Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, previewed Zoho CRM for Everyone for the first time in South East Asia at the user conference, Zoholics in Manila. This feature update includes a new set of capabilities aimed at democratizing CRM to all teams involved in customer operations activities. Zoho CRM for Everyone allows sales teams, the primary custodian of customer relationships, to communicate and coordinate from a single place various customer deliverables across areas like solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy. These capabilities stand to improve visibility for every stakeholder in the customer journey, mitigate gaps in coordination, reduce turnaround time, and improve the quality of the customer experience.
“Traditionally, the CRM system has been built by IT and built for sales workflows,” said Gibu Mathew, VP & GM Zoho APAC. “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 exists to break down those silos, unifying all customer operations teams onto the CRM to deliver better customer experiences.”
Modern CRM strategies require enterprise-wide collaboration and visibility to drive revenue. Zoho’s vision for ‘CRM for Everyone’ allows businesses to align with contemporary sales and engagement strategies by extending beyond the outdated concept of CRM as merely a record or database. It positions CRM at the core of revenue-focused projects, fostering connected collaboration and a project management approach to operations. This approach enables cross-functional actions that build durable customer relationships, ultimately driving more profitable customer interactions. The APAC region expects to see an annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of 14.08% in CRM spending[1], resulting in a market volume of US$25.24bn by 2028, this is higher than the average rate of 10% seen in other regions. As companies invest in CRM solutions, it is important for businesses to consider if the selected solution is able to scale with business growth as well as find benefits across the organisation.
Zoho CRM For Everyone enables account managers, for example, 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. All of these different activities can be managed within the CRM with deep customer context and cross-functional visibility. They may all use different core applications for deep work but can now converge on the CRM for managing shared responsibilities towards the customer.
To make this possible, the following underlying capabilities have come together in Zoho CRM:
Team Modules
Business teams can create their own team-level data modules (in addition to organization-level modules) by themselves while being governed by IT teams. Team Modules can have their own fields, permissions, workflow automation, and other customization that is specific to each team. These modules are housed within a dedicated space for each team. Together, this helps unite all customer-facing processes onto a single platform enriched with complete customer context.
Requesters
When a team member needs a deliverable from, or the contributions of, a colleague from a different team, they can simply raise a request in the appropriate team module. Such Requesters can track the status of their own requests, eliminating any guesswork involved in collaborative work.
Refreshed User Experience
To enable this fundamental shift in usage, the interface of Zoho CRM has been redesigned 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.
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. It is the first true democratization of the CRM paradigm. Over the following weeks, Zoho will add more capabilities to Zoho CRM For Everyone that make CRM the nucleus of all customer operations and enable a wave of CX transformation.
