2025 marked 11 years of building a customer experience platform designed to support organizations as customer expectations, channels, and operating models continue to evolve.
Over the past decade, Zoho CRM Plus has grown alongside its customers, guided by real-world usage, long-term partnerships, and an understanding that sustainable CX requires both flexibility and discipline. In 2025, this approach translated into focused improvements that strengthened how teams plan, execute, and govern customer experience across sales, service, and marketing.
Rather than broad reinvention, the year was defined by purposeful progress improving adoption, visibility, and scalability while preserving continuity for teams already operating at scale.
As we close out 2025 and look ahead to 2026, this retrospective reflects how Zoho CRM Plus continues to evolve with a long-term view shaped by experience, informed by customers, and aligned with the operational realities of modern CX.
Helping teams get started faster
Marketing projects are most effective when teams understand how channels work together. Earlier, users had to create projects from scratch, which often made it harder to fully explore Brand Studio’s omni-channel capabilities.
Sample marketing projects were added to Brand Studio to act as a guided starting point. These projects come pre-populated with activities across channels, along with structured tasks that demonstrate collaboration and execution in a real-world context.
This update helped:
simplify onboarding for new users
clearly demonstrate omni-channel marketing workflows
reduce early confusion
improve overall adoption of marketing projects
Strengthening access, security, and control
As CX teams grow, managing users across multiple applications becomes increasingly complex. With Zoho Directory now integrated into CRM Plus, identity and access management moved into a single, centralized layer.
Teams can now:
enable single sign-on across applications
manage users and roles from one console
enforce multi-factor authentication
sync with Active Directory
apply security policies and monitor audit logs
This integration simplified administration while giving IT and security teams better control over access across the CX stack.
Making campaign planning more efficient
Planning campaigns often takes as much effort as executing them. To reduce this friction, Create with Zia was introduced inside Brand Studio.
By providing inputs like campaign objectives, duration, channels, and target audience, teams can generate multiple AI-assisted campaign plans aligned with best practices. These plans act as a strong foundation that teams can review, refine, and customize before moving into execution.
The feature supports flexibility—users can regenerate ideas, adjust activities, and save projects as drafts or active campaigns. It operates on a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) model, allowing teams to retain control over AI usage.
Improving brand consistency and continuity
In October, landing pages were added to Brand Studio, enabling teams to build on-brand campaign experiences without switching tools. This helped ensure consistency across messaging, visuals, and customer touchpoints.
October also marked 11 years of Zoho CRM Plus—a reflection of steady evolution shaped by customer feedback and real-world usage. Over the years, CRM Plus has grown into a dependable CX platform designed to adapt as businesses scale.
Lowering the barrier to Unified CXM
We introduced CRM Plus Starter edition. A new pricing plan designed for small and growing teams that need a unified foundation for customer experience without added complexity. It brings together essential capabilities across sales, service, marketing, and analytics.
Starter also supports a clear growth path. Teams can begin with essential CXM features and progressively move to higher editions or flexible configurations as their requirements evolve, without disrupting existing data or workflows.
The Starter edition is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Canada.
Improving visibility across sales, service, and marketing teams
Understanding how sales, service, and marketing teams are performing often requires switching between multiple applications and reports. User 360 addresses this by bringing key work and productivity metrics into a single, consolidated view within CRM Plus.
Managers and admins can now view:
Deals closed and revenue generated
Ticket volumes, response times, and pending requests
Assigned work, open tasks, and overdue activities
Additional indicators that reflect overall workload and performance
Accessible through the Admin Panel, User 360 helps leaders evaluate team performance using real data, without manually piecing together information from different tools. Access is currently available to admins, with broader manager-level access planned for upcoming updates.
Conversations beyond the product
2025 marked the seventh year of our CX workshop series, a continuation of ongoing conversations with customers and partners about how customer experience is actually practiced on the ground.
This year, we met with over 300 attendees across Chicago, Miami, New York, Richmond, Toronto, Montréal, Dubai, and Johannesburg. These sessions focused less on features and more on the realities teams face: adoption challenges, scaling processes across functions, and maintaining customer trust as expectations evolve.
The perspectives shared in these workshops consistently informed how CRM Plus progressed through the year, helping ensure that product improvements stayed aligned with real operational needs rather than abstract CX theory.
Looking ahead
The changes made to Zoho CRM Plus this year reflect a growing maturity in how CX platforms need to support teams not just with features, but with structure and continuity. Looking ahead to 2026, CRM Plus remains focused on building a stable, adaptable foundation for customer experience as business needs continue to evolve.
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