A year ago at Zoholics US in Austin, Zoho launched CRM for Everyone, the next generation of its CRM platform. This year at Zoholics US in Houston, it announced significant AI-powered enhancements to the platform. These enhancements, powered by Zia, its AI platform, aim to help democratise the adoption and use of CRM across different functions within the organisation.
Key to these changes is the ability for different functions to customise the CRM application. It enables them to create modules, workflows and reports for their specific needs using a natural language interface. It will allow users from finance, legal, marketing or others to enhance the CRM so that the application fits their needs rather than updating something designed for a sales team.
Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe. “Multiple people in an organisation need access to customer information, yet historically, CRMs have been relegated to only sales teams. As we democratise CRM with the launch of CRM for Everyone, we also need to build in capabilities that make it easy for anyone to build and extend CRM with simple prompts, without having to be an expert in the system.
“This is where Zia’s advanced capabilities come in. Now, anyone can create capabilities, workflows, or reports in CRM with a simple prompt. They can also make their CRM look the way they want with Zia’s image design capabilities.”
CRM for Everyone goes GA
CRM For Everyone is generally available to global businesses. The new AI-powered functionality is included within the software license. The update has introduced a slight complexity into the pricing model, but it ensures that non-sales users do not have to pay the full amount.
There is still a Zoho CRM free edition that has three free users. The other tiers include Standard at £12 per user per month (pupm), Professional (£18 pupm), Enterprise (£35 pupm) and Ultimate (£42 pupm). Team users, ie those not working within the sales team, are charged £8 pupm (or €9 pupm).
New users can add Team users to existing licenses. Interestingly, this also includes the free tier. Full details of pricing and information about the difference between Team and Organisation (sales) levels are found on the pricing page.
New features
With this release, Zoho has added two new features: Connected Record and Connected Workflows.
Connected Records allow organisations to seamlessly link modules, enabling a unified view of interactions and relationships between records. They are currently available to connect between Team and Organisation modules. Connected records are not Lookup fields where there is a child-parent relationship.
Connected Workflows manage the connections between the connected records. For example, if a Sales agent creates a new customer after closing a deal. A connected workflow will automatically create a new record within the legal, marketing and accounts team modules.
Likewise, changes in fields within the record in one team’s or organisation module will update the others if the connected workflow is in place. The relationship between connected records is thus many-to-many rather than the one-to-one that a linked field often has.
New Zia Capabilities
Report Creation with Ask Zia
The natural language interface provided by Zia enables users to create a prompt that will generate a report. Zia then builds that on the users’ behalf.
For example, the user could ask Zia to create a report for a dealership to generate a report on all vehicles sold that had a value of over $40,000. The generated report will surface relevant information and provide the output that the users expect. Importantly, that will also be bound by their access rights to the data held in the system.
During the creation process, which is visible to the user, they can interrupt if they want to change something, perhaps add another field. Users can create and then edit reports. In the future, Zoho plans to introduce the concept of scheduling reports as a feature.
Custom Module Creation
Users can create a personal module using a natural language interface. For example, a Legal professional could ask Zia to create a contract module with the ability to upload contract documents.
The system will create appropriate records and fields, using connected records and connected workflows to interface the module to the Sales CRM application. The application would create the appropriate input screens, as well as the ability to upload contracts and customise permissions.
Workflow Creation with Ask Zia
Once the module is complete, Zia can also be used to create workflows. Zia will create these and then act on the user’s behalf. Perhaps generating an email once a client purchases over a certain amount. Or perhaps finance alerts are in an email if a profit margin drops below a threshold.
Any user can create these workflows, assuming they have the permissions to do so and that they have the permissions to access the data requested.
Image to Canvas
Image to Canvas allows people to add a visual layer on top of their system of record. Zia imports an image and then analyses the image, and labels the different images and text. For example, if a user wishes to change the UI of a web page for a car dealership, they can import an image that shows the image of a car alongside price, make and model in a layout they prefer to their existing system.
Zia will analyse the image and link the image and text to the relevant fields, enabling the rapid generation of a new page. This gives Zia multimodal AI capabilities that can be built on later.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There are two key messages for organisations within this announcement. The first is that not only is CRM for everyone in an organisation to use, Zoho has also recognised that employees not within sales do not need the full functionality that sales agents need and use hour to hour.
Other functions have other roles, but as Daniel Pink noted, “Everyone sells”. It means that legal, accounts and marketing people can update organisational information about customers in their flow of work. It also opens the door to a customer success module that connects Sales with the rest of the organisation. Will Zoho develop something in this area or leave it to a channel partner?
The second is that AI is becoming pervasive and a must-have for software vendors to include within their software. However, it should not come with an additional price tag, as it is now table stakes. The exception, and notably not part of this announcement, is Agentic AI.
Digital workers created using Agentic AI are likely to have additional costs, mainly because of the compute power they consume. Zoho controls the whole technology stack and should have a much better idea of the full cost of Agentic AI, compared to its competitors.
It will be interesting to see what its pricing model is. If it keeps to its normal approach, it will be far closer to the real cost than many other vendors.
Keith Dawson, Director of Research, Customer Experience, ISG Software Research, summarised, saying. “A lot of enterprises look at their CX progress and wonder why they have trouble coordinating multiple processes across isolated departments. Generative AI promised that it would be able to prune away many of the old barriers to progress. Happily, AI capabilities like Zoho’s are delivering on that promise.”
