We’ve already introduced you to Nova '25, Zoho SalesIQ's most expansive release yet, packed with intelligent automation, smarter IM engagement, and powerful agent tools. Now, it’s time to go deeper. In this blog, we’ll break down exactly what’s new and how it can transform the way you work.
But before delving into Nova '25, here's a refresher on what SalesIQ is and how it helps your business.
What's Zoho SalesIQ?
At its core, Zoho SalesIQ is a live chat and chatbot platform built to help you engage in real time with prospects on your website, mobile app, and messaging channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, LINE, and WeChat.
But it's more than just chat.
Our live visitor tracking dashboard actively shows you who’s visiting your website, what they’re looking at, and how engaged they are. You can then rank your leads with smart lead scoring, so your team can focus on those who're most likely to convert and proactively engage them.
When you do initiate that conversation, SalesIQ gives you everything you need to keep it frictionless. Our in-house AI assistant Zia and our OpenAI integration drive smart, AI-driven interactions, saving you time and effort. When a chat just doesn't cut it, your team can switch from typing to talking with the built-in call functionality.
But here’s where it gets really powerful—every interaction is measurable with our reports.
So it’s not just about having conversations. It’s about contextual conversations and constantly improving them, backed by real, actionable data.
Apart from this, we also integrate deeply with the Zoho ecosystem and third-party tools. That means your sales, support, and marketing teams all speak the same language, and your customers get a cohesive and smoother journey.
Now let's talk Nova
Zobot gets a facelift
Bot templates
Setting up a bot from scratch every time can really slow you down, so we've come up with ready-to-use, customizable bot templates across industries.
Just pick a template, customize it to match your tone and use case—and you’re ready to launch.
Bot import/export
Bot importing and exporting help you reuse bot flows for similar but not identical use cases or across different SalesIQ portals, all without having to create them from scratch every time. Simply export the existing bot, import it into the new portal, and make any changes needed.
Flow reports
Once your bot is up and running, how do you know if it’s actually working? Are people engaging with the bot? Where are they dropping off and what needs fixing?
With flow reports, you can now see how prospects and customers are moving through your bot—what messages they're viewing, where they're dropping off, where they decide to end the chat, and where they need human help. So if there's a card or path in the bot flow that keeps losing people, you can spot it right away and fix it. Or if a particular path is working beautifully, you can leverage it further.
Zia's GenAI capability in Answer Bot
So far, the Answer Bot was basically an article recommendation engine. And ChatGPT was an optional layer on top of it that can be enabled if you want GenAI text responses and not just article recommendations.
But now, this capability is built into Answer Bot by default using our in-house Zia LLM. So Answer Bot is now no longer just an article recommendation engine. With Zia’s Gen AI capability, It’s now able to respond with precise answers for visitor queries.
Productivity boosters powered by Zia
As much as bots help automate conversations, sometimes your live chat agents need to jump in. When they do, we want to make their jobs easier with our Writing Assistant and a conversation summary powered by Zia—Zoho's in-house AI assistant.
Writing Assistant can rephrase your messages in a click, fix typos and grammar, and even shorten messages so you can quickly respond to prospect and customer queries without compromising on quality.
Once a call or chat is over, you get a brief summary so you can quickly review what was discussed without replaying the entire call or going through the entire chat.
ChatGPT assistant integration
We've come up with an easy way to integrate ChatGPT assistants with SalesIQ to make both human live chats and bot interactions more contextual and effective.
ChatGPT assistant in codeless bot
Connecting ChatGPT to your chatbot enables it to respond to customer inquiries without depending on predefined bot responses.
While the ChatGPT integration enhances your bot, it draws on generic data to answer queries. It's more helpful in cases where the generic GPT model would suffice, like finding bank account or mortgage interest rates or generic guidelines for a process. But that doesn't work if your customers need answers based on your business context.
For this, you'd need ChatGPT assistants—customized GPT models that leverage your data, instructions, files, and functions—trained on your business data to provide precise answers to customer inquiries.
For example, if a customer asks, "What are your return policies?", the bot connected to ChatGPT might provide a generic response outlining a standard return window, as you see in the image on the left below.
But with the ChatGPT assistant, the answer will be precise, using the business's specific context, as you see in the image on the right below.
Smart suggestions powered by ChatGPT assistant
During live chat conversations, the ChatGPT assistant parses through your knowledge base and business data to give your team appropriate response suggestions to customer queries, called smart suggestions, that they can select from to respond faster and accurately with less effort.
Workflows
Workflows let you automate actions based on key events in the customer journey or your chat operation.
For example, you can create a workflow to instantly give your sales team an email or in-app notification when a lead hits a high score, so they can engage at the perfect moment.
Messaging channels upgrades
WhatsApp templates
WhatsApp templates let you proactively send pre-approved messages—like reminders, updates, or offers—to prospects and customers. You can create, edit, and manage these WhatsApp templates right from within SalesIQ, helping you stay consistent, save time, and reuse approved templates.
Broadcast messaging
Broadcast messaging enables you to reach out to your prospects and customers with offers and promotions in bulk.
This isn't just like sending a blast mail to all your customers. You can set specific filters for audience criteria like their country or lead score, and send a message that’s relevant to them.
Appointment scheduling in channels
Enable prospects and customers to schedule appointments or make reservations through instant messaging channels like WhasApp, Telegram, and LINE with the SalesIQ-Zoho Bookings integration.
Just add the bookings card to your bot flow, and the bot will collect the required booking info from your users. You can manage these bookings inside Zoho Bookings.
Profanity management across channels
Not every interaction goes the way we'd like. But with SalesIQ, you can ensure a safer, more respectful environment for your customer-facing teams across all messaging channels. Just create custom lists of inappropriate terms, and you can choose whether to display, mask, or block the abusive messages detected in a chat, display a warning message, and automatically close these chats or block the user, keeping conversations clean and professional.
You can also block spammers across channels.
Manage multiple WhatsApp business accounts in the same portal
If your business has multiple brands, you don't want all prospect or customer messages coming into the same number or account, which can quickly get messy and difficult to manage. With our multi-WABA support, each of your brands can now have its own WhatsApp Business Account, and you can connect them all to SalesIQ and manage them independently, with tailored templates, phone numbers, and settings for each one.
Instagram Story replies
Your Instagram Stories get attention, but now they can do more than just collect reactions and replies.
With instagram Story replies in SalesIQ, when someone replies to your Instagram Story, a live chat's instantly started, from where you can continue the conversation.
Voice calls in your business's mobile app
Voice calling has been a part of our website live chat, but Mobilisten, SalesIQ's mobile SDK, now supports voice calls, so your mobile app users can call you from the app.
Profile-based access control
As your business grows, so does your responsibility to protect customer data. With fine-grained, profile-based access control, you can now define exactly what each team member can see and do inside SalesIQ. Define user profiles and provide or restrict access at a feature level, so each team member sees only what’s relevant to their work and sensitive data stays protected.
Whisper chat
Whispher chat is especially useful for supervisors and leads. You can send a private message to an agent while you’re monitoring their chat without the prospect/customer ever seeing it. So if an agent needs help or you want to correct something mid-conversation, you can step in quietly and offer guidance without disrupting the conversation.
Two new integrations
Bigin by Zoho CRM
SalesIQ now integrates with Bigin by Zoho CRM—the CRM for small businesses. You can now push qualified leads from SalesIQ to Bigin without switching tabs, view important prospect and customer details from Bigin directly in SalesIQ’s operator chat window, set follow-ups so no lead slips through the cracks, and attach chat transcripts to Bigin for context during customer interactions.
Zoho Lens
Integrate SalesIQ with Zoho Lens, our AR-powered remote support tool that helps agents support customers in real time by letting them access the latter's mobile camera.
For example, if a customer is having trouble setting up a router or a printer, they can just point their phone camera at the setup, and your agent can guide them in real time instead of trying to convey all of it over chat.
Mobile app upgrades
We know that for sales and support teams, a mobile app needs to have most of the functionalities of the web app.
That's why we've upgraded ours, so now agents can:
Re-engage users on WhatsApp by updating and sharing WhatsApp templates on the go.
Craft the perfect response at no extra effort with the Writing Assistant.
Edit and annotate media before sharing it with customers to highlight what they need to see, like a button they need to click to get somewhere.
Trim videos to only share the important bit that may be a few minutes into a how-to video, so users don't have to sit through the irrelevant parts.
Receive inbound calls or call prospects and customers when needed. You can also reply via chat if you're unable to take the call, or you can transfer the call to another operator if the issue is beyond your expertise.
View a conversation summary to know what the chat or call was about without going through the entire conversation.
Add and manage conversation tags directly from the mobile app to organize them even on the go.
TV apps
In addition to our Apple TV app, we’re thrilled to extend the big-picture advantage to Android TV users too. Now, you can display real-time insights on a larger screen on your sales floor or support bay to keep your team aligned.
We’ve also released dedicated reports for the big screen. You can now display key metrics like your traffic source, visitor trends, most-visited pages, and more in real-time on your TV screen while reviewing KPIs with your team or presenting performance data in meetings.
Wrapping up
From intelligent automation to better messaging capabilities, mobile app upgrades, and TV app enhancements, all the new features in Nova '25 are designed to help your team be faster and work smarter than ever.
Try them out and let us know about your experience in the comments below.
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