Wrapping up 2025 on a high note: CRM Release Highlights of the year

Wrapping up 2025 on a high note: CRM Release Highlights of the year

Dear Customers,

2025 was an eventful year for us at Zoho CRM. We’ve had releases of all sizes and impact, and we are excited to look back, break it down, and rediscover them with you!


Before we rewind—we’d like to take a minute and sincerely thank you for trusting us for your businesses. This journey of 20 years with you in it, really made it what it is—Momentous!

Click on the below image to view our CEO’s vision for the next decade.
20 years of Zoho CRM

Now, let’s recall those 2025 releases!

Zia played a transformative role this year:

  1. With the introduction of  Zia Agents: A standalone agent-building studio, came agentic experts pre-built for Zoho CRM. You just need to deploy, educate, and employ: your growth advisor, personal assistant, sales coach, quote specialists, and more are just a click away. 🧞‍♂
  2. Up next, AskZia. AskZia, our conversational AI assistant got a massive do-over. Powered by LLM, AskZia can respond to you—literally! It can bring insights to the table, dissect with human-like analyses, help you with solutions and lookup references on CRM features, execute actions like module creation, drawing of workflow rules, and creation and co-creation of reports, based on your prompts.
  3. Zia LLM to act the nerve center. From drafting contextual emails to generating insightful summaries, Zia LLM can be chosen to be the AI model for Smart Prompts, without needing any keys. Your salesforce, enabled with our in-house power!
  4. Talking about Zia enabling your sales force, let’s also take a look at conversation summaries. With conversations overflowing through the pipeline, keeping up with recency and relevance in context is quite a hassle. Zia can summarize your conversations exchanged in various channels, and interpret events, sentiments, and behaviors, so that you can make the next move, your best move.
  5. Furthermore, we enhanced our Churn Predictor for accuracy. You can learn if and why your customers are going to churn, backed by factors pointing to it. With usage data from Google Analytics and soon from MixPanel, you can bring in customers’ behaviors and indicators to contribute to churn prediction.
  6. To close with, let’s look at QuickML integration. Zoho CRM and QuickML already had integration facility called the Custom AI solutions. This year, we enabled a deeper integration with Custom AI Studio. Upon the existing AI solutions, you can tailor your intricacies and your business’ precise needs to leverage your ML pipeline effectively.
Zia was all about tailoring solutions for your business needs and aiding them with functionalities. But, CRM, as such, got a range of enhancements—big, small, and everything in between.



When it comes to relationship management, user maneuverability paves the way to get things done. This year we brought so many enhancements that improve usage, convenience, and collaboration.
  1. CRM for Everyone: The Customer-centric approach that put customers and their data in the center and helped converge all customer-facing teams around. Using Team Spaces and Team Modules, businesses can collaborate, give and take data and deliverables harmoniously without any duplication, dependency, or delay.
  2. Next Gen UI gave meaning to what was built for Everyone. With Folders and sub-folders, requests and controls, Admins can organize and manage data distribution among organization modules  and team modules efficiently.
  3. New module views like Grid View, Split View, Timeline View, and Chart View helped users see their data the way they’d like. These categorization offer great clarity and direction to their pursuits.
  4. The CRM calendar got a fitting face lift with a focus to collaborative schedule management.
  5. Zia Intelligent Character Recognition is a quicker way to digitize data in physical form into Zoho CRM. Data entry is no longer a day’s work.
  6. Envisioned your template design for Canvas? Simply upload the creation, Canvas is enhanced to convert as a template.
  7. Adding elements and formatting them to look appealing can drain the designer at work. The new Canvas components Flex and Grid will help relieve this fatigue. Now, create adaptive and responsive templates without any exhaustion.
  8. Interaction view in records’ timeline depicts your customer’s journey across touchpoints and interactions with your business. You’d have the entire story in just a scroll.
  9. Connected records for context management. As customers’ data grow across CRM modules, users can connect records related to the customer.
  10. Enabling the formula fields with “Now” function to auto-refresh. This way, all those values, you’d want to be current and updated whenever your view can be achieved. If you’d like these forever-refreshing values to stop executing, you can also freeze them based on conditions.
  11. Choose the data you’d like to rollup and formulate how you’d like them to be summarized using the custom rollup option.
  12. Design what you’d like to print from CRM using Canvas Print View. From Shipping labels to Mailing labels, Canvas Print view can help generate brand-bearing labels easily.
  13. Finally, Zia generating syntax for formulas. Brief what you’d like to achieve, Zia is equipped to build and generate formulas. For formulas with lengthier syntax, this update gives a great relief.


The unrevealed secret of winning deals is to quote faster and efficiently. This year we optimized CPQ and deal management such that you can be quick to quote!

CPQ updates:
  1. Select multiple offerings in one go when you determine configure actions.
  2. Identify duplicate line items when a CPQ rule targets the same action entity.
  3. Clone product configurations and price rules for every new quotes that you are building.
  4. Zia’s suggestions makes selling intuitive. Based on pattern, frequency, and fashion, Zia can suggest product configurations that could best fit a quote.
  5. Criteria can be added for price rule configurations, paving way to offer personalized pricing structures to select customers.
 
Guided Selling:
  1. Select custom module when you setup your guided selling flow.
  2. Choose Guided selling rules for secondary lookup fields.

Deal management:
  1. Team Selling and Deal Split is a major upgrade to 2025’s  list of items. Enabling deals to be shared among other players and splitting their responsibilities as percentage, helped sales leaders assess their collaboration and reward their contribution.
  2. When converting your leads in bulk, you can choose only those fields that are essential for mass conversion, offering convenience.


Automation has been businesses’ aide even long before AI rose for public consumption. Today, even with the rise of Agentic AI, routine, recurrent, and event-based predictable automations are continuing to function without diminishing power and it is because it is Basic 🤌🏻 . To what is already efficient, we have added more power this year.
  1. Automation across team modules. With multiple teams onboarded, processes commences or stops or diverts based on user events. With team module fields participating in automation infrastructure, efficiency is easily achieved.
  2. Connected workflows to achieve automated actions based on events in the connected records. It gives your business process autonomy.
  3. Approval process got great flexibility this year. Edit records queued for approval, assigning of process admins to pivot approval flow, mandating  approval from all users in a team or roles for big transactions, and seeking approvals from top-down are enhancements that streamlined approvals.


Business is a number game. Decision makers rely on these projected numbers to stake their money on. In 2025, CRM got an interesting line of updates that have to do with numbers, reporting, and analytics.

Sales Forecasting:
  1. Zoho CRM is for Everyone. But, not everyone that uses Zoho CRM would sell. Apportioning target or tracking the performance of those who have no role to play in the pipeline isn’t valid. That’s why, we have enhanced the Forecast feature with the ability to include or exclude roles, territories, and users from participating in the forecasting activity. No more misinterpretations of lack of performance.
  2. Forecast is about predicting the future revenue. But, basing this anticipation on the expected revenue will lead to disappointments. The quoted amount is almost never the closing amount, there will be external factors affecting the final price. The deal owners or their superior are the best people to predict the fluctuations and suspect a difference.. They can propose forecast adjustments to the projected revenue, so that decision makers can make informed decisions.
  3. A forecast report is the direct reflection of the sales reps’ performances. That too, when it comes to forecasting for a period, when consistency in achieving targets isn’t met, Zia can spot these deviation and notify the sales managers of the anomalies. From seasonal dips to suspicious change of pace, sales managers can identify the change of course week-by-week and act on them.
  4. We saw about how team can share deals and accomplishments. In addition to splitting their contributions, revenue from participating deals can also be split and recorded in the forecast report of the players of the deal team.

Analytics:
When you have a lot of data at play, you’d want it to be presented as a visual. Analytics play a major role in understanding the impact of data. We brought the following representations to tell different stories.
  1. Treemap chart to depict large hierarchical datasets as nested tiles.
  2. Waterfall chart represents how data fared through a sequence set of variables. Positively influencing variable will ascend and the negatively influencing variable will descend.
  3. Sankey chart to represent flow and trajectory of data across stages.
  4. Butterfly chart to compare and contend two participating entities across various attributes.
  5. Cluster chart to represent otherwise stacked data as distinct bars, enabling easy calibration of plot values.

Reporting:
Drawing context from reports with large data sets can be challenging and time-consuming. By creating category columns, you can easily organize report data into groups or categories for quick inference and analysis.



So, we come to the point where we’d like to see our Customers succeed. This year, we engineered a massive improvement to our CX portfolio:

🎉 Presenting them in order:
  1. ABM for Zoho CRM help give undivided focus to the most valuable customer accounts in your CRM database. Identify high contributors, enrich them with market intel, segment them with customers’ subjective and objective parameters, nurture them with personalized solutions, and close deals. This extension provides growth opportunities for your business and helps convert your customers as evangelists.
  2. When customer journey can tell a lot about customers’ experiences, getting them right is very important. The revamped Journey management tool CommandCenter 2.0 is built to delight your customers at every step of their way. With smooth interface, accessible controls, unbounded stages, easy capture of Signals and contextual actions, Journey Builder in CommandCenter lets you design your customer journey right from their Zeroth moment.
  3. What your customer say about your business reflects how they feel about your business. This year, we expanded the scope of our Voice of Customer solution. It is no longer only about customers, rather the consumer market itself—and, act on them!
    1. With VoC attributes supported in Advanced filters of participating modules, finding and acting on those customers that feel a certain way was made possible.
    2. With VoC in Kiosk,  users can lookup customers records based on their response and behaviors.
    3. With configuring any module as a data source, you can bring in All reviews—known and unknown, in addition to direct responses given about your business in the external world into analyses.
  4. WhatsApp integration is already a way of business communication in Zoho CRM. We brought the ability to initiate chats manually, reply as threads, and preview audio messages sent by your customers.
  5. LINE for business integration is new this year! LINE is a popular messaging service used by a substantial number of users in East Asia. To be able to reach out to the customers in that area and further nurture them from within Zoho CRM is a capability that became dear to many!
  6. While LINE for Business integration pleased many, WhatsApp integration is still a service many business rely on to nurture their prospects and customers across the globe. Having WhatsApp as a follow-up action in Cadences, will only boost the acquisition and conversion rate for your business.

End of the day, accurate and authentic data makes all of these possible. Zoho CRM had key enhancements in this aspect this year.
  1. Data migration, by itself is a herculean job. Miss one file, the whole database could jumble. Adding them anew or importing them separately will steal away its integrity and accuracy of it. And, so we brought the ability to Upsert missing data into migrated datasets. You can choose if you’d want to overwrite data accrued in place of the missing data or replace with original data, all while preserving its original timelines.
  2. Next,  GraphAPI integration. In addition to the existing IMAP and POP options, you can now integrate your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API. Going forward, this integration sets you up to access even smarter, faster, and more connected experiences when it comes to Microsoft services.


  1. Client Script support for notes, subforms, list pages in Canvas, and Portals. Customize your business-specific actions from within your web browser.
  2. Catalyst solutions provides ready-to-use, customizable solutions to streamline bulk data processing in Zoho CRM.
  3. Users can now execute client scripts anywhere in Zoho CRM using Client Script Commands, which are accessible via the command palette or personalized keyboard shortcuts. These commands enhance productivity and user experience.
 
And, a host of MarketPlace extensions listed specifically to work with Zoho CRM.

There—those are our highlights for 2025. 

With Zoho CRM completing 20 this ‘25, these enhancements added all the more power to our milestone records.

🚩 We closed  the year with 300,000+ businesses trusting us
🚩 We are recognized as industry leaders by Destination CRM
🚩 POSTMAN called us Winner of the 2025 Developers’ choice award
🚩 Recognized by industry experts like Gartner, Forrester, Nucleus Research, IDC, and Info-Tech research group.
🚩 Winning accolades by Gartner, Capterra, and G2 consecutively


All of these were possible only because of your trust. We thank you with all our hearts. Within us, we carry a passionate yet humble determination to solve your problems and grow with you for decades to come. 

Join our stride. Let’s walk side-by-side!


I am Saranya, signing off :)

Along with me, is the entire team from Zoho CRM wishing you a Happy New Year 2026!

    • Recent Topics

    • About Meetings (Events module)

      I was working on an automation to cancel appointments in zoho flow , and in our case, we're using the Meetings module (which is called Events in API terms). But while working with it, I'm wondering what information I can display in the image where the

    • How can I hide "My Requests" and "Marketplace" icon from the side menu

      Hello everybody, We recently started using the new Zoho CRM for Everyone. How can I hide "My Requests" and "Marketplace" from the side menu? We don't use these features at the moment, and I couldn't find a way to disable or remove them. Best regards,

    • Introducing Workqueue: your all-in-one view to manage daily work

      Hello all, We’re excited to introduce a major productivity boost to your CRM experience: Workqueue, a dynamic, all-in-one workspace that brings every important sales activity, approval, and follow-up right to your fingertips. What is Workqueue? Sales

    • PDF Annotation is here - Mark Up PDFs Your Way!

      Reviewing PDFs just got a whole lot easier. You can now annotate PDFs directly in Zoho Notebook. Highlight important sections, add text, insert images, apply watermarks, and mark up documents in detail without leaving your notes. No app switching. No

    • Ability to assign Invoice Ownership through Deluge in FSM

      Hi, As part of our process, when a service appointment is completed, we automated the creation of the invoice based on a specific business logic using Deluge. When we do that, the "Owner" of the invoice in Zoho FSM is defaulted to the SuperAdmin. This

    • Right Shift key not sending to Zoho Assist environments

      I'm unable to use Right Shift key in Zoho environments. Zoho environments are Win10. Computer I access from is Win 11. Issue started when I changed to Win 11. Have tried: - Multiple browsers - web client AND desktop client - 3rd party mapping tools to

    • How do you do ticket add ons in Backstage?

      Hi Everyone, If you wanted to have general admin tickets and allow for add ons, like camping, or car or Carbon offset. What would you do? Peace Robin

    • From Zoho CRM to Paper : Design & Print Data Directly using Canvas Print View

      Hello Everyone, We are excited to announce a new addition to your Canvas in Zoho CRM - Print View. Canvas print view helps you transform your custom CRM layouts into print-ready documents, so you can bring your digital data to the physical world with

    • validation rules doesn't work in Blueprint when it is validated using function?

      I have tried to create a validation rule in the deal module. it works if I try to create a deal manually or if I try to update the empty field inside a deal. but when I try to update the field via the blueprint mandatory field, it seems the validation

    • Pull cells from one sheet onto another

      Hello all! I have created an ingredients database where i have pricing and information and i want to pull from that database into a recipe calculator. I want it to pull based on what ingredient I choose. The ingredients database has an idea and i want

    • How can Data Enrichment be automatically triggered when a new Lead is created in Zoho CRM?

      Hi, I have a pipeline where a Lead is created automatically through the Zoho API and I've been trying to look for a way to automatically apply Data Enrichment on this created lead. 1) I did not find any way to do this through the Zoho API; it seems like

    • Emails Failing with “Relaying Issues – Mail Sending Blocked” in ZeptoMail

      Hello ZeptoMail Support Team, We are facing an email delivery issue in our ZeptoMail account where emails are failing with the status “Process failed” and the reason “Relaying issues – Mail sending blocked.” Issue Details Agent Name: mail_agent_iwwa From

    • How does Zoho handle support operations for our EU users?

      Dear Zoho users, We have some news and reminders about how we handle support operations for Zoho users in the EU Data Center. This is part of our broader commitment to ensuring GDPR compliance and providing secure data handling for all users. We'd like

    • Sender Email Configuration Error.

      Hello Team, Hope you are all doing well. We are in the process of creating the Zoho FSM environment in the UAE. When we try to add the sender email address “techsupportuae@stryker.com”, we receive the error message: “Error occurred while sending mail

    • Different Task Layouts for Subtasks

      I was wondering how it would be possible for a subtask to have a different task layout to the parent task.

    • Layout Adjustment.

      Hello Latha, Hope you are doing well. I wanted to check with you about adjusting the layout columns in the Service Report from the backend, as currently there is no capability for us to customize the layout from our end. Below is the output that I am

    • Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

      I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for

    • Anyone in Australia using Zoho Books AND has their account with NAB?

      Hi I have an account with both NAB and Suncorp. Suncorp transaction come in the next day however NAB transactions take 4-5 business days to appear. eg: A deposit made today in my Suncorp will be imported into Zoho tomorrow. A deposit made today to the NAB account will be imported maybe Saturday (Friday overnight). I have contacted both Zoho and NAB but noone seems to know why. I was just wondering if anyone else in Australia uses NAB and has this issue (or doesn't) maybe we could compare notes and

    • Zoho Often Lag

      Desk Team, We've noticed that Desk, Creator & other apps seems to lag more these days. We often refresh multiple times.

    • Offer already made- but I withdrew it

      I made an offer letter, but made a mistake on it. I withdrew the offer but now I can't recreate the correct offer. Zoho keeps saying that "A same offer has already been made". I look in the "offers" and there are NO offers (this is the first time I've

    • Importing into the 'file upload' field

      Can you import attachments into the file upload field. I would expect it to work the same way as attachments do, But can't seem to get it to work. Moderation Update: The option to import into File Upload and Image Upload fields has been supported. Read

    • Layout Rules Don't Apply To Blueprints

      Hi Zoho the conditional layout rules for fields and making fields required don't work well with with Blueprints if those same fields are called DURING a Blueprint. Example. I have field A that is used in layout rule. If value of field A is "1" it is supposed to show and make required field B. If the value to field A is "2" it is supposed to show and make required field C. Now I have a Blueprint that says when last stage moves to "Closed," during the transition, the agent must fill out field A. Now

    • Why is the ability Customize Calls module so limited?

      Why can't I add additional sections? why can't I add other field types than the very limited subset that zoho allows? Why can I only add fields to the outbound/inbound call sections and not to the Call Information section?

    • Zoho Desk blank screen

      opened a ticket from my email, zoho desk comes up blank, nothing loads. our receptionist also gets the same thing under her login on her computer. our sales rep also gets same thing on zoho desk at his home on a different computer. I tried clearing cache/history/cookies,

    • Exporting All Custom Functions in ZohoCRM

      Hello, All I've been looking for a way to keep about 30 functions that I have written in Zoho CRM updated in my own repository to use elsewhere in other instances. A github integration would be great, but a way to export all custom functions or any way

    • Optimum CRM setup for new B2B business

      Can some advise the most common way to setup Zoho CRM to handle sales for a B2B company? Specifically in how to handle inbound/outbound emails. I have spent hours researching online and can't seem to find an accepted approach, or even a tutorial. I have

    • filter on sheets mobile (iOS, iPadOS) does not work

      I have this issue on every spreadsheet, whether imported or created natively in Zoho Sheets. I can use on desktop without issue: desktop screenshot on iOS the filter dropdowns are not there and there is no way to add them mobile iPadOS looks the same

    • 【Zoho CRM】商談タブへのデータインポート

      Zoho使用前にエクセルで管理していた商談情報を、Zoho一括管理のため、商談タブにインポートしたいのですが、お客さまの氏名だけが紐づけられませんでした。 「Zoho CRMにインポートする項目を関連付ける」のところが画像のようになっています。 （弊社では、「姓」を「★個人データ名」という項目名に変更し、フルネームを入れて使用しています。） どのようにしたら氏名をインポートできるかご存じの方がいらっしゃいましたら、ご教示いただきたく、よろしくお願いいたします。 （投稿先が間違っていましたらご指

    • Canva Integration

      Hello! As many marketing departments are streamlining their teams, many have begun utilizing Canva for all design mockups and approvals prior to its integration into Marketing automation software. While Zoho Social has this integration already accomplished,

    • Can't edit Segments

      Happening with 2 different Zoho One environments, in different browsers. Please fix.

    • Zoho Sheet for Desktop

      Does Zoho plans to develop a Desktop version of Sheet that installs on the computer like was done with Writer?

    • Transfer ownership of files and folders in My Folders

      People work together as a team to achieve organizational goals and objectives. In an organization, there may be situations when someone leaves unexpectedly or is no longer available. This can put their team in a difficult position, especially if there

    • Consumer Financing

      Does Zoho currently have a payment gateway (such as Stripe, Square, etc) which offers financing for customers? So, let's say the estimate we give the customer is greater than what they can afford at the time, but we can sell the service now, letting them

    • Subform edits don't appear in parent record timeline?

      Is it possible to have subform edits (like add row/delete row) appear in the Timeline for parent records? A user can edit a record, only edit the subform, and it doesn't appear in the timeline. Is there a workaround or way that we can show when a user

    • Zoho CRM - Option to create Follow-Up Task

      When completing a Zoho CRM Task, it would be very helpful if there was an option to "Complete and Create Follow-Up Task" in the pop-up which appears. It could clone the task you are closing and then show it on the screen in edit mode, all the user would

    • Mandatory Field - but only at conversion

      Hello! We use Zoho CRM and there are times where the "Lead Created Date & Time" field isn't populated into a "Contractor" (Account is the default phrase i believe). Most of my lead tracking is based on reading the Lead Created field above, so it's important

    • Zoho CRM for Everyone's NextGen UI Gets an Upgrade

      Hello Everyone We've made improvements to Zoho CRM for Everyone's Nextgen UI. These changes are the result of valuable feedback from you where we’ve focused on improving usability, providing wider screen space, and making navigation smoother so everything

    • File Upload field automatically replaces spaces with underscores – support experience

      Hi everyone, I want to share my recent experience regarding the File Upload field behavior in Zoho Creator and my interaction with the Zoho support team. When a user uploads a file, the system automatically renames the document by replacing spaces in

    • Deluge function to copy parent record file upload field to child record file upload field

      I'm stuck trying to write a deluge function that is triggered via automation in child record "Appointments," confirms if a file is in file upload "Report" field of parent "Contacts" record via Contacts lookup field "Contact_Name". If no file is in parent

    • Zoho Books Sandbox environment

      Hello. Is there a free sandbox environment for the developers using Zoho Books API? I am working on the Zoho Books add-on and currently not ready to buy a premium service - maybe later when my add-on will start to bring money. Right now I just need a

    • Next Page