Kheyti reclaims 40% of team bandwidth with Zoho CRM's automation

Key results:

• Adoption rate100%
• Bandwidth increase40%

The company

Kheyti is an award-winning social enterprise based in Hyderabad, India that's dedicated to empowering smallholder farmers through climate-smart agricultural technology. Founded in 2015, the company is best known for its pioneering "Greenhouse-in-a-Box"—a low-cost, modular greenhouse designed specifically for small-acreage farms.

Kheyti provides an end-to-end solution that combines affordable infrastructure with financing assistance, high-quality seeds, and digital advisory services. By enabling farmers to use 90% less water and achieve up to seven times higher yields, Kheyti helps vulnerable agricultural communities build climate resilience, stabilize their incomes, and transition toward long-term financial security.

The Kheyti team brings together experts in agronomy, engineering, and social impact, all driven by a shared mission to put farmers first in the fight against climate change.

The challenge

Previously, the company relied on spreadsheets to manage their data, but this approach became unsustainable as their volume of information grew. While spreadsheets were easy for initial data entry, they eventually became impossible to maintain, frequently hanging and crashing under the weight of too many rows. The need for a CRM arose and the company moved strategically to eliminate these technical bottlenecks and consolidate their fragmented data into a single, reliable source of truth.

The solution

To overcome the limitations of spreadsheets, Kheyti transitioned to Zoho CRM as its centralized operational hub. They chose Zoho CRM primarily because it's a homegrown brand that offered highly competitive pricing. Additionally, the decision was driven by the platform's ability to handle high volumes of complex data without the performance issues associated with manual tracking. Zoho CRM offered the flexibility to build custom modules tailored to the unique agricultural lifecycle—from greenhouse installation to crop economics—to ensure that data remained organized and accessible. By consolidating fragmented information into a single source of truth, the company could finally eliminate technical bottlenecks and focus on scaling their impact on farmers' livelihoods.

Driving user adoption

Moving to a single platform initially required an adjustment period, but the transition quickly proved its value by centralizing operations for the entire organization. By replacing manual spreadsheets with standardized features like picklists and user lookups, the company eliminated the chaos of inconsistent data. This shift allowed for better quality control and ensured that information was no longer trapped with specific individuals, but was instead accessible to everyone who needed it.

The success of the platform is reflected in its 100% adoption rate across diverse departments:

• Operational execution: On-field sales, finance, warehouse, installation, and service teams (including agronomists) use the system daily to input critical data, from generating invoices to tracking material delivery and farmer interactions.

• Strategic oversight: State heads, team leads, supply chain managers, and senior leadership leverage CRM and Zoho Analytics integrations to track real-time metrics and oversee large-scale operations.

• Data integrity: A dedicated data team uses the platform to manage quality control and maintenance and ensure the system remains a reliable source of truth for the entire company.

Lead acquisition and conversion

The process begins with field mobilization as sales teams identify high-potential villages. Using the Zoho CRM mobile app, officers capture farmer interest directly on-site, generating leads that include demographics, land eligibility, and funnel progression. This mobile-first approach ensures that data is recorded the moment it's gathered. Upon payment of a booking token, the lead is converted into an account, and a sales order is generated to document product and pricing details.

Financial and logistical fulfillment

Payment tracking is managed in a dedicated module linked to the sales order. Once full payment is received, the finance team generates an invoice and triggers the supply chain. The warehouse coordinator then manages stock and e-way bills to dispatch materials, while installation coordinators simultaneously deploy third-party labor teams to the site and track labor efficiency and timelines within the CRM.

Quality control and onboarding

Post-installation involves a two-tier verification: The installation coordinator conducts a QA check, followed by an agronomist's final QC. Once passed, the agronomist conducts an on-field onboarding visit to establish a one-year crop plan. These visits are documented in the CRM with checklists and photos to ensure the farmer is prepared for their first sowing season.

Advisory and lifecycle management

Ongoing engagement is tracked through a custom "Crop Season" module that monitors everything from sowing dates to final yield economics. All farmer interactions—including calls and WhatsApp messages—are logged as cases to derive engagement metrics and resolve technical issues. This continuous support loop secures the farmer's success, and often leads to repeat sales and community referrals.

With each agronomist managing an average of 200 farmers, the custom module and WhatsApp integration enable them to handle 30 to 40 cases daily while providing optimal agricultural guidance to farmer.

Unified communication via integrations

To create a single source of truth and ensure that every interaction the service team handles is automatically captured, Kheyti integrated a cloud telephony tool with Zoho CRM that provides a comprehensive history of farmer calls and enables the team to maintain continuity in service and support. Furthermore, the CRM is linked with a WhatsApp communication tool, which centralizes mobile messaging into the farmer's record and ensures that all digital advisory and support remain visible to the entire organization.

The lead generation engine is further strengthened through integrations with Zoho Social and Facebook. While lead sources vary across digital and field channels, these integrations allow the marketing team to funnel interest directly into Zoho CRM campaigns. This unified approach ensures that whether a lead is captured via social media or entered manually from the field, every prospect is tracked within the same ecosystem—eliminating data silos and streamlining the path to conversion.

Optimizing data entry with client scripts

To empower Farmer Success associates (FSAs) to make informed, real-time decisions, Kheyti leverages client scripts to automate data population during the record creation process. In complex workflows like the Crop Season module, it's essential for staff to see critical contextual data—such as greenhouse names, farmer details, and yield targets—immediately upon opening the creation page.

By using client scripts, these fields are populated the moment a record is initiated rather than after it's saved. This instant visibility ensures that FSAs have all the necessary background information at their fingertips to make strategic decisions on the fly. The result is a proactive approach to UI automation that not only accelerates the data entry process but also significantly improves accuracy by reducing the need for manual lookups across different modules.

Automating accuracy with validation and workflow rules

To maintain high data integrity across a geographically dispersed team, Kheyti uses validation rules to enforce strict operational standards. By placing restrictions on critical date fields—such as ensuring a "Planned Installation Date" can only be set for the current or a future date—the system prevents back-dated entries that could skew reporting. This real-time enforcement acts as a digital guardrail that minimizes manual data errors and ensures that the project timeline remains realistic and chronologically accurate.

Complementing these restrictions, Kheyti uses workflow rules to simplify the sales order process dramatically and improve the user experience for sales officers. Instead of manually entering dozens of line items, officers simply select the structure size, height, and specific combination of products (such as a greenhouse, drip system, or green tunnel) the farmer is purchasing.

Clicking a "Generate Subform" button triggers a workflow that automatically populates the subform with the correct products and their fixed floor prices. While sales officers retain the flexibility to adjust final pricing within approved limits, the automated population ensures that no essential components are missed and that the baseline financial data is always consistent and reliable.

Data insights and analytics strategy

The leadership at Kheyti relies on the deep integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics to maintain a high-level view of organizational health. While the core CRM provides excellent immediate insights, the specialized Zoho Analytics integration enables the team to perform more complex data modeling and gain deeper insights into long-term trends. This synergy ensures that whether the team needs a quick glance at daily metrics or a comprehensive review of seasonal performance, the data is easily accessible and visually intuitive.

The Home dashboard in Zoho CRM has become a cornerstone of daily operations, particularly for product owners and field teams. One of the most valued features is the ability to create dynamic, personalized views using the "Logged-in User" filter, which allows the team to build a single report that automatically displays only the data relevant to the individual viewing it. By removing the need for manual filtering, Kheyti ensures that every user—from sales officers to leadership—sees an immediate, clutter-free snapshot of their specific KPIs the moment they log in.

Beyond the home page, the ease of building CRM analytics dashboards has simplified the reporting process for non-technical users. The ability to use saved filters and drag-and-drop components makes it possible to construct quick, ad-hoc dashboards without requiring a background in data science. This accessibility empowers the team to stay agile and turns raw data into strategic business intelligence that supports better decision-making across all departments.

Benefits

The transition to a unified CRM has fundamentally transformed Kheyti from a reactive, spreadsheet-dependent operation to a data-driven organization capable of sustained growth. By moving beyond the limitations of crashing files and fragmented data, the team has established a reliable digital backbone that ensures information flows seamlessly across departments without loss or corruption.

This newly established stability has yielded immediate, measurable operational improvements:

• Enhanced data integrity: The implementation of validation rules, client scripts, and layout rules has strictly enforced process adherence, ensuring on-time data entries and capturing the exact data points required. This automation has successfully reduced manual data auditing and error correction, saving approximately 40% of the team's bandwidth previously spent on routine data checks.

• Accelerated order processing: By automating sales order subforms and pricing calculations, the system has eliminated manual entry bottlenecks. This has dramatically increased the number of sales orders a single officer can process daily and significantly boosts overall operational efficiency.

Ultimately, these advancements enable leadership to make strategic decisions based on trustworthy, real-time field metrics rather than outdated records and enhance the company's ability to serve farmers with precision and speed.