Introducing PathFinder for Zoho CRM: Journey orchestration gets more precise | Public Early Access 2023

Hello everyone,

We're happy to announce public early access to PathFinder, Zoho CRM's new journey discovery tool. With PathFinder, you can discover your customers' journeys across multiple touchpoints and channels, and understand how they interact with your brand. PathFinder is a significant step in the evolution of our journey orchestration capabilities, since journey discovery is a core component of any journey orchestration tool.

Note: We have enabled access to this feature for all Enterprise and Ultimate customers. Our old CommandCenter feature has been renamed to Journey Builder, and CommandCenter is now a journey orchestration platform comprises of both Journey Builder and PathFinder.

Some of the highlights that the PathFinder feature provides are :

Visualize your customers' journeys with intuitive maps.
Identify the most successful paths followed by your customers, common drop-off points, etc.
Filter journeys based on customer criteria and identify common paths among various demographics.
Get a better understanding of user intent and preferences.

Journey orchestration: A quick refresher

Journey orchestration is the ability to observe customer journeys in real time, and manage the business' responses to create the most meaningful experience for them. Journey Builder in Zoho CRM allows businesses to model their customer journeys and set contextual brand responses based on the path customers follow.

So where does journey discovery come in?

Journey Builder allows businesses to create customer journey maps and automate contextual actions based on the paths customers follow. However, these maps are static pictures based on the company's ideal vision of the journey. PathFinder, on the other hand, is all about accepting the dynamism in customer journeys, and automatically building a journey map based on the customer's choices throughout their experience with a brand.

Using Signals to discover customer paths

PathFinder works on the basis of states (distinct milestones in the customer journey) and touchpoints (a trigger to indicate a state has been reached). It uses Zoho's Signals framework to identify the actions taken by customers — including those taken on third party platforms — and constructs a map of their journey. Businesses can then examine reports based on all of their customers' journeys, break them down to understand behavior in various segments, and create better brand experiences.

Leverage multiple reports to understand your customer paths

The PathFinder feature provides you with 3 types of reports, namely path report, Sankey report, and journey report, to help you comprehend the observed journeys better.

Path Report

The path report dynamically identifies all the paths your customers take and use advanced filters to sort them by demographics. This enables you to understand these journeys, determine the most productive paths, and orchestrate more relevant ones for your customers.

Sankey Report

Zoho CRM provides you with a Sankey report to assess the flow of users from one state to another visually, to help you understand patterns of movement between the states you've defined, as well as the number of users moving from one state to the next.

Journey Report

The journey report in PathFinder provides you with a preview of the entire customer journey and the paths customers take. Similar to the Sankey report, you can gauge the movement of users between states. Furthermore, by analyzing the overall number of users entering and exiting each state, you can infer where customers face roadblocks or drop off from their journeys with your brand.

Now let's look at an example :

A business generates leads via multiple channels. Some of them are paid, like online advertisements, and participation in trade shows. The marketing team wants to understand the quality of these leads, and set up the following states and touchpoints in PathFinder:

State	Touchpoints (Signals)
Third party ad engagement	A lead signs up via a search engine
Trade show visitor	A lead scans their card at a trade show booth
Downloads brochure, watches video, social media follow, mailing list sign up	All these states are indicators of brand engagement. The actions they refer to are explained in their names.

Each of the states describes an action/choice taken by the customer. It's difficult to predict the exact path a customer might take. That's why we need a journey discovery tool like PathFinder, which detects customer actions and builds maps accordingly:

When the company analyzes the paths, they find that online advertising leads to much better brand engagement than trade shows. They can thus make better decisions on their marketing spends, improve lead scoring for advertising leads, and set up better automation using the existing journey builder within CommandCenter.

Feature limits

	No. of PathFinders	PathFinder Versions	No. of States	Total no. of records per day
CRM-Enterprise	5	5	50	50,000
CRM-Ultimate	10	5	50	100,000
CRM Developer	2	5	50	20,000

Overall, journey discovery is a key tool to give us better insight into customer behaviour, and build more meaningful experiences for them.

To know more about the PathFinder feature, please refer to this help page.

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