Customer Management: #6 Common Mistakes in Customer Handling

Managing customers doesn't usually fall apart overnight. More often, slight gaps in the process slowly become bigger problems. Incidents like missed follow-ups, billing confusion, and unhappy customers will lead to revenue loss. Many businesses don't realise what's going wrong until customers start slipping away.

Here are some of the most common mistakes businesses make when onboarding and managing customers.

Treating Customer Onboarding as a One-Time Task 

Many businesses see onboarding as "done" once a customer is added and billed. But customers come in through different channels. Sales calls, website signups, trials, and in-app. Forcing all of them into a single onboarding process creates confusion and error.

You'll often hear:

"I thought this customer already existed."

"Why do we have three records for the same customer?"

Zoho Billing supports multiple onboarding sources, sales-driven, self-service, API based and bulk import, which makes it easy for businesses to onboard customers into the system naturally without breaking internal workflow. This ensures onboarding remains consistent as acquisition channels expand.

Letting Customer Data Unorganised 

As businesses scale, customer relationships become more complex. Some customers represent multiple branches. Others belong to specific categories, such as resellers or premium clients. Without structure, it becomes difficult to track who owes what and which terms apply.

Teams start asking:

"Which invoice belongs to the parent company?"

"Are these customers eligible for the same pricing?"

Zoho Billing's Customer Hierarchy & Customer Groups features bring order to growing customer data. Hierarchies help manage parent-child relationships, while customer groups let you apply pricing, payment terms, etc., consistently across similar customers.

Handling Customer Requests Manually 

Customers frequently request basic actions such as downloading invoices, checking subscription status, updating billing details, or resetting passwords. When all of this goes through your support team, response times slow down, and customers get frustrated.

Common complaints sound like:

"Can you resend my invoice? I emailed yesterday. Why haven't I heard back?"

The Customer Portal feature in Zoho Billing shifts control to customers. They can view invoices, manage subscriptions, download statements, make bulk payments, update details, and reactivate subscriptions. This reduces dependence on support while improving transparency and trust.

 Losing Customers for No Real Reason 

When the trial expires or the payment fails, businesses often take extreme action, either by cutting access immediately or letting the unpaid subscription linger indefinitely. Both approaches lead to churn or revenue leakage.

Sales teams often say:

"We meant to follow up, but it slipped through."

The Free Plan option in Zoho Billing acts as a safety net. Trial users or customers with failed payments can be automatically moved to a limited-access free plan instead of being cut off completely. This keeps customers engaged and creates opportunities to convert or recover them later.

Poor Handling of Payment Failure 

Payment failures are inevitable, but many businesses treat them as a one-off issue. Without a proper retry or reminder strategy, customers unintentionally churn, even when they are willing to pay.

Customers often say:

"I didn't even realise the payment failed."

With Dunning Management, Zoho Billing automates reminders, retries failed payments, and escalates communication based on configurable rules. You can also set up a secondary payment method to increase the likelihood of successful collections before cancellation.

Not Knowing The Customers At Risk 

Many businesses react only after the customer leaves. By then, it's already too late. Without visibility into churn signals, teams miss opportunities to step in early.

This leads to hindsight comments like:

"We didn't know they were struggling."

Zoho Billing provides Reports, Churn Reports, including Under Risk Report & Renewals report that highlight customers with failed payments, downgrades, or cancellations. These insights help businesses proactively reach out, resolve concerns and prevent churn.

Making It Hard for Customers to Return 

Customers may cancel for valid reasons, such as budget cuts, seasonal slowdowns, or internal changes. When returning requires starting from scratch, many don't come back.

Customer hesitates:

"Do we have to set everything up again?"

With In-term Reactivation in Zoho Billing, customers can resume a cancelled subscription without changing billing cycles or creating new invoices. This makes reactivation simple, quick, and frictionless, especially when enabled directly through the customer portal.

Being Aware is the Key 

Customer management challenges rarely stem from a lack of intent; they come from disconnected systems, manual processes and limited visibility. Zoho Billing addresses these gaps by bringing structure, automation and flexibility across onboarding, billing, lifecycle management and retention.

By avoiding these common mistakes and using the right tools at the right time, businesses can reduce churn, improve customer satisfaction, and build relationships that last longer than a single invoice. 

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan. S

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• RouteIQ for Zoho FSM

  Beste, Zou wel top zijn dat we een RouteIQ hebben voor FSM aangezien we constant moeten zien wat de beste route is voor onze monteurs. Nu moeten we een speciale aparte programma hebben om de beste route te berrekenen voor onze monteurs aangezien de planning

• Export Tickets from the Help Center

  Hello everyone! We are now allowing end users to export tickets directly from the help center. The ticket export allows users to: Filter tickets by Department, Priority, and Account before exporting. Download files from Export History (Setup > Data administration

• Is it possible to remove filtering options?

  My CRM has a lot of custom fields that should not be used in filters or views. Fields that are automated and exist only to store temporary values that get used in functions. These create a lot of noise in the list of fields to filter. Isn't there any

• Function #18: Associate invoice templates automatically based on customer language

  For businesses dealing with a diverse linguistic clientele, it becomes crucial to send out invoices in the customer's preferred language to ensure effective communication. This requirement can be handled in Zoho Books by creating invoice templates in

• Changing field types

  Question im a Zoho CRM user and curious, if I change a flied type from single or multi line text to a URL field type will i lose the data in the field or will it be converted to website link automatically. Thanks

• Quote PDF – Header image stopped rendering suddenly

  Hello Zoho Support Team, We are facing an issue with Quote PDF templates in Zoho Books. Previously, images added inside the Quote header HTML were rendering correctly. However, recently the header image is no longer appearing, while header text still

• Changing Default PDF Name

  Is it possible to change the default name of a PDF? As of right now, all of my quotes are named 'QT_$QuoteNumber' (i,e: 'QT_19803471298374) - would it be possible to change this to: '$CompanyName - $AccountName - $QuoteNumber' for instance?

• Tip 2: Recursive functions in Deluge: How to dynamically run a function for a specified number of times.

  Hi folks, As part of the Zoho Creator - Tips and Tricks series every fortnight, we are back today with a new tip on Recursive functions.  Let us first quickly understand what Recursive functions are: A function that calls itself one or more times is known as a Recursive function. That is, you can execute a function to perform a particular action a specific number of times. And, at the end of each iteration, a new output is generated. Recursive functions are commonly used by programmers as it enables

• Function #48: Manage fixed installment payments using Zoho Books

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! Businesses offer installment payment options to their customers, particularly for expensive purchases, to ease the financial burden on them. By breaking down the total cost into smaller, more manageable

• Spotlight series #6: The Show app for Android TV has a new look!

  Hello everyone! We are delighted to introduce our revamped and redesigned Show app for Android TV.  Smart TVs are exploding in popularity. Android TV alone has over 110 million active monthly devices. Zoho Show, as part of a constant effort to improve

• Can’t create alias “Email alias already exists”

  Hi, I’m trying to create the following alias for my domain email. contact@ personal@ private@ But I get a email alias already exists. I had a soho account previously which I deleted which I suspect is causing the issue. Can someone assist? Kind Rega

• Appraisals - Order of Previous Reviews Should Be Newest to Oldest

  The new Zoho People layout generally does a decent job at providing the necessary information for performing appraisals of employee performance. One example of this is the Previous Reviews section: This information is helpful when conducting a review.

• Paging through API results. a major gap in your documentation.

  There is no way for me. to get all of my data through a single API call. Typically REST APis have mechanisms for paging through API results. But the documentation for the API I am using: https://desk.zoho.com/DeskAPIDocument#Introduction Has no mention

• Recurring invoices were generated with old template...

  I have recurring invoices setup. Ones generated on 10.20.2025 used the modified template I had used. But for some reason, on the ones created on 11/20/2025, it seems the invoices created reverted to the previous version of the invoice template. Notably,

• Tip #54- Exploring the Files Icon in Zoho Assist- 'Insider Insights'

  As we’re already in mid-December, it’s a good time to take a closer look at one of the most useful options in the Zoho Assist remote support dashboard—the Files icon. To get started, log in to Zoho Assist using your credentials. Once you’re in, navigate

• Tip#47: Estimation planner

  Sprint planning becomes easier, smoother, more collaborative and more accurate with the Estimation Planner extension. Most work items involve multiple users, and each user's role and effort vary. To provide an unbiased and fair estimation point to the

• Time Tracking on Iphone doesn't stop

  When I start a time tracking session the timer starts as expected. However when I hit stop, the timer remains on that project. The only buttons available are discard and start. Start runs the timer more and discard says it will throw away the data from

• Zoho Sign - Zoho CRM extension upgrade

  Hi everyone, We've updated Zoho Sign extension for Zoho CRM with significant internal changes. Impact on existing Zoho Sign extension users Users using the extension without customization If you are using the integration without implementing Zoho Sign's

• Group by Owner/ Owner Kanban /Group by Custom Field

  Hi, We are missing the option of viewing Tasks grouped by their owner, as it is an essential function for us to manage our employees' working tasks. We find it hard to inspect what are the tasks that our employees are working on.  We are seeking an option

• Flow using way too many tasks

  I built a flow that is using way too many tasks for what it is doing. I reached out to support a week ago but never heard back so hoping the community can help. Does a filter count as a task? I am seeing tons of records filtered with < 1 Sec Time Taken

• Regarding the integration of Apollo.io with Zoho crm.

  I have been seeing for the last 3 months that your Apollo.io beta version is available in Zoho Flow, and this application has not gone live yet. We requested this 2 months ago, but you guys said that 'we are working on it,' and when we search on Google

• Start Workflow from Deluge Script

  I have developed a customized process from our CRM that leverages a deluge script to create a statement of work document. Once the document has been created via the merge and store function, I would like the ability to start a workdrive review & approve

• Saved Sections?

  In sites editor, the + button reveals options to add a section, element, etc. It includes Saved Sections, but I can find no way to save a section I've already created. Otherwise, is there a way to copy a section from one page to another?

• Marketer's Space: Unable to select a sender address? Here's the fix

  Hello Marketers, Welcome back to yet another post! So you've added a sender address in Zoho Campaigns and later found that you're not able to select it while creating an email campaign. Has this ever happened to you? If so, don't worry—you're not alone.

• Loading Project Balances in ZOHO Books for each project

  Hello, What is the best method for loading project balances actual and budget into ZOHO books to provide tracking to our project managers. We have projects and federal awards (also treated as projects) which span multiple years. We are converting from

• Scale up your writing style with content analysis tool in Knowledge Base

  Hello everyone, Sometimes writers may have strong knowledge about the subject but may find it challenging to articulate clearly or produce comprehensible, jargon free content. To make the process easier and to ensure consistent, high-quality articles,

• Zoho Books "Update" Trigger for Zapier?

  Hi Zoho Team, I've been in talks with Zapier about using their services to connect my Zoho Books account to various apps, but I require an additional trigger beyond the "New" trigger. I require an "Update" trigger, which will allow me to filter and create Zaps only when certain conditions are fulfilled on the Zoho Books end before I automate a separate app. Specifically this will help me create invoices in QuickBooks Online only when payments are recorded in Zoho Books, rather than when a new invoice

• How to prevent editing of closed tickets in Zoho Desk?

  I would like to confirm whether it is possible to completely prevent agents from editing tickets once their status is set to Closed. Is there any configuration, permission, or best practice in Zoho Desk to ensure that closed tickets remain read-only and

• Zoho Desk Limitations

  Good day, all, I would like to know whether others share my frustration with some of Zoho's limitations. Don't get me wrong, I like Desk (and I also have a subscription for Analytics), I have been with them for close to 10 years, and unfortunately, I

• New Mandatory One-Click Unsubscribe Link Overshadowing Custom Unsubscribe Link

  I was recently informed by Zoho CRM Support that they are now mandated by the large email service providers like Google and Yahoo to provide a one-click unsubscribe option in the header (not the body) of all mass emails. I have a custom unsubscribe link

• how to undoreconciled transaction

  how to undo reconciled transaction

• Exciting Updates to the Kiosk Studio Feature in Zoho CRM!

  Hello Everyone, We are here again with a series of new enhancements to Kiosk Studio, designed to elevate your experience and bring even greater efficiency to your business processes. These updates build upon our ongoing commitment to making Kiosk a powerful

• Change eMail Template for Event-Invitations

  Hello ZOHO-CRM Team How I can change the eMail Template for Event-Invitations? I work with the German Version of the Free Version. I know how I can modify eMail alerts or Signature Templates, but where I can other eMails modify you send out? Thank you for your answer. Regards, Juerg

• Service Title in Service Report Template Builder

  I am currently working on the Service Report Template Builder in Zoho FSM. I have created three separate service report templates for different workflows: Preventive Maintenance Report Requested Service Report Installation Report My issue is that I cannot

• Zoho Sign for Zoho Projects

  Documents authorization and validation with signature is now easier in project management with Zoho Projects' Zoho Sign extension. Sign documents or send them for signatures directly from tasks and issues using Zoho Sign extension in Zoho Projects. Extension

• Deluge Learning Series – Best Practices in Deluge | December 2025

  We’re excited to bring you the next session of the Deluge Learning Series, focused entirely on writing cleaner, faster, and more reliable Deluge code. In this edition, we’ll dive deep into the essential best practices every Deluge developer should follow

• Associate a Contact to a Campaign using deluge?

  If I want to add one record to another related list, which zoho function do I use? zoho.updateRelatedRecord is not it I don't think.  I simply want to take a "Contact" and associate it to a "Campaign" using deluge.  Can anyone help? contactId = 5122008000000796037;

• Add "Groups" above "Users" in the Zoho Forms Left Menu

  Hi, We have Groups but you have to go to a Form and Share or use the Directory App to manage them, please add "Groups" above "Users" in the Zoho Forms Left Menu so you can manage them in 1 place within Zoho Forms too. Thanks Dan

• Zoho Books | Product updates | October 2025

  Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From iOS 26 updates to viewing reports as charts, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. Zoho Books Updates for Apple Devices At WWDC 2025, Apple

• Adding Taxes to paid consultations in Zoho Bookings

  I created a 'paid' consultation under Zoho Booking and integrated it with payment gateways for online/instant payment before a booking is done. How can I add 'taxes' to the price of consultation? I can add taxes to other Zoho apps (liks Books, Checkout,

• Next Page