer-friendly - Circuits help you manage parallel processes, service integrations, spot failures, retry, and view logs, within minutes. Developers can focus on the business logic and not worry about these factors.
- Orchestrate CRM Functions - Use various CRM functions on your circuit to integrate multiple third-party apps and Zoho CRM, seamlessly. Write functions once, and orchestrate them in circuits to solve different business needs.
- Automate IT and business processes within CRM - Create a circuit, associate it to a workflow, blueprint, or button, and automate your entire business process. With high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance, circuits ensure the performance of your workflow remains consistent even with changing states and an increase in frequency.
Sample business scenario
To put it in action, let's talk about payment processes, that are a part of most business processes. Say for your business process, once a deal is won, you'd like to send a payment link to said deal, and then generate an invoice on successful payment. If the payment is unsuccessful, the link is re-sent.
Here, we're building a circuit with two functions, in the order as mentioned below, and with the output of the former feeding into the consecutive function
A function that parses the details of the deal record, fetches the email ID, fetches the right payment URL and sends it to the deal.
A function that checks the payment status and updates the corresponding fields in CRM and generates an invoice on successful payment or resends the payment link to the deal upon payment failure.
So, let's understand why circuits are necessary in this business scenario.
- The order of orchestration - While CRM offers the option to write individual functions, as and when necessary for custom actions and workflows let you automatically execute them, Circuits goes one step further and streamlines the flow of your functions' logic, and simultaneously performs error handling. This ability to pick the order and states of your functions lets you pull in different third-party or external services to address minute use-cases.
- A single, editable space - A flow diagram that uses states and flows that include everything from functions to trigger record movement, using wait or parallel actions as others simultaneously occur, to record states that give you the record details. This not only gives you a bird's eye view of all that's configured in your circuit, but also, allows you to pinpoint issues, modify or reorganize it.
- Diagnose errors and view audit logs - A detailed log of each execution provides the status of each state's task execution, the payload and parameters passed, and the responses and exceptions generated.
- Use Existing Functions - From picking functions you've already tried, tested, and are up and running in your CRM account, to using a circuit within another circuit, this flexibility opens up possibilities of handling so much of your out-of-the box requirements in a single space.
The flow of action here:
Other examples of actions that can be performed with Circuits:
- Generate reports automatically, track inventory, fulfil orders and track them, and generate receipts.
- Trigger a circuit when a deal is won, update the deal's details in a sheet, calculate the commission based on the revenue, and update the details back in CRM.
- Manage users, send custom push notifications based on specific conditions, and manage user-generated files in applications, automatically.
Once enabled for your account, Circuits will be available under:
Setup > Developer Space > Circuits
Learn more about the components of Circuits and how you can make the most of it in the help documentation. Once we enable early-access to Circuits for your account, we'll send out an email confirming the same.
Cheers!
Shylaja