Zoho ups the CRM game, brings the first conversational AI for sales teams and a lot more

Soma Tah

Upping its CRM game, Zoho today unveiled Zia Voice, the first conversational AI for sales teams and the hyper-customization platform, Catalyst for its CRM.

Although the majority of the Zoho CRM user base still remains in the midmarket segment, but as it continues to add more enterprise-grade features into the CRM, the company has now set its eyes seemingly on the large cutomers as well.

Zoho's AI-powered sales assistant has been already present in its CRM for some time now, but now it has brings both the speech and chat capabilities to Zia. As a result, Zia can now also predict deal closures and analyze email sentiment.

"Zia's enhanced AI capabilities will now help salespeople sell smarter, with contextual assistance and access customer information through a powerful voice and chat interface," said Mani Vembu, COO, Zoho Corp.

"Voice interfaces make interactions a lot easier, and the best thing is that it can save your time and effort as it does not even need you to look at a screen or type continuously. This can be handy while you are on the go or in the habit of multi-tasking," said Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer, Zoho Corp.

Zia can now talk to sales teams via simple chat and voice messages and answer their questions on everyday CRM information like new leads created, average deal revenue, or even monthly forecasts, etc. For example, it can analyze the CMR information, and interactions to do the following tasks:

Lead and Deal Prediction: Zia analyses interaction patterns and the progress of a lead or deal in the pipeline, and suggests the probability of its closure. This helps salespeople spend their time on deals that are more likely to close.

Email sentiment analysis: Zia makes sense out of the scores of emails that a salesperson might receive every day. Every email is analyzed to discover the relevant positive or negative sentiment. This helps salespeople identify critical emails and address them first.

Alerts for the best time to contact: Zia gives salespeople real-time updates about when they are most likely to reach their prospects. This increases their chance of connecting with leads and reduces the time spent on unanswered calls.

While Zia Voice makes it easier for the salespeople to interact with the CRM, the hyper-customization platform, Catalyst helps customers with customization capabilities that are suited to serve specific business requirements.

Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK): Zoho CRM's mobile SDK helps companies design and build custom mobile apps based on their own work roles or needs, helping them shape their own experience, their way.

Mobile Device Manager (MDM): Companies can distribute their custom apps built through Mobile and Web SDK internally through the MDM network, no matter if they run on iOS or Android.

Serverless computing: Enterprises can now use Zoho's infrastructure to run code without having to worry about physical hardware or servers. Zoho CRM users can also integrate their account with third-party services using serverless components and save up on managing web servers.

Widgets: Businesses can build custom UI components to provide contextual information from external sources and work in real time with Zoho CRM's data.

Keeping the enterprise customers in mind, Zoho now helps customers with Customer Portals where they can have access to their sales, past purchases, cases, and invoices in one place. Zoho also makes managing sales processes and compliance easier with additional features such as Blueprint 2.0 with SLA and checklist capabilities, Reporting Hierarchy, Canvas, Busiess Hourse, Meeting Integrations, Sub-forms, Translation, Encryption, etc.

Most features are available immediately on the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Zoho CRM. Some features are being rolled out to customers in a phased manner.

Zoho CRM is available in the freemium pricing model. The usage of up to 3 users are free, while the pricing of Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Edition ranges from Rs 900-2,700/user/month, and the Ultimate Edition, catering specifically to large businesses, available at Rs 6,000/user/month.

Zoho CRM users can view their CRM data in a preferred language also, as it supports 20 languages globally including English.