The News: Zoho, at its Zoholics event, announced early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone, which is a new set of capabilities designed to provide CRM access to all sales, marketing, and service teams involved in delivering great customer experience. The new capabilities include team modules, a requester profile, and a refreshed user interface, each of which is designed to let users from various teams, with disparate roles, access and interact with CRM data within the workflow. Early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone is now available upon request for Zoho customers worldwide.
You can read the press release announcing the news at this link.
Zoho Announces CRM for Everyone
Analyst Take: Zoho announced a new set of capabilities designed to provide easy access to CRM data, regardless of whether a user works in the sales, marketing, or support teams. Zoho CRM for Everyone is formed to enable sales team members, the traditional manager of customer relationships, to work across various tasks and departments from a single workspace, including solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy.
These capabilities aim to improve visibility for every stakeholder in the customer journey, reduce coordination snafus, improve time-to-resolution for support tasks, and enhance the overall quality of customer experience. The following enhancements were announced at Zoholics on June 5.
Team Modules
Team-level data modules (in addition to organization-level modules) are now available, while still falling under the governance of IT. Essentially, Team Modules allow teams or departments to customize the fields, permissions, workflow automation, and look & feel that work best for them within a dedicated space, without affecting the underlying data. This helps in improving worker efficiency and effectiveness.
The most intriguing feature of this announcement is the application of this customization without IT skills or training, thereby democratizing access to data and how it is displayed and utilized. Previously, department heads had to submit a request to IT to have them customize an application, which was usually rejected or pushed to the bottom of the pile, due to IT resource limitations, staffing constraints, costs, complexity, and the unwillingness to spend all their time doing custom work that may or may not impact underlying workflows. While workflow customization is not new or novel, it is the ability to enable knowledge workers (most likely department heads) more easily tune their CRM to work in the most efficient and friction-free manner to match their specific requirements.
Requester Profile
These team modules also support a feature called requester profiles. According to Zoho, when a team member requires a deliverable or other input from a colleague from another team, they can simply submit a request in the appropriate team module. These requesters can track the status of their own requests, ensuring that tasks or issues are not lost in the shuffle.
Most importantly, these requests can be handled within the workflow and include customer context enabled by the underlying data held within the CRM, ensuring all stakeholders understand the nature and urgency of the request.
Refreshed User Experience
Zoho also announced that the Zoho CRM interface has been revamped to improve usability across roles and functions. Teams can organize data within modules, and modules within Team Spaces. Meanwhile, individual users can swiftly move between these and control their workflows using no-code or low-code experiences without requiring core IT skills.
Zoho is expanding the accessibility in the new interface, with capabilities covering areas such as vision, motor activity, and interactions. According to the company, Zoho will add more capabilities to Zoho CRM for Everyone to make it the centralized source of truth for an organization.
The main takeaway from my perspective is that these tools allow greater customization of not only the interface but also workflows and processes. In the past, it was impossible to design such a tool due to either IT constraints or the fear of an application sprawl with multiple variants rolled out. However, these are essentially interface customizations that sit on top of a common, underlying platform, which can be implemented by non-IT staff. Thus, organizations can reap the benefits without complexity or incurring any extra cost.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
