Zoho targets large businesses for CRM

CALIFORNIA, USA: Zoho announced the expansion of Zoho CRM and Zoho Support for large businesses. Both Zoho CRM and Zoho Support make their foray into the enterprise market with updates outfitted with advanced features.

The latest enhancements to Zoho CRM include:

Territory Management provides a powerful and flexible option for customer segmentation. Users can organize customers by grouping them together based on criteria such as geographic locations, industry type, expected revenue, product lines and divisions. Users can now do forecasting based on territories, identify regions that are making profit, better plan allocation of resources, and ultimately, exceed sales forecasts.

Custom Modules let users tailor their Zoho CRM implementations, supplementing the standard sales, marketing and customer support modules with industry-specific modules that can be built without needing developer tools. User-built custom modules behave like standard CRM modules, allowing users to customize, import and export data, configure workflow rules, link with standard CRM modules and generate insightful reports.

Custom Functions (for workflow automation) let users automate business processes by capturing complex business logic in a function created using Deluge, Zoho's scripting language. A function can be created to automatically update data in related CRM modules or third-party apps. Based on workflow criteria, the workflow engine triggers the custom function which could update the CRM system or a third-party application. Users can also pick from a pre-built list of functions in the custom function gallery.

Social Integrations allow users to listen to and engage in customer conversations without leaving their Zoho CRM account. Social interactions with customers are now contextually presented in CRM. The new Social tab inside CRM allows users to monitor social mentions and trends as well as provides the ability to search the entire social stream for possible leads.

The latest additions to Zoho Support include:

Cloud Telephony allows users to hook up a customer service phone number to receive calls within Zoho Support. With its contextual integration inside Zoho Support, agents can see a caller's background information to efficiently find solutions and resolve issues. The system automatically creates support requests for missed calls from customers, attaching any voicemails to the support tickets.

Mobile Apps for both iPhone and iPad allow users to offer customer support from any location. Support agents can quickly respond to support requests using response templates, and support requests can be assigned to other agents with Quick Assign. Agents can also tag each other and ask for help via social network-style comments. Important activity related to requests is delivered to support agents instantly through push notifications.

Zoho CRM Enterprise edition is available at the price of $35 per user per month. Mobile apps for Zoho Support are available in Enterprise and Professional variants at $25 and $12 per agent per month pricings respectively.