Today, customers want transparent, fast, and personalized experiences when buying from businesses, and are increasingly unforgiving when it comes to delays and friction. The sales team collaborates with several other teams to create these experiences. This partnership may occur on a consistent basis (such as the delivery team fulfilling an order after a sale is finalized) or sporadically (like involving the compliance team to address a specific customer's safety worries). Rising customer expectations means that the cost of poor coordination within an organization becomes increasingly hard to ignore.

Customer-related work in an organization is usually managed in multiple tools due to the involvement of various teams. These tools could range from sophisticated, customizable software such as a CRM for the sales department to the ubiquitous spreadsheet used by the delivery team to track deliveries, as well as the different communication tools like chat and email utilized by all teams for internal collaboration.

Using multiple tools can result in teams losing context for their work, experiencing delays when switching between apps, facing challenges in collaboration due to requests going back and forth using different tools, and more. To avoid this, businesses must customize and integrate these various tools. This requires time, effort, and money, including the cost of acquiring tools and paying multiple admins to maintain those tools and integrations.

Wouldn't it be easier to provide great customer experiences if we could simplify our tool set and bringing as much customer-related work as possible into the CRM?

To do this, the different teams that perform such work must work within the CRM, bringing their data and processes into it. Teams typically don't do this because they prefer to have control over the tools they use to monitor their customer-related tasks. On the other hand, CRM admins value reliability and security when managing the CRM, as it contains customer and account information. Giving admin-level power to multiple users or teams goes against the principle of least privilege and raises privacy and security risks. Overpowered users could unintentionally cause harm by wielding their immense power without realizing it, even in the absence of malicious intent.

CRM admins prevent these problems by restricting teams from making changes to the CRM. Non-sales teams struggle to work in the CRM, as even minor changes require the attention of busy CRM admins who are already handling multiple similar requests. As a result, they eventually switch to tools that are more easily accessible and under their full control.

So, to simplify our tool set, we need multiple teams to move into the CRM. For multiple teams to move into the CRM, they should have enough power to bring their data and processes into the CRM but not too much power that could potentially cause harm as feared by admins.

We'd like to present CRM for everyone as Zoho's solution to cut this Gordian knot.

With this update, teams will be able to manage their work and processes in a brand-new kind of module called Team Modules. These modules are specific to their teams and not to the organization as a whole. Learn more

They can operate in specialized Teamspaces that contain team modules for monitoring work and organization modules for added context. Learn more

All of these capabilities also are presented to you in a refreshing Next Generation UI, with intuitive shortcuts among other benefits. Learn more

After teams move in, they can streamline collaboration by adding users as requesters to team modules tracking deliverables. With that done, requests can be easily raised and efficiently monitored in the Requester tab, available to all users. Learn more

CRM admins will retain control of critical modules like Contacts, Accounts, and Deals (called organization modules) that contain the context needed by multiple teams to do their work. Instead of being swamped with multiple change requests by different teams, they can focus on tweaking the CRM to meet company-wide objectives.

Access to a teamspace can be managed by teamspace admins to restrict unauthorized users from viewing the data. The organization modules visible in the teamspace will be based on your profile permissions set by CRM admins. Your access to team modules within the teamspace will be determined by your role in each specific team module as assigned by the admin of that module. In short, everyone will have access to the data they require, no more and no less.

Users from customer-facing teams can quickly log into the CRM and work within their Teamspace. Within a team module, they can switch to a view that suits them (Kanban view, list view, canvas list view, canvas table view, canvas tile view, Zoho Sheet view). We've even included a new view called chart view to help users visualize their module data as charts within the module itself!

Users can minimize time spent switching apps as their work, context, and collaboration are present within the CRM. If they need to request something from another team, they can smoothly move to the Requester tab and raise a request there. If they need to make a change to a team module, they can simply request their team module admin (a member of their own team). For a large team that wants to track such requests, a dedicated team module can be used for handling intra-team requests.

Compare this to the experience of logging into the CRM to view account details, transitioning to the work management tool to track work progress, initiating a chat conversation to make a request, and accessing the internal IT or operations portal to request a change that will require weeks to implement. Working this way is difficult once you have experienced the capabilities of our solution.

We hope CRM for Everyone will facilitate increased adoption of the CRM by multiple teams and help them quickly collaborate at scale, thereby providing amazing customer experiences at lower cost and with a simpler tool set.

​For learning more about working with team modules, see: Working with team modules.
For instructions on creating, editing, or deleting team modules, see: Configuring team modules.
To know about the various options available in the re-designed user interface, see: Navigating the Zoho CRM interface.
To setup teamspaces, see: Teamspaces.
To learn about chart view and for a 360 degree view of customer interactions, see: Chart View and Interactions tab respectively.