Zia - Next Best Experience
Overview
In today’s competitive market, every customer interaction is an opportunity to build lasting relationships and drive growth. Zia’s Next Best Experience (NBX) transforms raw CRM data into actionable insights—enabling your team to nurture leads, retain customers, and close deals more effectively. Seamlessly integrated into your CRM, NBX continuously monitors data from leads, contacts, accounts, and deals to offer context-aware recommendations that empower you to craft personalized engagement strategies.
Zia’s NBX acts as a smart assistant. It analyzes interactions and behaviors to guide your team with clear actions based on past trends and real-time data. By leveraging detailed data—from lead sources and engagement scores, to custom KPIs, deal stages, and competitor signals—NBX ensures that every recommendation is relevant and contextual to the record. The more varied the data, the more accurate the suggestions.
Each suggestion also comes with a clear explanation, which boosts confidence in the suggested next step. This approach helps create a customer journey that is both responsive and strategically aligned with your business goals.
Every morning, your dashboard tells a story: which leads require immediate follow-up, which customers might need a proactive check-in, and which deals are poised for acceleration. In doing so, NBX removes the guesswork, providing a roadmap that lets your team focus on what truly matters—driving conversions and deepening customer relationships.
Using multi-module data for smarter suggestions
Zia’s Next Best Experience (NBX) helps you make smarter, more personalized decisions by analyzing data from multiple modules within Zoho CRM. NBX integrates engagement metrics, historical trends, and real-time customer behavior to deliver actionable recommendations. A key component of this is Voice of the Customer (VOC) data, which provides insights into customer satisfaction, feedback, and sentiment. These VOC insights are seamlessly combined with other data points to ensure that every suggestion is aligned with both customer needs and your business objectives.
Imagine starting your day with a comprehensive view of your pipeline accompanied by clear, data-backed directives. NBX delivers this by turning complex data into actionable narratives:
- Lead nurturing: NBX uses information such as lead source, score, demographic details, and engagement history (calls, emails, meetings) to determine when and how to follow up. For example, if a lead is marked as “warm” and displays frequent interest in specific product details, the system might recommend, “Contact to discuss custom pricing options,” citing increased inquiry activity and positive engagement trends.
- Customer retention: By tracking key account signals like interaction frequency, satisfaction scores, and historical support requests, NBX identifies when a typically engaged customer starts to dip. The system might then advise, “Schedule a call to address emerging concerns,” with an explanation highlighting a deviation in the customer’s usual engagement levels.
- Pipeline optimization: NBX examines deal-specific data—including stage, expected close date, deal value, and historical conversion patterns—to suggest precise actions. For instance, if a deal remains stalled in the negotiation phase, the system could advise, “Arrange a strategic meeting to resolve pricing barriers,” based on trends observed in similar successful deals.
NBX pulls data from key modules to guide your next steps.
Leads Module
NBX starts by analyzing essential lead details such as lead source, score, and status. It also factors in things like the last activity date and assigned salesperson. But it doesn’t stop there—NBX looks at how the lead has engaged with your business, whether through emails, calls, or meetings. Combining this with custom metrics like conversion probability, it figures out when to follow up or advance. So, when a lead is best suited for the next step, NBX will be right there to suggest the most impactful action.
Contacts Module
In the Contact module, NBX looks at how often your contacts interact with you, the quality of those interactions, and their role in the buying decision. It also takes into account previous meeting notes, satisfaction scores, and any concerns they've raised.
Accounts Module
NBX doesn’t just focus on individual leads or contacts—it also looks into your accounts. It pulls in key details like account size, industry, and last contact date. On top of that, NBX checks for any risk factors, like the chance of a customer churning. If an account seems to be slipping away or shows signs of disengagement, NBX can suggest a follow-up action to keep the relationship strong, whether that’s reaching out with a special offer or simply checking in to see if everything’s going smoothly.
Deals Module
NBX tracks your deals through every stage, from prospecting to closing. It checks details like deal value, expected close date, and the competitive landscape. By analyzing past deals and their conversion rates, NBX identifies exactly what action will help move a deal forward. So, if you’ve got a deal stuck in the negotiation phase, NBX might suggest setting up a meeting to tackle any points—based on patterns it’s spotted from similar successful deals.
Transaction Modules (Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices)
NBX also pulls in data from your transaction modules like quotes, sales orders, and invoices, to provide a full picture of how deals are progressing. It helps you stay on top of everything by suggesting follow-up actions, whether it’s nudging the customer to accept a quote or making sure an overdue invoice gets paid.
NBX doesn’t just rely on static data—it learns from every interaction, adjusting suggestions based on the current journey of the record. The more you use it, the smarter it gets, constantly adapting to provide the most relevant next steps. This reinforced automatic learning ensures that suggestions are always based on both past interactions and the customer’s current behavior.
While some records follow predefined paths based on the standard business requirements, such as those set up using Command Center or Blueprint, NBX allows for a more dynamic and personalized journey. If a lead’s behavior changes, NBX will adjust its recommendations accordingly. For example, if a lead starts showing interest in new products or pricing details, NBX will adapt and suggest more targeted actions, ensuring a fluid, personalized journey.
Business Scenarios
Case 1: Nurturing a high-priority lead
Case 2: Proactive customer retention
Case 3: Accelerating deal closure
Case 1: Nurturing a high-priority lead
Consider a scenario where a high-priority lead—flagged due to its impressive lead score and strategic industry alignment—has been interacting with your product demos without converting. NBX, using data from interaction histories and inquiry patterns, recommends, “Schedule a personalized demo with the key decision maker.” The widget explains that similar leads have shown improved conversion when a demo is promptly scheduled, and it provides data-backed insights to support this action.
Case 2: Proactive customer retention
A customer success manager may identify a normally engaged account that shows a recent decline in activity. NBX highlights this deviation by comparing current engagement data with historical trends. It then prompts, “Initiate a check-in call to address potential concerns,” ensuring that the drop in engagement is quickly addressed before any risk of churn escalates.
Case 3: Accelerating deal closure
In the case of a stagnant deal stuck in negotiations, NBX combines information from the deal stage, value, and historical conversion metrics to suggest, “Arrange a strategic meeting to resolve pricing concerns.” By basing its recommendation on successful patterns from similar deals, NBX helps the sales rep overcome common obstacles and push the deal toward a successful close.
The Next Best Experience widget
Each recommendation is displayed in a widget on the records' detail page. NBX supports multiple communication channels—from emails and telephony to business messaging and SMS, ensuring that the recommended action can be executed through the most appropriate medium. This multi-channel approach guarantees that your engagement is both timely and contextually relevant.
- On the widget, you can see the suggested action, along with an action button. This action button changes based on the suggestion.
- You can also click the Reason for Suggestion button for the reasoning.
- Additionally, the widget shows the last updated date and time of the suggestion, so you can see how recent or outdated it is.
- You can give the suggestion a like or dislike right from the widget to improve Zia's accuracy.
Configuration
NBX operates on a goal-based configuration model, where specific toggles—lead nurturing, customer retention, and pipeline optimization—are automatically mapped to their corresponding modules. This pre-mapping ensures that the system immediately begins processing records to generate relevant suggestions.
Enable Next Best Experience
To enable Next Best Experience,
- Go to Setup > Zia > Recommendation > System Recommendation.
- In the System Recommendations page, toggle Next Best Experience for Guided Selling.
- You can activate NBX with an overall toggle that triggers goal-specific toggles. For each goal (Lead Nurturing, Customer Retention, Pipeline Optimization), the system auto-maps the appropriate modules—leads, accounts & contacts, and deals, respectively.
NBX automatically begins pattern creation when minimum data criteria are met. If not, it enters a “waiting for data” mode.
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