What's new in Zoho CRM Winter '21

What's new in Zoho CRM Winter '21

Delivering the best experience, both to you and your customers, has been a cornerstone of Zoho CRM since our inception in 2005. With every release, our goal has been to make that experience richer. This year, we made a big stride in that journey with the launch of Canvas, the industry's first no-code CRM design studio. This allowed users to craft their own CRM experience and make Zoho CRM fit seamlessly into the way they work.



Now we're continuing the journey by adding client scripts, a pro-code tool that empowers businesses to build hyper-personalized, bespoke CRM experiences using the power of JavaScript. We've also introduced enhancements and new functionality across Zoho CRM to build on of the foundation of UX and CX we've built over the years.


Let's have a look at what's new!


Client Scripts


Client scripts empower your developers to use JavaScript codes to extend the capabilities of your Zoho CRM system to address niche business needs. Since the scripts are executed completely on the client side, your team can address a wide range of requirements through these low-latency scripts that perform actions like field validation, enrichment, auto-population, computations, and UI actions, as well as trigger widgets, flyouts, and functions as you work with Zoho CRM data.





Automation

Sales teams are successful when they are empowered to focus on what they do best, closing deals and building long-term relationships with customers. To these teams, CRM automation has become an indispensable part of their daily routine. Here's what we've added to help you automate your processes more effectively.


Multiple scoring rules


One of the best ways to help sales reps prioritize their prospects is through lead scoring. In Zoho CRM, you can now create multiple models that score prospects based on different factors and interactions according to the needs of the sales and other customer-facing teams in your business, to help prioritize the right prospects or customers.



Workflow failures and retries


Your workflows need to run like clockwork in order for your sales team to focus on your customers. When something goes wrong with a workflow, it can disrupt the entire sales process, resulting in fewer wins and poor customer experience. To help address these situations effectively, Zoho CRM gives you in-depth information about when and where your workflows fail, and all the records that are affected. Your team can use this data to fix the underlying issues and get your workflows up and running again.


*This feature will opened in phases to customers




Forecasting and Performance


Setting meaningful targets to measure performance against is key to maintaining the long-term health of your business. We're bringing some exciting changes to our forecasting and reporting systems, as well as introducing new components to help your business get granular when analyzing your business performance.


A new forecasting system built from the ground up


We've completely revamped our existing forecasting system to make it more robust and give more control to your business, allowing you to build multiple forecasts for different periods, leverage predictive AI to track where you'll stand at the end of your forecasting period, and drill down into the data to granularly compare your current performance with previous fiscal years.







Unlock a deeper level of intelligence with reports


The all-new Zoho CRM reports let you analyze, monitor, and track your business health while also providing you with the ammunition you need to make important decisions. The easy-to-use visual builder makes generating complex and precise reports a breeze. Get more granular access to your CRM data by viewing shared entries or unique entries in two or more related modules with the new inclusive/exclusive relationship tool. Expand your perspective and uncover deeper insights into your CRM data by joining multiple reports into one.






Segregate your sales data into zones. Focus on what matters.


When you work with high volumes of sales data, it can often be difficult to visualize the relationship between two dimensions just by looking at raw data in standard two-dimensional charts like bar charts or pie charts. The new zone component displays your data in separate zones so it is easier to understand and analyze the areas that are doing well and the areas that need your attention.








Eliminate points of friction for your prospects with webform analytics


Your webforms are often the first point of interaction for prospects in their sales journey. It's vital to ensure that them submitting their information and being added to your sales cycle is as frictionless as possible. We've added a number of analytical charts to help your team measure the drop-off and abandon rates of your webforms across different devices to help you identify and eliminate friction points for your prospects.









Intelligence


We have some exciting updates to Zia, Zoho CRM's AI sales assistant to bring new levels of insight and customer understanding, to help you build more meaningful and personalized customer relationships.


Better recommendations for improved conversions


With the introduction of Zia's recommendations last year, we aimed to help businesses make the right pitch to their customers to maximize conversions. This year, we're adding the following capabilities to help your sales team get the most out of Zia's recommendations.




  • Reference customers: Zia will make recommendations to new customers based on the purchase patterns of existing customers with similar profiles and provide relevant reasoning for each recommendation.



  • Recommendation notifications: Zia will collect information and automatically notify your sales reps when a recommendation is ready, making it easier for them to make pitches based on these recommendations when the time is right.



  • Automation for your recommendations: Build workflows that can automatically send the right communication to your customers based on Zia's recommendations. Send the perfect upsell offer to a high-value client whose membership renewal is coming up or send a re-engagement offer to a loyal customer who hasn't made a purchase in a while.





Let Zia tell you why


Zia offers a wide range of functions to make the life of your sales team easier. Zia predicts, recommends, assigns records, and more, but until now, your team only saw the end result. Now you can get a glimpse into the algorithm black box, so you can see what factors that contributed towards Zia making the recommendations, predictions, and assignments that your team relies on.





Omnichannel communication


In today's hybrid working environment, it's vital for sales rep to maximize benefits across all channels of communication when engaging with prospects. To build on the robust omnichannel communication platform that's already part of the Zoho CRM system, we've introduced a number of enhancements across our email and telephony systems to help sales teams be more effective.


Add a personal touch to all your emails


Personalized emails are key to building long-term trust with your clients, so why not add a personal flair to all your emails to define your identity and establish your brand identity in the minds of your clients? Customize every aspect of your emails from font styles and sizes to your email signatures for your individual email address and all your email aliases.






Get your business emails into the right hands


Depending on the roles of your CRM users and the nature of your email communications, you may want emails to be available to every user in your CRM, or keep them confidential and only available to a small group of key decision makers. Define your email sharing policy at the organizational level for each role and update the policy for users in bulk, so you can quickly set email sharing permissions for new employees or update them when users move to different roles in your CRM system.






Connect with multiple telephony vendors simultaneously


There's a whole range of reasons, from availability in all the countries you work in to cost of service, and more why it's not always feasible to depend on a single telephony vendor. Multi-vendor telephony support in Zoho CRM gives your business the flexibility to assign individuals or groups of users to different telephony systems and move users between different providers based on your business needs.





Kick off your call strategy with built-in telephony


With Zoho CRM's built-in telephony system, you don't have to worry about choosing and integrating a telephony provider. Purchase local or toll-free numbers for the users in your organization and assign unique outgoing numbers to help your sales reps build a personal connection with your customers.


*Feature will be opened in phases






Streamline and manage your sales calls effectively


Our native integration allows managers to monitor, coach, and help their reps to get better at sales calls. Zoho CRM allows them to keep an eye on how their reps are performing in their active calls, and manage calls that are in the queue waiting. Sales managers can also coach new sales reps as they progress through a call and jump in directly to take the lead when the situation calls for it.


*Feature will be opened in phases






User Experience 


This has long been an overlooked aspect of CRM solutions. In the pursuit of robust functionality, attractive prices, and strong market presence, businesses often overlook the experience these CRM solutions offer to their daily users. With the launch of Canvas, we wanted to help businesses improve the experience for daily users of Zoho CRM, and we're now introducing some intuitive functionality to make the UX even richer.


Color-coded meetings in calendars


Online meetings have become an integral part of today's hybrid working model. With sales reps engaging with prospects through online meetings more than ever, it is vital to offer them an easy way to track and prepare for them. Zoho CRM now allows sales reps to color code different meetings based on factors that are important to your business processes, such as whether they're online or in person. Now, even a quick glance at their calendar gives reps a clearer idea of all their upcoming meetings and what they need to prepare for.







Bring unique visual flair to your tags


When they're working with hundreds of records everyday, a unique visual identifier makes it easier for your sales reps to search, categorize, prioritize, and segment records efficiently. Associate unique colors with your tags so your sales reps can see details like priority, deal state, associated departments, and more at a glance.






For the administrators


CRM administrators have one of the most challenging jobs: keeping your CRM system running like a well-oiled machine. We're announcing some exciting updates to make their jobs easier with the winter 2021 release.


Access multiple CRM accounts with a common set of credentials


You can associate a user with multiple CRM accounts to allow business owners, upper management, and decision makers to manage multiple businesses or business units with ease. Users can switch between accounts quickly to make it easier to access key business data to help them understand growth and derive insights which can be used to prepare reports, agendas, and ideas for future planning, all with a single set of login credentials.







A new and improved testing environment for your customizations


Sandboxes are essential in a CRM for testing and pushing error-free customizations to your live production account. We've added a number of features to our existing sandbox to help your developers be more effective when building and testing out customizations. This includes the ability to run multiple sandboxes, deploy all or only some settings, import sample or partial production data, and a unified deployment log to track your changes from all your sandboxes.






We'll be going over all these features across 3 overview webinars, which you can register for at the below links:


 

Webinar 1 | Date: 21/01/22 - This webinar will cover multiple sandbox, email sharing preferences, multi-organization support and retry support for workflow failures.

 

Webinar 2 | Date: 28/01/22  - This webinar will cover the new forecasting and reports system along with the new analytical components and improvements made to Zia.

 

Webinar 3 | Date: 04/02/22 - This webinar will cover client scripts, color-coding meetings and tags along with enhancements to our email and telephony system.

That wraps up our Winter '21 announcement and we look forward to all your thoughts and feedback on these features and how they can be made better.


Happy selling,

The Zoho CRM Team











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