Yesterday Zoho released the much awaited new UI for their flagship CRM product. There are many new and updated features that really do improve the overall functionality and experience. At first you may find things a bit strange and some things have moved however we believe that once you get used to the changes/improvements you will love it just as much as we do.

True, not all of this new functionality is available in all editions but with these changes there may just be that slam-dunk functionality now available that will save your organisation loads of money and make it worth upgrading. As always it is likely you will need some help navigating through all these changes so if you have any questions about it please get in contact with us.

  • Signals  – The SalesSignals feature in Zoho CRM enables you to receive real-time notifications from your leads, contacts, or potential customers. If you are a lead or contact owner (sales representative), you will be able to view SalesSignals notifications received from your leads, contacts, or potential customers in the Zoho CRM home page. You can touch-base with them on all aspects and keep track of their activities from a central place. SalesSignals improve timely communication and enables you to followup with your leads and contacts and close deals more quickly.
  • CalDAV – Zoho CRM now supports Calendar synchronization with any iOS device (iPhone, iPad, MacBook as well as Apple Watch) via CalDAV configuration. The result – any event that you create in Zoho CRM will be synchronized with your iOS Calendar and vice versa.
  • GameScope – The new Gamescope in Zoho CRM is designed with the sole aim of making sales more fun and exciting for your sales and/or marketing teams. This is achieved in two ways – by letting sales people compete with one another and also with oneself. But don’t worry, if you don’t like it you can turn it off!!
  • Record level sharing – The record-level sharing is just an extension to the already existing sharing rule applied to a record. You can share individual records or select bulk records from the list view and share. There are two ways to share records
    • Share a record with users and provide the same set of access permission for all the users.
    • Share a record with users and provide different access permissions to each user
  • Zoho Finance Suite integration – The Zoho Finance Suite integration allows you to integrate your Zoho Books, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Expense as well as Zoho Subscription accounts with Zoho CRM. As a result you can view and monitor invoices, estimates, purchase orders, sales orders, expenses, expenses reports and subscription details related to customers within your Zoho CRM account. You can also Zoho Finance Suite information contextually under the Account, Contact and Potentials details. Another reason to change over to one of the Zoho finance applications or indeed just use Zoho Expense as an extremely easy way of avoiding spreadsheet entry!
  • Page layouts – The new Page Layouts feature allows different views of your customer data in different ways. Whether it is just a different view of a contact for sales or operations or a different staged process for servicing or sales it is now possible to change the view each department has of customer data.
  • Phonebridge API – The Zoho PhoneBridge feature connects the PBX system and the Zoho CRM system that holds all the important details of your leads and customers. With this feature, Zoho CRM offers you a platform to manage incoming and outgoing calls. Not just that, it reminds you of the calls that are scheduled and also identifies the caller and matches the details with the customer’s record in Zoho CRM.
  • Extensions (Marketplace) – Zoho CRM Marketplace is now an avenue for you to search for and install extensions which will add value your existing CRM setup. You will find various extensions which you can install in your Zoho CRM account. These include plugins for Box, Dropbox, EventBrite and many, many more.
  • Email as SalesInbox – This exciting new feature allows you to see all your email sorted into categories withink Zoho CRM. You can choose the categories but suggestions may be Contacts, Colleagues, Personal, Opportunities etc. A great new feature and one that gives you even more reason for operating inside the system that you run your business with instead of a disconnected Microsoft application.
  • Check-in – If your business largely requires you to travel and constantly be on the move, then check-in is for you. In Zoho CRM, sales and service managers and anyone who visits clients or other sites can manage their work-related visits easily with the help of check-ins from the Zoho CRM mobile app. A check-in is associated with an event so you can be sure that you can prove you visited a client or a site through a simple click of a button on you phone.

I know this is a big list but please ask if you want to know more details about anything. Clareti will be more than happy to help you understand and apply any of these new features within your business and work with you to allow you to get value from them.