Zoho CRM Plus helps Agoda’s Strategic Partnerships team manage workflows and communicate with partners.

From its beginnings as an e-commerce start-up based in Singapore in 2005, digital travel platform Agoda has grown to offer a global network of over 2.4 million properties in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, offering travelers easy access to a wide choice of luxury and budget hotels, apartments, homes and villas to suit all budgets and travel occasions. In 2019, Agoda added flight bookings and packages to help make travel even easier.

Headquartered in Singapore, Agoda is part of Booking Holdings (Nasdaq: BKNG) and employs more than 4,000 staff in 30 countries. Agoda.com and the Agoda mobile app are available in 39 languages.

Introducing Zoho

Agoda's requirements included ‌deal, ‌contract, campaign management, and advanced technical implementations.

For their CRM subscription, Agoda selected Zoho CRM Plus given Zoho’s customer support levels, user interface and experience, ability to support with custom features, and the overall cost for value proposition.

Blueprint and workflow automation to manage onboarding

Addressing the requirements, Zoho analyzed and built a process flow using Blueprint, guiding partnership managers through the process with ease. Another Blueprint was configured alongside this to manage the deal flow from lead to live, including all advanced technical implementations. This helped Agoda structure their partnerships onboarding processes in a way that avoids manual emails and chat messages to request backend systems configurations.

Approval rules were implemented to manage approvals required during the process. ‌For this, workflow rules were set up to manage follow-up tasks and custom functions were configured to manage the partner onboarding process.

To improve Agoda’s campaign management process, activity lists were created and ‌assigned to the campaign management team in Zoho CRM. Rules were also set up to monitor the progress and completion of campaigns.

Agoda also leveraged Zoho CRM to efficiently execute email campaigns to share updates with partners.

The benefits

With the level of adaptability in Zoho CRM and its wide scope of customization, Agoda moved from just using Zoho CRM to consolidating all their requirements into one system, Zoho CRM Plus. Zoho made customizations to replicate a few features and setups available in previously-used solutions, plus were able to set up additional features to meet further operational expectations including multi-level approval, opening and closing tickets based on updates to the ticket, and more.

The flow of data between different applications (specifically Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk) is the most important useful part of Zoho CRM Plus for Agoda. Beyond the basic capability of the platform, its versatility towards customizations made CRM Plus the right choice.