Zoho Launches CRM for Everyone

Zoho has previewed Zoho CRM for Everyone, a new set of capabilities aimed at democratizing CRM for all teams involved in customer operations.

Zoho CRM for Everyone allows sales teams to communicate and coordinate from a single place various customer deliverables across areas like solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy.

"Traditionally, the CRM system has been built by IT and built for sales workflows," said Mani Vembu, Zoho's chief operating officer, in a statement. "Over the years, it has accumulated a wealth of customer context, but access to the CRM is strictly rationed and teams are forced to operate on their own islands with limited context. This is fundamentally antithetical to a great customer experience. Zoho CRM for Everyone breaks down those silos for the first time, enabling different teams in a sales process to contribute productively by reducing CRM complexity and encouraging participation."

Zoho CRM for Everyone enables account managers to pull in a solutions engineer to coordinate a great product demonstration for a customer. A specialist can track the step-by-step rollout of the onboarding experience for each customer. A marketer can perform win-loss analysis for specific deals. A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies. And all of these activities can be managed within the CRM with deep customer context and cross-functional visibility.

Zoho CRM for Everyone not only opens up CRM access cross-functionally but also empowers every team to manage their own workflows autonomously within the corporate IT framework.

To make CRM for Everyone possible, Zoho brought together its Team Modules and Requester Profiler collaboration tools and redesigned the Zoho CRM interface for better usability across roles and functions. Teams can organize their data within modules and modules within Team Spaces. Users can switch between these quickly and adopt no-code or low-code experiences to manage their workflows without core IT skills. With this release, Zoho CRM is also making a major stride in accessibility with capabilities covering areas like vision, motor activity, and interactions.

"Modern CRM strategies demand that the entire enterprise contribute and orchestrate actions around revenue-driving motions that require visibility and collaboration across teams," said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, in a statement. "This is what stands out about Zoho’s vision for CRM for Everyone. This is a solution that meets the modern sales and engagement strategy, reaching beyond the stagnant notion that CRM is a record or a database…it puts CRM at the center of the project called Revenue. It applies connected collaboration and a project management mindset to the operations of building durable customer relationships through cross-functional actions in order to seamlessly drive more profitable relationships with customers."

Starting today, early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone is available upon request for Zoho customers worldwide. Zoho will be releasing additional capabilities to CRM for Everyone during the early access phase. 

Also new from Zoho is Apptics, a digital analytics solution for application developers. It consolidates analytics across app usage, performance, user engagement, and growth metrics into a centralized console, then synthesizes these multifaceted data streams into actionable insights presented visually in dashboards and reports. It can prompt Android and iOS users for app ratings and updates directly from the Apptics console. Integrated app store reviews management helps in analyzing user sentiment. .

Apptics provides multi-platform analytics support, covering Android, iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, iPadOS, Windows, React Native, Flutter, and Unity, with web analytics capabilities coming soon.

Zoho has also updated its collaboration portfolio with new AI, workflow automation, and industry-specific capabilities.

Zoho Projects, the company's project management platform, now includes natural language processing powered by Zia, Zoho's AI engine. Using colloquial voice commands, users can enlist Zoho's search engine to source information stored across Zoho's apps and summarize custom charts and analytics dashboards via Zia Insights to generate task recommendations .

Zoho Notebook, the company's dynamic note-taking application, also leverages Zia to enable smart summarization, task management, automatic tagging of topics, data analysis from notes, visual chart creation from notes, and calendar creation for next steps. Zoho Notebook also now interprets and tweaks message tone and inserts context. With a new feature called Whiteboard, users can conduct real-time brainstorms by embedding audio or video meetings within the application.

Blueprint, Zoho's visual workflow automation technology, is now accessible within Zoho Projects, WorkDrive, and Sign.

Zoho WorkDrive, the company's file management solution, now includes workflow automation to map, manage, and automate content procedures across departments and teams. This includes legal policy or contract review and approval.

Zoho Sign, a digital signature and ID verification solution, slots into unified systems at any stage of a workflow and now helps users create reusable templates, sales orders, HR documents, legal documents, and more. It now offers Knowledge-Based Authentication and greater controls for financial technology, healthcare, and life science companies.

Zoho also developed new capabilities for industry-specific workflows with the construction, healthcare, manufacturing, and aviation industries.

"Companies today are working on multiple devices and networks, in and out of the office, in varying time zones, making collaboration extremely difficult and time-consuming to manage," said Raju Vegesna, Zoho's chief evangelist, in a statement. "We've developed a tightly integrated set of collaboration tools powered by platform-layer services like AI, unified search, and process automation underneath, all in an effort to help businesses be more productive. When people work well together, regardless of their timezone or network or device, and never once consider the technology that's driving that work, that's when we feel we've done our job."

Zoho has also added safeguards to its reinforced, tightly integrated security tech stack, which includes Ulaa, a workforce identity and access management platform; Directory, a multifactor authentication solution; OneAuth; and the secure password manager Vault. The added security measures provide businesses with greater protection against data breaches, tracking, and attacks.

"Nothing is more important to Zoho than the privacy and security of not only our customers but their customers, too," Vegesna said. "That's why we're announcing additional safeguards to our integrated security stack, bringing businesses the broad and deep protection needed to defend against today's increasingly sophisticated attacks. This stack is unlike anything else on the market, providing top security solutions alongside a privacy-first browser, which affords users an additional layer of safety against surveillance and tracking.