What's new?
When AI models sometimes struggle to interpret the usage data, customers often find it challenging to use their usage data in CRM systems effectively. Event mapping is a proper mapping mechanism to utilize usage data fully, not missing any opportunity on customer engagement, retention, and personalized service delivery.
With the new Usage Data under Zia, you can map each static set of events to the fields of the custom module. This enhancement helps Zia provide a deep analysis that can help predict more insights. Likewise, your churn prediction goes on, and the data is automatically updated with incoming data whenever your customers engage.
Zia can expand the range of applications for the usage data beyond Churn prediction after being trained with the data. The scope of Zia expands with the full utilization of usage data, helping with the following use cases in other features.
- Recommendations help you decide what products you can cross-sell or upsell to which customers.
- Analyze your customers' signals and engagement rates to gain deeper insights.
- Bring in more accuracy to churn predictions, like when a specific customer is likely to churn.
Additionally, Zoho CRM can now access usage data sourced via API, URL, or any supported file format from any tool to be stored in a custom module. This lowers your dependency on restricted tools.
Let's get started with the details of the enhancement.
What is usage data?
All businesses need transactional data as a base to study user purchase behavior on metrics like customer details, date and time, payment methods, discounts, and inventory movements.
Unlike transactional data, which only includes information about customer purchases and subscription details, usage data tracks how these customers interact with or use them, through an app or a website, concentrating on metrics like frequency, duration, and patterns of usage, helping businesses understand user behavior and preferences.
Tools like Google Analytics track customer actions, such as logins, interests, purchases, and location, to provide us with this data. It is used for behavior analysis, engagement metrics, churn prediction, and more.
What is event mapping?
Event mapping is a learning technique for the system so the user can activate Predictions, such as churn prediction. Through event mapping, the system will learn and understand how to interpret usage data. Mapping involves certain data attributes like event name, event timestamp, event initiator, and others.
Why event mapping?
Since event mapping requires the mapping of information, you are directly feeding in more details about the user interactions, easing the accuracy of churn prediction. In simple words, more details give you more accurate prediction.
For instance, a sudden reduction in the amount of logins serves as a significant indication of decreasing engagement, potentially indicating churn. Through event mapping, Zia can anticipate the reasons why a certain demographic of users cease logging in at specific times and whether device-related factors impact their logins.
Moreover, event mapping unlocks various functionalities like calculating churn scores, generating personalized recommendations, and monitoring customer engagement. For example, through Workflow Rules, users can send promotional emails to encourage customers who have not logged in for over 30 days to stay engaged.

Steps to configure:
With the enhancement, import usage data into a CRM custom module, create a mapping of the data called event mapping, and utilize that data for churn prediction and more Zia insights. Through event mapping, AI increases the accuracy of Zia-driven predictions and also widens its scope for personal recommendations and other predictions.
Let's look at this activation in the below steps:
- Create a custom module and three (mandatory) fields to store the following data: event name, event timestamp, and event initiator.
- Import the usage data from other sources (via API, DataPrep, CSV, or any supported file format) to the created custom module and map the fields.
- In Usage Data under Zia, perform the event mapping to create a way that the system understands.

Availability
DC: All DCs
Editions: Enterprise and Ultimate editions
Release Plan: This feature will be released phase-wise to all DCs
For detailed description and guide, refer to our resources: