Discover Zoho
Clareti are CRM, Zoho and Integration experts. A Zoho Advanced Partner with more than 20 years experince in a range of industry sectors.
Clareti are CRM experts and can help you build the right CRM system
Zoho CRM is an easy to use and configure CRM system. Over the last 20 years it has become an industry standard system for storing information on and interacting with your clients or stakeholders. At it’s core is a highly structured and customisable relational database with many functional elements built on top of this but on a day-to-day basis it just allows you to see key information on anyone you deal with. See recent emails to a client or whether they have outstanding invoices, which email campaigns they have interacted with or the history of opportunities that your organisation has been involved in.
Your CRM system becomes your knowledge base of client/stakeholder interactions over time as well as your forecasting tool. It can and should replace all the spreadsheets that can scatter key information around the organisation and reside in the deepest recesses of your storage system.
Key reasons for choosing Zoho CRM
- Cost – Zoho CRM is far less expensive than equivalent applications from some other well know providers. It’s hard to understand why clients use apps that are 3-4 times the cost but do the same thing and are not as easy to use.
- No long term contracts – Yes you can sign up to a year to save some money over the long term but you don’t have to. Subcribe for a month or two and then decide to switch to yearly invoicing – the choice is yours and Zoho (and Clareti) do not tie you into long support deals from which limited value is available.
- Easy to use and train your staff
- Huge community – with over 150 million Zoho users worldwide you can be sure that someone has already asked the question that you need the answer to and can be found via a simple web search.
- Free basic support from Zoho – This can suit some organisations with simple and non-urgent needs and can supplement support provided by Clareti. Its just nice to have the choice that isn’t available from other major CRM providers.
- Expert implementation through Clareti – this goes without saying of course
- Did we mention cost? – Again just let us help you with the sums to see how much you can save and how quickly this will pay back.
Zoho CRM can help your organisation
- Gather all client and stakeholder information and knowledge in one system giving a 360-degree view of your relationship with them
- Automate long-winded manual processes and or workflows through extensive automation capabilities
- Predict business into the future and monitor KPIs
- Summarise and give insights into your data using powerful AI-enabled tools through Zoho’s own Zia AI engine or the AI tool of your choice
- Make client data available within the systems you use every day including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Xero, Sage and your proprietary internal systems via flexible integrations
It would take a very long time to tell you about all of the features and benefits of Zoho CRM so we won’t attempt to do that here. We will however try to give you a flavour of some of the functional elements and how these support processes that most organisations can resonate with.
Automation and the ability to create custom modules in Zoho CRM are worthy of separate mentions as it is functionality that can transform your business and improve efficiencies across the organisation.
Automation – Workflows
“Wouldn’t it be nice if…..” is something we hear from many of our clients. The answer with Zoho CRM is almost always yes with its ‘If this then that’ simple workflow automations. Many things can be automated in a whole host of ways. Clareti uses workflow automation almost every day for their clients. Simplifying processes and saving time. Some examples of what can be done follow:
- Simple alerts mean that tasks don’t get forgotten and people stay informed.
- Field updates keep track of changes in the system.
- Assigning record owners to keep responsibility clear
- Tagging to categorise records
- Notifications into the channel of your choice including Microsoft Teams
- Creating records to track requirements or client interactions
- Send webhooks to trigger or send data to other applications
- Custom Functions to do pretty much anything you want – Custom functions allow Clareti to write code to carry out tasks either within the system or in any other system linked to it. They can either sit as automatic actions or triggered more controllably from a button placed on an appropriate screen within Zoho CRM.
Custom Modules
Beyond the standard CRM modules that you are familiar with like Contacts and Organisations it is straightforward to create custom modules to hold any data that you wish and permission these modules as you choose. You can relate this information to any other modules within the system and use all the functionality of the CRM system to manage this information.
Clareti uses custom modules extensively with most of our clients to store and work with information that would otherwise reside on people’s PCs in spreadsheet form to ‘surface’ this information within the organisation and allow wider visibility.
Custom modules become critical for organisations with complex and/or non-traditional business models such as multi-service providers or Not-for-Profit organisations.
Beyond these core areas there are many functional elements bundled into an incredible package. The selection below are just a flavour of the built-in system tools that Clareti uses on a day-to-day basis to make our client’s lives easier.
A recent innovation from Zoho. Team Spaces allows you to bring the teams you work with into Zoho CRM. These spaces are unique to each team and managed by their own team leads with overall control still with your CRM administrator. Requester modules enable teams to create and send requests across departments and allow all applicable departments to see the status of requests.
Team Spaces is a powerful concept and one that is just becoming appreciated as a game-changer in how the CRM system is viewed within an organisation. Contact Clareti for a further discussion on how this may help you and your colleagues.
There is much talk about how AI is going to change the world we live in. Zoho have invested heavily in trying to make sense of this as it relates to making the day-to-day lives of CRM users easier and more insightful. Their own Zia AI engine now operates throughout the CRM system helping you do complex tasks and summarising data to allow that data to knowledge transition.
Client Script is now used routinely by Clareti in most of our client’s systems. It is a tool that enables you that additional system control to make user’s lives easier. It may be just live copying information from another module into a record whilst you are creating it or stopping a particular user editing a field. The details can get technical but it often allows Clareti to just say yes before a client asks a question!
Blueprints are used to ‘regularise’ a stage-based process within the CRM system. When an opportunity makes progress you may require a set of additional fields to be filled out prior to moving to the next stage or an attachment to be added or a side process to be called. This can all be mandated within a blueprint. This helps you control the process and avoid skipping of steps or getting to the end of your process only to find key data is missing.
If you need a structured and aided way for a record to be created then a Wizard may help. A Wizard allows you to capture contextual data, one screen at a time and simplify the collection of data by using sequential screens with help boxes to collect contextual data. Rules, logic, and conditions can be applied for each sequence and screen for an easier user experience and creating a logical sequence for screens hardcoded into the Wizard. Clareti are using Wizards extensively now as an easier, more intuitive way of creating the more complex CRM records giving it structure and support.
Although not visible to most clients it would be remiss of us to not mention custom functions. Custom Functions are pieces of code, sometimes hundreds of lines long that just ‘do stuff’ within your CRM system. If you can think of something that is needed within the system. If it isn’t standard functionality then Clareti writes some code to make it happen. We are masters at doing this and so can take on the more complex client requirements where BOTH understanding the problem and coding the solution are critical.
A lot of Clareti’s clients are keen for everyone to see all data contained within the CRM system however there are key instances where either sensitive or regional specific data needs to be visible only to certain staff.
Zoho provides all the tools within the CRM system to construct complex data sharing structures. The tools to do this exist in the form of Territories, Layouts, Roles, Profiles, Module Visibility and Data Sharing Rules. By combining these in sometimes esoteric combinations Clareti is able to deliver any data sharing scenario a client requires.
It can sometimes become fiendishly complicated but we’ve created some complex sets of permissioning that have allowed our clients to have the piece of mind that their data is being shared appropriately.
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