Zoho Launches Canvas, The Industry-First Design Studio to Re-envision The CRM Experience For Enterprises

Canvas brings consumer-level simplicity to the CRM user experience through a no-code design studio, increasing CRM adoption rates

Austin, Texas – August 10, 2021 — Today Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced Canvas for Zoho CRM, a one-of-a-kind design studio for CRM personalization. Canvas enables businesses to create their own CRM interfaces that are better suited to the role of each employee, without IT or developer involvement. It helps simplify complex CRM implementations into streamlined and contextual employee-facing experiences.

Data and workflow customization can render a CRM system too complex for most employees, and personalizing the CRM for each employee’s role involves too much development effort and cost. As a direct result of this complexity, productivity drops, employees become disengaged, CRM adoption struggles, and ROI can suffer. With Canvas, companies of all sizes can avoid these issues and enjoy the breadth of functionality offered by a general-purpose CRM and the specialized experience offered by a vertical CRM.

With Canvas, Zoho’s customer experience platform continues to focus on building a system of experiences that simplifies the experience economy for brands and every stakeholder. From planning and creating diverse customer experiences to delivering and evolving them for the future, Zoho CRM helps organizations of all sizes enable employee productivity, improve stakeholder collaboration, and increase customer success.

“A lot of CRM software already offers an abundance of personalization for customer experiences, but the same is not true for employee experiences. As a result, everyone’s using the same system and paying the productivity tax for no reason.” said Mani Vembu, COO of Zoho, “Imagine a reality where the system is tailor-made for each employee’s role. That is true all-around personalization, and that’s what we’re bringing to market with Canvas. We believe it’s a more natural solution to the challenge of software adoption. Our ultimate aim is for businesses to create enterprise-wide software experiences with consumer-grade simplicity.”

Canvas Capabilities Include:

  • Drag-and-drop editor- Canvas sports a simple drag-and-drop editor that facilitates designing without the need to write a single line of code.
  • Template gallery – Customers can pick a preset template that speaks to them and their industry, and dive right in.
  • Industry relevant views – Companies can create views that are relevant to their industry, their work culture, their sales process, and more.
  • Self-service via portals – Customers can also share Canvas creations over portals and create a better experience for vendors, stakeholders, and more.
  • Role-based assignment – Companies can assign different Canvas views based on roles, responsibilities, and teams in their company.
  • Extensive formatting: – Canvas also houses a wide range of formatting options to edit the finer details of a view, and can load styles dynamically based on conditions.

More information on further capabilities here: https://zoho.com/canvas

Additional information about Zoho CRM can be found at: https://zoho.com/crm

Customer Statements:

“Arctic Spas has been using Zoho One for a few years now with dozens of integrations, extensions, Flows, and APIs in the environment, and a heavy emphasis on CRM as the core of our deployment. We collect a ton of information about our web leads and like to keep track of as much of that information as we can. I’ve tried many different options to organize the data but previously, it was difficult to ensure the most relevant information was exactly where it needed to be. Canvas makes things simple. It’s simple to understand and quite easy to navigate around. I was able to build a view for our leads that shows all pertinent info in one place–it’s simple to navigate and easy to find anything in seconds. The ability to customize where everything is into different elements on the same page, or even tabs, has made life a lot easier for all my users. Our dealer approvals process is now 90% faster because people have easy access to the information they need, all organized in a way that makes sense for our business. The customization it’s given us will continue to improve our productivity as we expand our usage. Canvas is simple to use and easy to understand, and is making life a lot easier for all our users.” – Arctic Spas, Mike Sigvaldason, Corporate CRM Administrator

“Canvas has allowed us to have different views for different departments in our company. Our client success team wants to see all of the licenses that the current client has in the “Accounts” module. Whereas, our training team wants to view all of the training details for the contacts within that account. The Canvas builder not only allows us to have this customization, but we are also able to edit the layout to match our company’s brand. Another area of Canvas that has been really useful for us is the ability to add tabs and use sections to create the layout. This has made it easier for us to view information quickly.” – Bluelight LLC, Nicole Lynch, Process Specialist at Blue Light LLC

Media Statements

“An organization’s customer experience can be impacted by the employees’ experience and the tools they use. High platform complexity and low adoption can affect employee engagement and drive down the ROI of CRM implementations. This is a universal problem.” said Greenberg, “A simple no-code approach to help companies build their own software experiences is one of the more elegant solutions to that universal problem. It can greatly help drive platform adoption and create success for the organization.” – Paul Greenberg, Founder, Managing Prinicipal of The 56 Group, LLC

“Solutions like Canvas turn the paradigm of teams conforming to tools on its head. Canvas is for teams as personalization and engagement optimization engines are for customers—creating contextual, personalized, and relevant environments to elicit valuable outcomes. Instead of learning how to work with CRM, Canvas empowers organizations to design a user’s experiences with CRM based on how individual teams want to and need to work.” – Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research

“Everybody knows how important personalization is from a customer’s perspective, but there is less emphasis on the role personalization plays in order for employees to create/deliver those personalized experiences. Canvas for Zoho CRM focuses on that side of the equation, providing employees with tools to more easily and efficiently create their own workflows and processes, which in turn improves their ability to deliver those personalized experiences customers want.” – Brent Leary, Co-Founder & Partner, CRM Essentials

Pricing and Availability

Canvas will be available across all editions of Zoho CRM, at no additional cost. Zoho believes that every CRM user deserves a better experience and stands for supporting the CRM community, which is why Zoho is offering Canvas free of charge to all Zoho CRM customers.

In the coming years, Canvas is also poised to be implemented into all Zoho products so that users can experience a consistent, cohesive experience across the Zoho ecosystem.

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho ensures a level of confidentiality that no other vendors in the industry can guarantee. Zoho does not allow any third-party trackers to monitor usage behavior and never sells any data to ad-based companies. Because Zoho owns and has built its entire technology stack, the company is able to offer the most secure experience to its 60 million users without any compromise on data privacy. Zoho CRM users have the assurance that their data is confidential and protected, and only users themselves maintain ownership of that data.

About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific software companies.

Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 9,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates.

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 60 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com

Media Contact

Sandra Lo
[email protected]

Author Information

As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.

Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.

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