As we draw closer to the end of another year, we're back with our penultimate quarterly update for this year so we can share some exciting updates across the board. We'll give you a quick rundown of these updates so you can start using them to improve and optimize your business operations.
Introducing CommandCenter 2.0
Let's start this off with the all-new CommandCenter. The 2.0 version, as we call it, comes with a host of improvements to existing functionalities, enhancements, and a revamped user experience.
CommandCenter is a powerful tool that enables your business to plan, build, and automate complete end-to-end journeys that deliver memorable experiences to your customers.
So what's improved?
We've made CommandCenter more accessible and easier to use with a brand new UI, sleek controls, and easier-to-use builder elements, like Signals.
States are now called stages, and are no longer bound to specific modules, which enables you to house records from multiple modules in each stage in the journey, whereas triggers—now known as signals—enable you to capture events from across various sources, including standard, integration, and custom sources. You can use custom signals to capture highly specific actions/events from anywhere in your organization and move records from one stage to another.
We have some new additions to help you make your customer journeys more dynamic and comprehensive as well:
Identifiers - Now that stages aren't bound to modules, you don't need lookups to connect records across modules statically throughout the journey. With identifiers, you can use values from existing fields to build relationships between records dynamically as they move through the customer journey you've built.
Retroactively triggered actions - By backtracking across your journey using identifiers, you can trigger actions based on previous stages that your customer has been through in the journey.
SLA-based transitions - You can now move records between stages based on the lapse of SLAs, enabling you to keep your teams accountable throughout delays in the customer journey.
Set tangible goals - As you build your journey, you can clearly define what you wish to achieve, which gives you control over outcomes and yields insights into how you can refine your journey to facilitate these goals.
Tag your end stages with sentiments - You can associate each stage at the end of your journey with different sentiments to provide context and a clear picture of where each customer is, how their journey ended, and what their experience navigating the journey you've built for them was like.
While CommandCenter 2.0 will be the default experience for all new signups and existing users, there are two things to note:
If you're an existing Zoho CRM user but haven't set up CommandCenter, you can access the updated CommandCenter experience.
If you've already set up journeys, we're slowly rolling out the migration option and will ensure there are no issues on the backend when migrating your processes.
Enhancements to Canvas: Grid components, breakpoints, and tab focus direction
The updates keep rolling in for Canvas, which give you more freedom to customize and personalize your CRM experience. Let's look at what we have in store for you:
Grid component
First off, we're adding a grid component in Canvas, which is a component that displays a grid that acts as a guide for placing data where and in which visual proportions you want.
Any data you place on the grid snaps on to the component, eliminating the need to drag and align data elements manually. Gutter spacing helps provide visual balance between elements added to the grid.
Breakpoint width
We're also adding the ability to define a breakpoint width, which enables you to make your canvas view responsive to screens of different sizes and resolutions.
You can add grids within the grid component and set nested breakpoint widths to render a smooth responsive design, as well as use breakpoint widths to emphasize key data and make it easily accessible.
Tab Focus Direction
You may have created a custom form view in Canvas to move away from Zoho CRM's default two-column form views—but that would have changed the way you navigate between fields as well.
To make navigating easier, we're adding a feature we're calling Tab Focus Direction, which enables you to choose which direction you move in when you press the tab key. You can also move back to where you moved from using the shift + tab command. This directional focus can be applied to specific containers in your canvas view or to the entire page.
Explore the latest enhancements to Canvas
Enhancements to Cadences: WhatsApp support, new limits, and more
Automating follow-ups at scale has never been easier than with Cadences in Zoho CRM. Cadences is a feature that lets you build sequential follow-ups, automatically enroll and un-enroll into/out of sales cadences based on pre-defined criteria, and create a strong nurturing flow.
Businesses need to be able to connect with prospects via all available channels when engaging them in the buying process, and for most modern customers, WhatsApp is a key channel.
Accordingly, we're happy to announce that WhatsApp is now a supported follow channel when you build cadences in Zoho CRM. You can now achieve the following:
Add WhatsApp as a follow-up step when building your cadence.
Choose a pre-approved WhatsApp template (for example: payment reminders, offers, or feedback requests).
Schedule when the messages go out, just as you would with emails or calls.
Automatically move records to the next follow-up based on whether the WhatsApp message was delivered or failed.
Additionally, we're enhancing the overall limits of the feature itself to ensure businesses can continue to manage their follow-ups and not let limits bottleneck their operations. We're no longer limiting each individual type of follow-up and have now established a higher overall limit for follow-ups.
Score and prioritize your records—now with advanced AI insights
When you're working with hundreds of records everyday, it's vital to have a system that lets you prioritize which ones to focus on. Zoho CRM's scoring rules enable you to score your records based on a wide range of factors, give your team visibility into how actively a prospect is engaging with your business, and help your teams plan out their future engagements.
We've got some improvements that can make your scores more accurate and insightful in planning your future interactions with your prospects. Let's have a look:
A unified scoring experience - We've consolidated configurations for both manual scoring and Zia Scoring under "Multiple Scoring Rules," so you can view and define scoring parameters in a single space.
A wider range of scoring parameters - When setting up your scoring rules, you now have access to more channels, factors, and operators to make your scores more robust, comprehensive, and accurate.
Different scoring types - Zia Scoring now offers multiple scoring types to give you a clearer picture of each prospect, including attributes like health, engagement, follow-ups, field attribute, and conversions.
Introducing VoC factors - You can now use Voice of Customer (VoC) insights that Zia derives from your data to add more depth to your scoring models.
Introducing AI factors - For existing channels like email, surveys, help desk, social media, and phone, you can leverage AI functions like intent, sentiment, and emotion analysis to drive your scoring.
Explore the updates to Scoring Rules in Zoho CRM
An overhaul to calendars
To align with the new UI, Zoho CRM's calendar has undergone a UI overhaul to keep the user experience consistent across the product. So what's new in addition to the UI itself?
- Views for users and groups - Create new views for your users and groups that enable them to switch between schedules with a single click.
- Distinct icons - To help you quickly distinguish between various activities scheduled on your calendars, we now have distinct icons for each activity type.
- Manage your calendars - You can organize your calendars by re-arranging them as needed, determine which activities you want to see for specific users and groups, and use the search function to find calendars you need.
- Week labels - Your sales team can now keep track of the current week, which makes it easier to plan out their activities, forecasts, and reports.
- Clutter-free agendas for the month - If your schedule exceeds the spatial limits of a calendar cell, the rest of the agenda will be summarized in a preview box when clicked.
And there's more for you to experience as you plan, schedule, and track your daily activities using the new calendar.
Get more control over the data you export
You may export data for any number of reasons, but what doesn't change is that you need to maintain your data's integrity when you do. Here are some enhancements that give you more control over how and what you export from Zoho CRM:
Export as XLSX - In addition to the originally available CSV format, you can now export data from Zoho CRM in XLSX format. You can export up to 50,000 records at once ,compared to the 200,000 records at once in CSV format.
Choose a charset - When exporting in CSV format, you can now choose the character set to be used to encode your CSV file and therefore preserve international characters used in your data, if any.
Expanded control over the data you export - You can now export data directly from modules—even specific records—and exclude the record ID from the data you export.
Control who sees your leads' and contacts' complete interaction histories
The Interactions tab provides a comprehensive view of customers' touchpoints across various channels, presented in chronological order. Here, every signal is captured and every interaction is recorded, giving businesses a complete history of each interaction across touchpoints throughout the customer's time with your business.
However, not everyone in your business needs access to this data, so we now support profile-based permissions to control who can access and see this data. Administrators can ensure that the data is only visible to those that absolutely need it and thereby maintain data integrity and privacy while preserving access for those that need it to drive meaningful customer experiences.
Integrate with your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Graph API
If yours is a business that relies on Microsoft to manage your email communications, your only options to bring your emails into Zoho CRM were through the classic POP or IMAP integrations.
Now, in addition to these tried and tested choices, we're adding another option to integrate your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM: Microsoft Graph API, which offers a single endpoint whereby you can access data from across Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem. This makes it easier and simpler for developers to provide a more modern, secure, and responsive user experience to end users. Together with Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors and Microsoft Graph Data Connect, this API acts as the future-proof standard for working with the Microsoft 365 platform.
Today, your email experience in Zoho CRM with Graph API will be the same as IMAP or POP, but going forward, this integration will set you up to access even smarter, faster, and more connected experiences when it comes to Microsoft services.
That's all for this short and quick update for the quarter. As always, the team is working hard on building new features, enhancements, and integrations that can make your business operations even better. Until the next quarter—happy selling from all of us at Zoho CRM!
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