Zoho CRM - Improve Global Search for Names Containing Prefixes and Punctuation

Zoho CRM - Improve Global Search for Names Containing Prefixes and Punctuation

I recently raised an issue with Zoho Support after one of our clients ran into a problem with CRM Global Search.


A user was trying to find a Deal containing the name John O'Connor. They searched for Connor, but the Deal did not appear. It only appeared when they searched for O'Connor.


Zoho confirmed that this is expected behaviour because CRM Global Search currently works using equals and starts with matching rather than contains.


I understand the technical explanation, but I think the current behaviour creates a genuine usability problem and can result in false-negative search results.


If a user searches for Connor, and CRM contains a Deal called John O'Connor, I think most users would reasonably expect that Deal to appear.


This becomes particularly relevant with names containing prefixes or punctuation, for example:
  1. O'Connor
  2. O'Brien
  3. O'Grady
  4. D'Arcy
  5. McCarthy
  6. McDonald
  7. MacDonald
  8. Smith-Jones

A typical real-world scenario might be a customer phoning and saying:


"Hi, it's John Connor. I'm calling about my order."


The CRM user types Connor into Global Search and gets no result. From their perspective, CRM is effectively telling them that the record does not exist.


That can lead to much more than a slightly inconvenient search. The user may create a duplicate Contact or Deal, spend time manually searching different modules, tell the customer that their record cannot be found, or simply lose confidence in Global Search.

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Feature request


I would like to see Zoho improve the way Global Search handles names and values containing punctuation or common prefixes.


This does not necessarily need to mean unrestricted contains searching across every CRM field.


A more targeted solution could be to improve how values are indexed or tokenised.


For example:


O'Connor could be searchable using:
  1. O'Connor
  2. Connor

Smith-Jones could be searchable using:

  1. Smith-Jones
  2. Smith
  3. Jones

This could potentially be extended to other values containing punctuation where it makes sense.


I think this would retain the speed and relevance benefits of the existing search mechanism while making Global Search behave much more closely to how users naturally expect search to work.


For me, the key point is that Global Search should help users find records that already exist, even when they do not know the exact way a surname or value has been stored in CRM.


I would be interested to know whether other Zoho CRM users have encountered this, particularly with Irish or Scottish surnames, hyphenated names, company names or similar values.


If this would improve Global Search for your users too, please up-vote the idea.