Transforming scattered data into meaningful customer journeys
Process
Understanding each customer's business use case is crucial for Zoho's customer-facing teams to deliver proactive and personalized support. Additionally, this information enables them to better understand how Zoho applications help address evolving business needs. A use case document serves to capture a customer's complete journey, from the challenges they faced with past applications to their expectations from Zoho, their onboarding experiences, their business outcomes, and more. These deeper insights empower customer-facing teams to foster stronger relationships and provide more value to customers at every touchpoint during their journeys with Zoho.
Criteria-based customer identification
To identify customers ideal for use case documentation, custom views are created in Zoho CRM's Subscription module by filtering for companies whose number of licensed users is greater than five, or whose ARR is above $5,000, or other criteria. These views are then assigned to the each team's respective DRI, who are responsible for documenting complete customer use cases.
Collecting information from stakeholders
The DRIs then reach out to stakeholders who onboarded customers across various teams like pre-sales, sales, onboarding, customer support, and others to collect contextual information about each customer. In addition to personal interactions, DRIs review calls, tickets, and notes from these teams to outline the context of each customer use case.
Data enrichment through web research
Despite collecting information from various teams, DRIs usually need more information to build complete customer use cases. Accordingly, they enrich the customer's data by manually sourcing data from various platforms like the customer's website, LinkedIn, publicly available reviews, and others.
Use case documentation
The DRIs use Zoho's built-in word processor, Zoho Writer, to document use cases. Once complete use cases are documented, DRIs share them with the respective stakeholders to verify use cases' accuracy. With Writer's collaborative functionalities enabled, stakeholders add their comments and make changes directly in the documents to ensure DRIs see any changes or corrections.
Use case publishing
Upon addressing stakeholders' suggestions, the DRIs use Zoho Writer's access settings to make the documents accessible to anyone in Zoho who has the documents' URLs. The link to each document is then added to the appropriate CRM record through a field called Internal Use Case Doc Link, thereby creating a repository of various customer use cases.
Converting unique use cases into Solution Documents
Throughout the use case documentation process, DRIs look out for unique or interesting use cases from which a larger group of customers or implementation experts might draw implementation ideas, best practices, and plausible solutions. DRIs identify such use cases at their discretion and convert them into detailed Solution Documents, or, in some cases, Implementation Case Studies. These resources cover in detail the technical details of the solutions implemented so that customers with similar business needs can use these documents as implementation manuals.
Challenges
Several factors—listed below—hindered account managers, customer advocacy teams, marketers, and sales personnel from accessing critical knowledge about their customers. A scattered data landscape resulted in customer engagements being reactive rather than strategic, and meant that Zoho missed opportunities to add meaningful business value to its customers.
Fragmented information
Critical insights—such as customers' reasons for subscribing to Zoho CRM, their onboarding milestones, requirement gathering, configuration details, and more—were often scattered across sales notes, pre-sales calls, support tickets, onboarding documents, and email threads. These disjointed data fragments made it difficult for customer-facing teams to understand the context surrounding each customer.
Lack of data standardization
The absence of a standardized data format that clearly records and segments the challenges customers faced with their previous applications, their expectations from Zoho, and the solutions Zoho provided often led to information mix-ups and insufficiency.
Poor visibility
All internal stakeholders—sans the implementation experts—lacked comprehensive visibility into the solutions provided to customers to meet their real-world business requirements. This made customer advocacy and contextual customer engagement difficult.
Communication delays
The lack of a centralized information repository created cross-functional dependencies for customer-facing teams who needed to collect customer-related context, which resulted in unreasonable time delays and a lack of transparency.
Solution
To overcome the challenges of scattered customer data and fragmented insights, we introduced a dedicated teamspace in Zoho CRM called Customer Advocacy and created a Use Cases module that serves as a central repository of Zoho's real-world application scenarios across diverse industries, user bases, and subscription plans. This module breaks down data silos and encompasses customer journeys, including their business process, past software usage, challenges, onboarding history, special requirements, and internal collaboration track, thereby showcasing how Zoho CRM is used in different business contexts.
This solution aligns with Zoho's CRM for Everyone architecture and ensures that CRM insights are accessible, relevant, and actionable for all internal stakeholders—including product management teams, marketers, pre-sales reps, support reps, and account managers.
Teamspace creation
Zoho created a teamspace called Customer Advocacy, as shown below.
Module creation
Within the Customer Advocacy teamspace, Zoho created a module called Use Cases. Zoho CRM offers a host of predefined templates that you can choose to start using the product quickly. However, if you don't find a template that fits your requirement, you can build your module from scratch. In this case, the Use Case module was completely built from scratch using the option highlighted in the screenshot below.
Module customization
Zoho CRM's module customization functionality was used to configure the layout by adding the required fields and sections, as shown below.
The fields were grouped under five sections, namely: Customer Profile, Use Case Details, Internal Stakeholders, Customer Stakeholders, and Consent Management.
The Customer Profile section includes fields like Account Name, Contact Name, Contact Information, Address, Subscription Details, Company Information, License Details, and more. By accessing the data from this section, one can review and understand a customer's basic details.
The next section is the Use Case Details, which houses the fields related to the use case, such as the Name, Link, Status, Features, Apps, and Integrations Used. Besides being a repository of use case-related information, this section also introduces customer-related information from other modules, such as Onboarding and Presales, through a lookup.
From this section, one can track each customer's migration information from other software to Zoho, their transaction histories with the pre-sales and onboarding teams, and their complete use case story.
The next section is the Internal Stakeholders, where stakeholder information from various teams is recorded. Anyone who accesses this record can check who has worked with a particular customer so that they can reach out to them to obtain more context.
The Customer Stakeholders and Consent Management sections serve to record the customer's company contact information and obtain their consent before publishing use cases to Zoho's larger customer base.
Permissions and access controls
Stakeholders are granted profile-based access permissions to enable streamlined collaboration between departments.
Workflow creation
Workflows related to the Use Cases module were created as follows. One example is a workflow created to pass records automatically to relevant stakeholders as case study leads one year after becoming customers.
Custom reports and dashboards
We created multiple reports and dashboards to track real-time insights related to this module.
Result
Implementing Zoho CRM for Everyone to consolidate scattered customer data and build meaningful customer use cases resulted in the following benefits for teams across Zoho:
They can access contextual customer information quickly.
They can learn how Zoho can be used for various industries.
They have a real-time reference resource to help marketers create targeted customer campaigns.
They can collaborate with multiple departments from a single application.
They can easily collect and provide customer feedback about products.