OffiNeeds gains control over data and greater visibility into customer interactions using Zoho CRM

The company 

OffiNeeds is an end-to-end corporate gifting platform. They've been helping businesses with their customized gifting needs for more than 19 years now. Having started in 2005, they have six experience centers in India and serve 2,000+ large corporations.

Their Zoho partner

Rovia solutions is a Zoho-authorized partner. Their services include marketing, business development, and re-selling of IT products. OffiNeeds got in touch with Rovia Solutions  in 2018 for a few customizations in Zoho CRM and have since worked on several integrations, including Zoho Projects. Later, they helped OffiNeeds transition from standalone Zoho products to the Zoho One bundle.

The challenge

It was back in 2008-2009 that OffiNeeds realized they needed a CRM to keep track of all their leads, potentials, and customers. Having a diverse customer base with varied orders and customization requests, they needed to keep track of every request individually and filter records by order preferences such as products ordered, logos, timelines, and other customizations.

"When we started off, we didn't know how to keep track of customer data, and we used Excel sheets," says Srikanth Acharya, Founder and CEO of OffiNeeds. "Then we learned that there's something called CRM."

OffiNeeds started evaluating different products and began their journey with Vtiger CRM, but eventually moved on to Zoho CRM. Thereafter, they used several standalone products from Zoho, including Books and Zoho Social, before graduating to Zoho One.

The solution 

Once they started customizing Vtiger on their own, they realized that it had several limitations: As an open source technology, there was no proper process to follow. They continued their search for a scalable and more customizable solution.

"Zoho CRM is a lot more structured, and there are tutorials available," Acharya says, adding that they were just starting the business at that point and didn't have a lot of knowledge about how CRM worked. "We loved the fact that Zoho already knew the best practices. We just needed to follow those for our business to be a lot more productive—so we switched to Zoho CRM."

Some of the modules they started working with were Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Potentials, Quotes, and Sales Orders. As they became more familiar with the Zoho ecosystem, they gradually started using other CRM modules and Zoho products, like SalesIQ and Campaigns.

Learning to work with Zoho CRM 

Acharya feels that they started using Zoho CRM at the right time for their organization, as there were fewer customers and less data to handle. The migration from Vtiger to Zoho CRM was easier. At first, they thought that learning the CRM would be a challenge. However, they quickly found out that they had plenty of help documents at their disposal to learn from. "That was good enough for us," Acharya says. "I was personally learning all of these, and it was exciting for me to learn CRM and implement it. We have done almost 99% of the implementation by ourselves, which continues even today."

Growing with Zoho integrations 

"We kind of evolved with Zoho CRM. We've adopted new features and customized them, and streamlined things to a great extent."

- Shubra Acharya, CEO, OffiNeeds

OffiNeeds has been able to scale up with Zoho and has been around for countless updates, integrations, and new feature releases along the way. They've incorporated these features over the years and seen great benefits from them.

Speaking about some of these enhancements, Acharya says, "SalesIQ came and we realized that you can integrate it very easily with Zoho CRM. That was really, really cool. It saved us a lot of time and effort."

Later, Zoho CRM's Zoho Forms integration became a crucial part of their lead-gathering process. Using Zoho Forms, they created a form on their website and started using it to add leads to Zoho CRM. "That was another awesome game changer," Acharya adds.

Most recently, they've integrated Knowlarity with Zoho CRM, which has enabled them to initiate and receive calls to and from customers in Zoho CRM, keep call recordings, assign follow-up activities instantly after a call ends, and keep logs. "That is another big benefit to be able to scale up that process, and that's amazing," Acharya says.

The OffiNeeds team also uses the WhatsApp integration for marketing and keeps customers updated about their offers.

Working with Zoho CRM 

At OffiNeeds, the sales and marketing teams use Zoho CRM the most. "The sales team lives in Zoho CRM," Acharya says. From creating new accounts to creating a potential to sending quotations; everything happens in Zoho CRM.  

The company has two sales teams: remote sales and field sales. Their main lead source is their helpline phone number, which is listed on their website. Apart from this, they also get leads from their marketing campaigns, social media channels, and WhatsApp integration. Every lead gets added to the CRM directly, and then a tele-caller calls to validate it. Once verified, the lead is turned into a potential in Zoho CRM, and their associated contact and account records are also generated. The lead is then assigned to a salesperson either from field sales or remote sales. Acharya says this is the stage where the customer journey starts for OffiNeeds and where salespeople become more familiar with the customers.

The field sales team predominantly uses the Zoho CRM mobile app, which enables them to create and send quotations easily when they're at the client's location. "That's the biggest use case," Acharya says. "It's inconvenient to carry the laptop on the field at all times, so the CRM app is very convenient."

After the initial call and requirement-gathering phase, there are two customized modules that come into play according to the customers' needs: One is called Sample Request, and the other is Design Request.

When a customer asks to see a sample of the products they've ordered, that request goes to the Sample Request module; when they want to see what their logo design will look like on ordered products, the request goes to the Design Request module. Someone from the merchandising team then obtains a sample for the sales team to show the client. These requests are easily tracked through CRM.  

Once the client approves the design, they're sent a quote. After the approved purchase order arrives, it's converted into a sales order in Zoho CRM with just a few clicks.

But that's not where the customer journey ends. OffiNeeds fully utilizes the data recorded in CRM to nurture leads. They keep in touch with their leads and customers via email marketing, WhatsApp marketing, and telephony—all of which are integrated with Zoho CRM.

They assess their marketing attribution to understand which touchpoints generate the most leads. They track email open rates from campaigns and website visitors and assign points to outbound calls to identify hot leads.

OffiNeeds generate different types of reports from Zoho CRM daily to understand bottlenecks, forecast sales, and derive business insights.

Saving time with automated workflows 

Acharya says that OffiNeeds have saved time by using workflows to create a range of task lists whose stages are automate via workflows for every product and vendor. For example, when a customer submits a sales order for a product, it turns into a milestone and from there follows an automated task list that determines the actions to be taken next, from placing an order with the respective vendor to creating an invoice. Once the sales order is closed in Zoho CRM and it automatically passes a milestone, it's then assigned to different teams who handle various sub-tasks, depending on the order.  

They also collect feedback and payments through workflow automations.  

Benefits and ROI 

Acharya reflects on the main changes OffiNeeds have undergone over their years of using Zoho CRM. "One is that as we grew as an organization, we were able to aggregate all our leads and study their patterns—what is working, what is not working," he says. "People don't forget to follow up with customers now—which happens a lot if the information is on a piece of paper or an Excel sheet."

"Not every potential or account created turns into business immediately," he adds, "but because they remain as contacts in the CRM and get our email campaigns and WhatsApp messages, leads are warmed up, and eventually—maybe in two to six months—they convert."

He recalls an experience of a customer who was a cold lead in the system for four years and eventually converted—a decision the customer attributes to the campaigns they received over the years from OffiNeeds.

When other entrepreneurs come to Acharya for advice on how to scale business, manage more leads, grow their salesforce, and engage with customers more effectively, Acharya has one answer: "I tell them we use Zoho CRM for all of that."