Industry experts are
excited about Canvas

Everybody knows how important personalization is from a customer's perspective, but there is less emphasis on the role personalization plays in order for employees to create/deliver those personalized experiences. Canvas for Zoho CRM focuses on that side of the equation, providing employees with tools to more easily and efficiently create their own workflows and processes, which in turn improves their ability to deliver those personalized experiences customers want.

An organization's customer experience can be impacted by the employees' experience and the tools they use. High platform complexity and low adoption can affect employee engagement and drive down the ROI of CRM implementations. This is a universal problem. A simple no-code approach to help companies build their own software experiences is one of the more elegant solutions to that universal problem. It can greatly help drive platform adoption and create success for the organization.

Solutions like Canvas turn the paradigm of teams conforming to tools on its head. Canvas is for teams as personalization and engagement optimization engines are for customers—creating contextual, personalized, and relevant environments to elicit valuable outcomes. Instead of learning how to work with CRM, Canvas empowers organizations to design a user’s experiences with CRM based on how individual teams want to and need to work.

With Canvas, Zoho is looking to deliver consumer app-like experiences to business applications (now Zoho CRM, but in the future the potential to expand across the CX portfolio) and offering customers an unprecedented level of control over the look-and-feel and user experience of their Zoho CRM instances. In the greater market, this hasn’t yet been seen, and with this investment, we see Zoho looking to differentiate itself on user experience and ease-of-use versus other key CRM providers, just as it has always prioritized user experience and ease-of-use (and deployment) over everything else.

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In the current evolving Experience Economy, employees' needs are often forgotten. To ensure success in given roles, employees require tools that are easy to use and personalized to their needs and responsibilities within the organization. Canvas for Zoho CRM removes friction from the employee experience by offering a no-code, drag-and-drop customizable user interface. By gaining such ease of use and customization capabilities, enterprises will ensure effective adoption of new technology by employees, as well as sustain engagement in the long term.

Strong and sustained end-user adoption is a hallmark of success for a CRM implementation. However, many users find the default interface options presented in their CRM platform to be lacking; a common concern we hear from our members is that the baseline interface lacks the appropriate context and personalization of UI elements for specific end-user roles. While it's often possible to re-engineer the stock interface, doing so is often cumbersome and requires hands-on assistance from developers or a system integration partner. Zoho's new Canvas offering is a clear step in the right direction for dramatically reducing the complexity associated with rejigging the default UI presented by many CRMs. It allows non-technical staff to quickly and easily reconfigure their user experience based on their unique needs. Our view is that this capability will be a boon to user adoption, and result in higher satisfaction from sales, marketing, and service staff.

CRM is only effective if you can get salespeople to use it and to look at it as a positive resource instead of a drain on their time. One way to boost usage is to make it more personal, allowing people to easily customize the design framework to the needs of their particular organization or their vertical industry. Zoho’s Canvas is a strong step towards creating a better CRM user experience for employees, reducing complexity and confusion. It could bring significant benefits to organizations whose sales teams need ready access to contextually relevant customer information.

With the introduction of Canvas, Zoho sets a new standard for great CX in a CRM solution. Canvas drives ease of use to new heights to improve user adoption further, and it is surprisingly easy to use given the vast customization capabilities.

Zoho Canvas offers an intuitive mechanism for customizing the Zoho applications experience for each team across an organization. Classic CRM systems, for example, may contain lots of detailed information, but what really matters to sales, marketing, support, etc., team members is to find the information they need in the context of the moment. It is highly visual, making it easy to get at relevant contextual information without drilling down into multiple data sources, switching between applications, or being overwhelmed by the volume of detail. A focus on the employee experience is long overdue in today's business applications. Canvas provides that consumer-level systems experience. I'm pretty sure I could get to grips with it in a matter of minutes. I think the key to success will be to balance consistency with a team-based personalization approach. As it is role-based, admins should discuss options with each team and configure Canvas to meet their needs. Canvas will foster greater adoption of CRM and other systems and probably improve data quality as a result. Definitely worth a closer look.

Bloor is of the opinion that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation tools should be key to the functioning of any customer-facing organisation. Nevertheless, CRM implementations are often messy and take-up can be slow. What is needed is one source of truth that can be personalised for the needs of all and any stakeholders using a no-code, visual, drag-and-drop approach. It must be IT- and Ops-friendly but also allow appropriate business stakeholders to personalise their experience for themselves. The tool should encourage rapid adoption by allowing its users to take ownership, safely, of their own work experience.