Process management solutions in Zoho CRM are primarily categorized under business process management and customer experience management. 

While business process management typically deals with streamlining internal process flows for operations and compliance, customer experience management deals with optimizing the customer journey across business touch points in order to maximize customer experience. It deals with ensuring that the customer is acknowledged, guided and hand held along every step of the way in their buying journey. From these two perspectives, we have specific solutions in Zoho CRM under business process management and customer experience management.

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When to use: When you have a need to promote compliance across teams in your organization. If you need to streamline internal processes effectively in order to guide your teams, validate data entered in the CRM, collaborate among stakeholders/departments, automate routine action and ultimately ensure compliance, then Blueprint is your solution. 

Zylker Travels could have different processes for effective travel management and customer relationship building. For instance, they could have a travel enquiry management process based on the Enquiries module. They could have a Trip Management process for the Trips module. They could also have a customer ticket handling process for the Cases module and so on. This is because Blueprint directly addresses the concept of BPM and is designed for internal teams to adhere to processes and ensure compliance.

From that angle, here is a blueprint for Zylker's trip management in action.

 

When to use: If you want to set up a simple internal process for the manual validation of data entered into CRM, you may use approval or review process. Both approval and review processes automate the submission of data for the purview of the management based on specific criteria. Let's say you have a process guideline that says a discount of under 12% can be offered directly by the sales person but anything beyond this number should be approved by senior managers based on their discretion. In this case, whenever a deal reflects a more than 12% in the discount field, it should be automatically submitted for senior management's review/approval. For this scenario, approval and review processes can be configured. 

In both cases, the submission of records is automated for manual approval of the selected users. 

Approval process example: Whenever a trip with a discount of more than 12% is submitted, the trip gets submitted automatically for manual approval. Until it gets validated by a panel of approvers in a sequential or parallel manner and exits the approval process, it cannot be modified or deleted and will not participate in any other CRM functions. The approver can access the record from My Jobs module for approval or rejection. 

 

 

Review process example: Whenever an enquiry is added with Employee referral as the lead source, the name of the employee and a few other enquiry parameters are required to be reviewed by the sales manager. This review is important to consider referral discounts, upselling and cross-selling and other possibilities in the business. 
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Zylker Travels wishes to ensure that their customers are given a great experience across enquiry and trip booking and beyond. 

So here is a simple journey designed for them. Whenever an enquiry is created either via webform or other means in CRM, they automatically get a series of emails. If a customer successfully opens the introductory email and subsequently responds with a selection on their Preferred Destination survey, then they are automatically converted to a contact so that a sales person can handhold them further, and a trip record is created automatically under the Trips module. 

This journey could be extended further to proceed to handle escalations filed by the customer and further retention efforts such as feedback survey triggers and loyalty programs— however for the sake of this example, let's see how this simple flow works when in action. 

Here is the backend Journey Builder flow to ensure this seamless orchestration of engagement actions. 

So, a Journey Builder could span across touch points in the customer lifecycle and attempt to deliver what they need at the right time and also ensure that no customer is left alone or detached from the business at any given point.

Path Finder is an out-of-the-box solution for you to plot your business touch points and figure out how your customer traverse between those touch points. Do they visit your website and then drop an email and then wait for a call? Do they spend a lot of time on your website and drop away after that? In that case, that is a good point to plant a live chat widget and reach out to your visitors. 

So Path Finder helps you plot your business touch points and discover valuable insights about how your customers and prospects communicate with your business across these touch points and how they call connect in the form of a "path". This could help you unearth meaningful truths and equip you with the knowledge required to make informed decisions. 

This could also potentially help you improve your customer journey. For example, you could understand that missed chats is an important touch points for which you may not have configured any engagement plans in your Journey Builder. With the Path Finder insights as solid source of truth, you can go ahead and configure chat responses and other plans in your customer journey. This way you stop operating based on assumptions and have detailed insights to back you up on your decisions. 

Cadence Studio is Zoho CRM's out-of-the-box solution for streamlining customer follow-up conversations. To put things in perspective, Cadence studio could be seen as a subset of the Journey Builder. If your requirement is only to streamline follow-up responses, then Cadence Studio is the right solution for you. If, apart from follow-ups, if you want an end-to-end journey mapping to be made and ensure customer experience is maximized, then as you know, Journey Builder is the right solution.

Here is a simple follow-up sales cadence to make sure that a combination of email, task, or call actions are created for each customer based on their response to a previous communication attempt. You can enroll your customers into a cadence with an objective—such as receiving a response to an email or a call. Once that response has arrived, it means the objective of your cadence is met, and that will drop the customer out of the cadence, which here is called un-enrolment. Until this objective is reached, you can continue to orchestrate a series of follow-up attempts as seen fit.