Zoho CRM Blueprint 3.0 — What's in store for you!

Zoho CRM Blueprint 3.0 — What's in store for you!

Hello everyone,

We hope all of you are doing well. We are excited to let you know that we have launched a set of useful enhancements in Blueprint. Here is a rather elaborate post on what those enhancements are and what to expect. Feel free to get back to us with any questions you may have.

Summary of enhancements:

  1. SLAs now support automated actions apart from existing default email alerts.
  2. "Same-state looping" has been introduced.
  3. The During Transition settings now let you mandate Tags.
  4. Introducing Automatic Transitions (Early access only*):
    Avoid process delays by automatically pushing records from one state to another after the passage of an acceptable time period.
  5. Introducing Mass Inclusion/Exclusion of records (Early access only*):
    Whether you want to include records into a Blueprint or take them out of one, you can now do so in bulk.

1. Automated actions now supported in SLAs.

SLA or Service Level Agreement in Blueprint, is a setting that enables you to keep a track of records that are falling behind in a process. How is this done?

By triggering a standard escalation alert to yourself or your team members, whenever a record has rested in a particular Blueprint State for more than a defined period. This way, you can take note of records that have stalled within a Blueprint and take further action on them before further delay.

Now in addition to standard email alerts, you can also now configure custom email notifications, tasks, field updates, run a custom function, or trigger a webhook as part of automated actions in SLAs.

For example, let's say that as per your process, you want to be alerted whenever a record has stayed in the Negotiation State for more than 5 days. For this, apart from the the default email alert you can choose to automate a field update where a field called "Urgency" gets updated from "Mild" to "Severe" whenever a record has stayed in the Negotiation state for more than 5 days. Later you can filter out records for which the urgency is severe and prioritise their transitions first.

2. Same-state looping

A process often contains steps which you have to attempt multiple times for it to be successful. A typical example would be an attempt to contact a customer. In order to gather their requirements you will have to call them. But often they may be unavailable or may ask you to call later. Unless you speak to them you cannot go to the next stage, so you have to stay in the same State until they answer. However your staying in the same state doesn't also mean you did not do your job — you just have to try multiple times until you are successful.

In such cases, you can now create a transition that "loops back" to the same stage. The From and To state is the same. For example, in the following deal follow-up process, you can use the "Retry contacting" transition infinite number of times, until you are successful in which case you will select Customer Available and progress further.

3. Mandate tags in the During Transition settings

You may now mandate tags as part of the During Transition section of a Blueprint. The transition owner would then be prompted to enter a value for tags in order to complete the transition.

4. Automatic transitions

Automatic transitions have been introduced in Blueprints, to help you combat process delays. Often, a record that traverses through a process tends to stagnate in a particular state and you may not even realise it. This causes unwarranted delays. One thing you can certainly do is set an SLA for the state and be notified whenever there's an escalation.

But ultimately, SLA is also a notification or a task/field update of sorts— the record at the end of the day, needs your manual intervention in order to progress further in the process. If you only want to be notified of escalations, you may configure SLAs. On the other hand, if you want the system to act and automatically move a record from one state to another at any point, you can now create automatic transitions.

So what are automatic transitions and how do they work?

An automatic transition is one in which a record in a Blueprint automatically moves from one state to another, after a specified "Wait" time has elapsed.
As per the process, in order for a record to go from State A to State B, you will have to perform a Transition A. If this Transition A has not been executed within a said time period, say, 5 days, then the Automatic Transition configured for that state will get executed and the record will be pushed forward automatically to another state in the Blueprint as per the configuration.

For instance, in the following screenshot, CRM will wait for one of the transitions to take place: Either "Confirm Interest" or "Drop deal". If no action is taken on this record until a said date, the record will be moved to the "Price Quote" stage automatically and the users can take it up from there.


To configure an automatic transition

Select the Automatic Transition checkbox as you create a regular transition.

Then, mention a "Wait time" and corresponding automated actions.

According to the following screenshot, the deal follow-up process flow has a handful of major steps to be performed before a price quote can be drafted — namely, Contact establishment, qualification, needs analysis and value proposition. If a particular deal has moved to the "Contacted" stage but the user has not taken the action required for Qualification, Blueprint will wait for 5 days and directly move it to the "Id.Decision Makers" state. From there the user concerned can take over drafting a price quote.



A price quote cannot be created without knowing requirements, contact details etc, so there the action items from previous states can also be done altogether at this point, without wasting any more time.

5. Mass Inclusion and Exclusion of records to a Blueprint

While creating a Blueprint for a module, you have the option to specify entry criteria. When you specify one, only records that meet these criteria can go through with the Blueprint.

Well, an important point to note is, only records that henceforth meet the criteria can go through with the Blueprint. So what about existing records? How can you get already existing records that qualify for the Blueprint into the Blueprint.

That is where the mass inclusion of records come in. With this enhancement, you can easily include a bulk of records by specifying your desired criteria. All you need to do is go to Bulk Include > define conditions to pull out the records you have in mind > click Include.

Also, if you have the need to "exclude" records in bulk from an existing blueprint, you can filter them out in a similar way.

When is it ideal to include/ exclude records in bulk?

  • Bulk inclusion: When you have created a new Blueprint and you have existing records that qualify to enter the Blueprint, you can include them in bulk.
  • Bulk exclusion: When you want to push records from one Blueprint to another, or you want to disassociate the records from a Blueprint altogether.
We hope you find these updates useful. If you have any questions or suggestions on this subject, please let us know by commenting below.

(*) Early access: Automatic Transitions and Mass inclusion/exclusion of records are early access features which will be enabled for those who have request them. This will be done in batches. 

If you are interested in gaining early access to these two features: SUBMIT YOUR REQUEST HERE. 

Further reading: 


    Access your files securely from anywhere

          Zoho Developer Community




                                    Zoho Desk Resources

                                    • Desk Community Learning Series


                                    • Digest


                                    • Functions


                                    • Meetups


                                    • Kbase


                                    • Resources


                                    • Glossary


                                    • Desk Marketplace


                                    • MVP Corner


                                    • Word of the Day



                                        Zoho Marketing Automation


                                                Manage your brands on social media



                                                      Zoho TeamInbox Resources

                                                        Zoho DataPrep Resources



                                                          Zoho CRM Plus Resources

                                                            Zoho Books Resources


                                                              Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                                                                Zoho Projects Resources


                                                                  Zoho Sprints Resources


                                                                    Qntrl Resources


                                                                      Zoho Creator Resources



                                                                          Zoho Campaigns Resources


                                                                            Zoho CRM Resources

                                                                            • CRM Community Learning Series

                                                                              CRM Community Learning Series


                                                                            • Kaizen

                                                                              Kaizen

                                                                            • Functions

                                                                              Functions

                                                                            • Meetups

                                                                              Meetups

                                                                            • Kbase

                                                                              Kbase

                                                                            • Resources

                                                                              Resources

                                                                            • Digest

                                                                              Digest

                                                                            • CRM Marketplace

                                                                              CRM Marketplace

                                                                            • MVP Corner

                                                                              MVP Corner





                                                                                Design. Discuss. Deliver.

                                                                                Create visually engaging stories with Zoho Show.

                                                                                Get Started Now


                                                                                  Zoho Show Resources


                                                                                    Zoho Writer Writer

                                                                                    Get Started. Write Away!

                                                                                    Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                                                                                      Zoho CRM コンテンツ






                                                                                        Nederlandse Hulpbronnen


                                                                                            ご検討中の方





                                                                                                  • Recent Topics

                                                                                                  • Subform Time field to string.

                                                                                                    Good afternoon All. I have a Subform 'Delivery_Receiving_Hours' that captures Day (Dropdown), Time_Open (Time), and Time_Close (Time). I need to capture this data and send it to a multiline field in the CRM. The code, posted below, below will capture
                                                                                                  • Data export

                                                                                                    I need to export our customer's data and projects' data for our purpose but am unable to export full data i only get around 3160 projects and around 2k customer can you please help me to get full data, please
                                                                                                  • Adjusting Physical Inventory

                                                                                                    Not getting very far with support on this one, they say they are going to fix it but nothings happened since November. Please give this a thumbs up if you would like to see this feature or comment if you have some insight. Use Case: Inventory set to be
                                                                                                  • Zoho Marketing Plus : Un outil tout-en-un pour la création de pages, la collaboration et la gestion du calendrier marketing

                                                                                                    Nous sommes ravis de vous présenter trois nouvelles fonctionnalités puissantes de Zoho Marketing Plus s’enrichit désormais d’un page web (l'éditeur de pages), qui vous permet de créer des pages attrayantes et à fort taux de conversion pour vos campagnes
                                                                                                  • Grouping payments to match deposits

                                                                                                    Is there a way to group multiple invoice payments together so they match credit card batches and grouped deposits in the bank account? Basically, we are creating invoices for each of our transactions, and applying a payment to each of the invoices. Our payments are either credit cards or checks. We want to be able to group payments together so when our bank account reflects a credit card batch made up of many transactions, or the deposit we took to the bank that has multiple checks from different
                                                                                                  • Employees can not add some expenses suddenly

                                                                                                    Zoho expense was working fine and whenever there was a new merchant, it would automatically add and also the same auto added in Zoho Books (due to merchant-vendor sync) untill now. From today, it is having problems in searching the existing vendors and
                                                                                                  • Zoho email setup in office365

                                                                                                    When i am trying to setup zoho mail setup using my domain in office365 and it is not working and it says that we couldn't log on to the incoming (IMAP) server and please check your email address and password and try again. I was able to login using my
                                                                                                  • iOS 10: Caller ID new feature?

                                                                                                    Hi, in the update history of the iOS App (for iOS10) - v.3.2 - i found the point "caller identification" has this feature been deactivated again? i cannot find anything on my iphone on how to activate this feature. or does it just work from the beginning?
                                                                                                  • Recommendations to store meeting notes for easy access from Contacts, Accounts & Deals module records?

                                                                                                    I would like your advice on how to achieve this use case for my organization. It’s related to where/how best to store meeting notes from a conversation with Contact(s) working at an Account (Company) in the context of a Deal. The ideal solution (from
                                                                                                  • Bank reconciliation. Match Transaction -filter

                                                                                                    When matching an imported bank statement file we only get a match if it is an excact match on both amount and date. Then a suggestions comes up with a very broad selection regarding amount, and no default "between" dates. I can then go an manually adjust the filter, and have to put in from-to amounts and dates. How do I set a default from-to date?  As an example, I would like the date to be +- 3 days, Thanks.
                                                                                                  • Added new staff but does not appear in other organization list

                                                                                                    Hi, I added the new staff under Sales Manager in the contacts, but it does not appear in the other organization list where I need to create a contact, and I can't select the newly added Sales Manager
                                                                                                  • Integrating Calendly with Zoho Calendar in Zoho Mail

                                                                                                    I moved my office into a business incubator space that uses Calendly for meeting management and events. Calendly doesn't have a integration with Zoho Calendar and vice versa. I was directed to Zapier for integration but it doesn't have an integration
                                                                                                  • Map fields from module X to a lookup field in subform in module Y

                                                                                                    Hi there In the 1st screenshot attached, you can see a subform in myLeads module. You can see that there is a number already filled there - that is the 'Property ID' and it is a single line field. It is the 'Property ID' of an entry I have in another
                                                                                                  • 🎄 Jingle, Mingle, and Automate: Spread Christmas Cheer with Zoho Desk Auto-Replies! 🎄

                                                                                                    Hello Everyone! Welcome to this week's episode of the Community Learning Series. Christmas is in the air, and I’m sure we can all feel the jingle and the mingle of the season! The folks at Zylker Techfix are no exception—they’re busy with holiday plans
                                                                                                  • how to create a new line in string in Client Script?

                                                                                                    I want to show an alert using client script, I need to add a new line in String, I assume I can use \n\n inside a string, but unfortunately it doesnt work ZDK.Client.showAlert("First Line \n\nI expect this is in second line");
                                                                                                  • Surely it's time Inline editing from views

                                                                                                    I think the first request I found for in-line editing from grids was approximately 12 years ago - that post was locked because it was suggested Zoho sheetview solved the problem. However, it's now 2024, and in-line editing from grids is just a basic expectation.
                                                                                                  • Multi branding issue with sender addresses

                                                                                                    Hello, I'm currently working on a project involving two (seperate) brands. Named 'Windeck' and 'Prolance'. They've chosen CRM Plus and I'm currently working on CRM, SalesIQ, Social and Marketing Automation. So far, I'm able to make enough separations
                                                                                                  • How to Replace an Assessment in a Job Opening on Zoho Recruit

                                                                                                    Hi everyone, I’m currently using Zoho Recruit and would like to replace the assessment linked to a specific job opening. I want to remove the existing assessment and add a new one. What is the best way to do this without losing any important data or affecting
                                                                                                  • Is there API Doc for Zoho Survey?

                                                                                                    Hi everyone, Is there API doc for Zoho Survey? Currently evaluating a solution - use case to automate survey administration especially for internal use. But after a brief search, I couldn't find API doc for this. So I thought I should ask here. Than
                                                                                                  • Email Campaigns overview page is missing SENT DATE and # people sent to!

                                                                                                    I would like to see the date the email campaign was sent, so I can understand and track when each email campaign was sent. Right now, unless you go to a contact who received a campaign, you cannot see when the campaign was sent (!!!!!!). So, if my boss
                                                                                                  • SEO recommendation of H1 tag for website tittle

                                                                                                    The exact words are “ It is good practice to place the page title inside the H1tag.” Now I already have one H1 tag on my website but it is not website tittle. In the SEO recommendation that is clear too that I have h1 tag on my page. Now I don’t know
                                                                                                  • How to choose other payment methodes than creditcards

                                                                                                    We have connected stripe as a payment provider in zoho books, booking, commerce and checkout. In stripe we selected al major payment methodes for Belgium (mainly bancontact). However, at checkout customers seems to have only the possibility to pay with
                                                                                                  • Introducing Zia LLM: Zoho’s in-house Generative AI solution for CRM's AI capabilities

                                                                                                    Hello everyone, We're excited to announce the launch of our in-house Large Language Model (LLM) by Zia to power our AI offerings. What is LLM? LLM stands for Large Language Model, a powerful AI technology that processes and generates human-like text based
                                                                                                  • How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?

                                                                                                    How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?
                                                                                                  • Can the code in my "Successful form submission" WF be invoked from a function?

                                                                                                    Can "Successful form submission" be invoked from a function? Data gets into a form manually and programatically. My code in "successful form submission" is good and I want to reuse it/call it, from another function which does Insert Into How to achieve
                                                                                                  • Kaizen #169 - Serialization and Schema Management in Queries

                                                                                                    Hello everyone! Welcome back to another post in the Kaizen series! In Kaizen #166, we discussed handling Variables in Queries and associating the query in Kiosk. This week, we will discuss Serialization and Schema management in Queries. Business Scenario
                                                                                                  • Introducing Keyboard Shortcuts for Zoho CRM

                                                                                                    Dear Customers, We're happy to introduce keyboard shortcuts for Zoho CRM features! Until now, you might have been navigating to modules manually using the mouse, and at times, it could be tedious, especially when you had to search for specific modules
                                                                                                  • Feature Request: Notebooks within notebooks (Tree-like structure)

                                                                                                    Dear Zoho! I already migrated all my stuff from Google Keep, Im really fond of Zoho Notebook so far. One thing that could make the service much more powerful is multi-level notebooks (or tree like structure). For example, entering into Notebook named
                                                                                                  • How to Retrieve and Store Expense Attachments from Zoho Expenses?

                                                                                                    I am currently syncing Zoho Expenses with our internal portal. During the sync process, I can successfully retrieve expense details, including document-related information such as file_name, document_id, and other metadata. My goal is to retrieve these
                                                                                                  • Can't get authorization for Sandbox environment using the self client

                                                                                                    Hello, After creating a self client, and following the client-credentials method (as it's not optimat to manually generate a code for every 10 minutes), after inputting the sandbox org id for SOID parameter, im getting the error: "error": "no_org". For
                                                                                                  • Create landing pages from Zoho Marketing Plus

                                                                                                    Hey everyone, Over the last few months, we've introduced various features and enhancements to bolster the marketing capabilities of Zoho Marketing Plus and make it simpler for everyone. To that end, we're excited to announce that Zoho LandingPage is now
                                                                                                  • How to Download Expense Attachments from Zoho Expenses Using Document Details?

                                                                                                    I am currently working on syncing Zoho Expenses with our internal portal. While syncing, I can successfully retrieve expense details, including document-related information such as file_name, document_id, and other metadata. However, I am facing an issue
                                                                                                  • Custom service report or Zoho forms integration

                                                                                                    Hello, So far the experience with Zoho FSM and the integration with Books has been good, however there are limitations with service reports. As with my business, many organisations send technicians to different types of jobs that call for a different
                                                                                                  • Email tracking subdomain

                                                                                                    The Email Tracking configuration screen of the ZeptoMail asks for a subdomain. I have gone through the documentation but could not find more information about how that subdomain is used by ZeptoMail to track the emails. Can someone throw some light about
                                                                                                  • Chart View group X-axis values above a value

                                                                                                    I have a data set with X values ranging from 0 up to 300-400, the Y values are an AVG of the values for the given X. I am interested in the values at the low end of the scale, say 0-10 and want the X values 10 and greater to be grouped into a single category
                                                                                                  • How do I get the Text Account name instead of the Reference number?

                                                                                                    Good Morning everyone! I am very new to zoho analytics. I'm trying to create some pivot tables and when I add the Account or Division name it comes up as a reference number. From my research, I need to use a lookup. I'm having a really hard time understanding
                                                                                                  • Custom API - Need to create a string return value, not only MAP

                                                                                                    @Support: When creating a Custom API it only allows a return from a function of MAP type. The service I'm using requires a string return, how can this be achieved?
                                                                                                  • missing video-urgent

                                                                                                    hi..I have a problem regarding zoho meeting. I already record almost 2hrs for my interview session. After end my session, i'm stop the recording. Its happened when i didn't received any meeting recording at my email.But i received recording 7minutes after
                                                                                                  • Duplicate New Ticket Emails

                                                                                                    I am getting two Ticket emails when a ticket is created. The first one goes to me as the Admin helpdesk@ And because I am an Agent as well it also send to helpdesk@, support1@ and support2@ Is there any way to stop this?
                                                                                                  • Ticket Response Email Template

                                                                                                    Is there a way to have an email template automatically selected when I click on Reply for a ticket?
                                                                                                  • Next Page