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.

Learn more about personalizing your email composer

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.

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.

Learn more about color coding your meetings

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.

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.

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.

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,