Introducing Zia Strategy Influencer for Zoho CRM

(Last Modified on 22/08/2023): The Strategy Influencer feature is now available to all customers.

Hello everyone,

We are glad to launch Zia Strategy Influencer, an AI-derived strategy prediction analytics in Zoho CRM, for administrators, which provides prescriptive and descriptive insights on your organization's business trends and patterns. Using Zia's AI capabilities, it helps you understand the different factors affecting your business positively and negatively to take necessary corrective actions. It provides these insights in the form of 5 exclusive components to plan strategies, find anomalies affecting the target, and identify top contributing fields towards your goals.

Why Zia Strategy Influencer?

Designing and implementing effective goals are key for your business to flourish. To set your goals, it is important to have a clear understanding of your organization and the respective metrics that impact its goals. Zia Strategy Influencer leverages the power of AI and provides a holistic picture of where your business stands with respect to your goals, as well as what you can do to achieve and exceed them.

The below gif provides you with a basic idea of how Zia Strategy Influencer can help you :

Let us now explore the feature in a detailed manner.

Zia Strategy Influencer

Let us consider that you want to set a target for the total revenue from your deals in your organization. You would need relevant insights about your organization to set and achieve the most suitable target. You can create a Zia Strategy Influencer analytics as shown on the screen below :

Strategy Influencer Name - Define the name of the Zia Strategy Influencer
Select metric - Select the module for which the Zia Strategy Influencer is to be created. Then select the criteria for which the prediction is to be done, in this case, the ''Sum of Amount''.
Associated date field - Define the date field based on which the prediction is to be done for the intended time period, for example, this week. In this case, it is "Closing date'', and hence all the records having closing dates this week will be taken into consideration as part of the contributing factors.
Objective - Select whether the increase in value should be considered as a positive or negative trend. For example, in this case, where the measure we have chosen is "Sum of Amount", you can select the increase in value to be positive, since an increase in value in this case would mean more revenue. Else, if we had another case, where the measure would have been "Sum of Lead Conversion Time", then an increase in value would mean the lead conversion consumed more time. In such a case, you can select the increase in value to be negative.

Once you create it, Zia will scan through your existing records in the Deals module and provide you with insights by predicting an overall target and the various contributing factors that impact it. Let us now dive into how your Zia Strategy Influencer insights are displayed.

Components of Zia Strategy Influencer

The insights in the Zia Strategy Influencer are provided across 3 major components namely :

Target Contributors
Anomaly Finder
Gap Analyzer
Predictor
Prescriptor

Target Contributors

The target contributors component breaks down and lists the individual contributing factors that impact the overall target to be achieved. It provides you with details of the expected target that each individual contributing factor needs to achieve, in combination with the rest of the contributing factors, for you to hit your overall target.

It also displays how much has actually been achieved against the expected target value for each contributing factor. This helps you analyze your performance and incorporate necessary actions required to achieve your target.

Apart from these, it also displays trend icons that represent the impact of those contributing factors on your overall target, either positive or negative. And in case you feel the predicted target or any of the contributing factors do not align with your actual business scenarios, you can manually adjust them in the target contributors component based on your requirements. Strategy influencer accordingly adjusts the main or contributing targets based on where you adjusted the value.

You can edit your overall target, any of the individual contributing factors, the expected values for each factor, and also select which contributing factors should be part of your target contributors component.

Note : You can select only up to 15 contributing factors in the target contributors component.

Anomaly Finder

There might be cases when you wouldn't have achieved your desired target and it might have a significant negative impact on your business. On the other hand, there might also be instances where you would have well exceeded your expected performances. In such cases, it becomes important that you know the factors that were mainly responsible for these positive or negative deviations.

The anomaly finder component lists down the contributing factors from the target contributors component, that had caused a significant positive or negative trend relative to the predicted overall target. The anomaly finder provides details including the reasons for the anomaly, the expected and the achieved targets, and also the impact amount on the target, for the selected time period.

These insights help you in determining the reasons for the anomaly, analyzing the impacted aspects of your business, and implement suitable strategies to achieve your business targets.

Note : If all of your actual values met with the expected values of your target contributors component and your overall target is met for the duration, then the anomaly finder will report no anomalies for that duration.

Gap Analyzer

The Gap Analyzer component identifies disparities between the projected and the real target values for a specific date, week, or month. It elaborately displays the reasons for gaps during a particular period of time based on the value of the gap.

Predictor

The predictor provides you with the top picklist and lookup fields that contributed the most towards formulating the contributing factors that impact your overall target. This enables you to get a clear idea of the categories that impacted your target the most.

The predictor component displays the predicted and achieved targets for individual field values of the top-contributing picklist and lookup fields identified by Zia and its impact during different time duration. Similar to the target contributors component, you can edit individual contributing factors as per your needs. In this case, the "Customer Type" field is displayed.

It is also possible to include another top picklist or lookup field identified by Zia, by cloning the predictor component. In this case, we can additionally include the "Industry" picklist as well.

Notes :

The predictor component identifies up to 4 top picklist/lookup fields out of which you can use a maximum of 2 picklist/lookup fields for your predictions.
There can be a maximum of 15 values for each picklist/lookup field.
If there are no picklist/lookup fields that contribute to the target, the predictor component will not be generated.

Prescriptor

The prescriptor component combines predictive and descriptive analytics for a target. It covers three main areas:

what should be done each day to achieve a predicted target for a week/month/year
what went wrong in the previous data
what can be done to improvise in upcoming days if a daily target is missed.

Updating the Zia Strategy Influencer

The overall target, the contributing factors, and the values do not auto-update themselves based on everyday business performance. You will have to retrain Zia to update the Zia Strategy Influencer with the latest insights.

The Retrain Zia option recomputes your data and updates your analytics with the latest insights. The option to retrain will be available once in every 15 days.

How is Zia Strategy Influencer different from Forecasts?

Both forecasts and business projections are used for futuristic predictions and goals. For both forecasts and strategy influencer, Zia suggests targets. But in the case of forecasts, it lets you set your own or Zia suggested targets and the corresponding prediction criteria to track organization performance.

While in the case of strategy influencer, it rather provides you a predicted target and insights on the factors affecting the target for the metric in an organization selected by you. It also allows you to play around these influencing factors in combination with other factors and their effect on the target. The strategy influencer is more like a referential information for you to know how to achieve your targets.

You can, in fact, make use of the insights from the Zia Strategy Influencer analytics to design suitable forecasts for your organization's needs. To make this easier, we will also be enhancing forecasts by tightly integrating strategy influencer with it.

How is Zia Strategy Influencer different from Prediction Builder and Recommendation?

Zia's prediction builder lets you build custom predictions for your business. It provides predictions based on the field in any module specified by you. In the case of Zia's recommendation, it uses AI to study and analyze customer behaviors and trends to provide relevant product recommendations.

The difference lies in the fact that both the prediction builder and recommendation provide record-level insights, i.e. based on the module and field selected, the predictions and recommendations are provided with respect to each individual record that is part of the selected module. These predictions are used when you need record-specific predictions, for example, when you want to refer to predictions for a specific customer based on their unique behaviors and patterns.

While in case of Zia Strategy Influencer, it provides organization-level analytical insights to achieve the target based on the module and field selected. You can use Zia Strategy Influencer when you need predictions, and prescriptive and descriptive insights for your organization as a whole.

Feature Requirements

You need a minimum of 5000 records spread across at least one year in your organization for Zia to assess your goals.
This feature is available only for customer accounts in Enterprise and Ultimate edition accounts with more than 20 users.
Only users with an Administrator profile can access this feature.
This feature is available only for English language users. The super admin and other admin users need to be English users.

We look forward to your feedback on your Zia Strategy Influencer experience. To explore the feature in detail, please refer to this help documentation.

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