Key results:
- Reduction in employee onboarding time75%
The company
PandaPay is a Canadian payment processing sales company with a strong presence that's expanding across Canada, including Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, as well as a growing reach in the United States. The company provides merchants with payment accounts, terminals, and reliable processing solutions.
In an industry where providers often disappear once contracts are signed, PandaPay continues to support and maintain relationships long after the sale. When the main provider can't resolve issues, PandaPay steps in to ensure merchants get the help they need—building trust and standing out as a true partner to businesses, especially in Montreal and across Canada.
What sets PandaPay apart is its commitment to going the extra mile for its merchants.
The challenge
PandaPay operates via a simple yet powerful policy: "We deliver what we promise, when we promise, and the way we promise it," says John McMahon, Chief of Operations at PandaPay. Living up to this philosophy requires being present for merchants at every step of the journey. However, this level of service was difficult to achieve with PandaPay's previous CRM solution, along with other fragmented systems that left teams working in silos.
The solution
To truly deliver on its promise, PandaPay needed a single cohesive platform that could bring its sales team, relationship managers, client experience team (support), and leadership together. The company sought a unified ecosystem capable of streamlining processes, improving visibility, and strengthening merchant relationships. This led them to choose Zoho One, a comprehensive suite that includes a robust CRM along with powerful tools designed to support PandaPay's merchant-first commitment.
"Zoho CRM is the core engine of the company," says George Al Hajjar, Director of Information Technology at PandaPay. The robust system powers everything from merchant onboarding to ongoing support, ensuring every step of every process is captured and managed without anything being lost.
"Zoho truly listens to client needs and continuously builds and enables features that add real value. With Zoho, there are no borders."
Capturing leads from multiple sources
Zoho CRM serves as the centralized hub for all leads, and is seamlessly integrated with Zoho Forms, SalesIQ, and Zoho Mail's TeamInbox. New client inquiries flow directly into the CRM as leads. With every channel connected, no opportunity is missed, and approved leads are automatically assigned to the right sales representative.
Customizing modules for application management
PandaPay manages application submissions to payment providers through a custom module in Zoho CRM. This module tracks the status of each application to ensure visibility and accountability at every step.
Eliminating human error with automation
Payment processing is complex, with many moving parts that leave no room for error. PandaPay simplifies this by leveraging Zoho CRM's workflow automation to ensure they don't miss any steps. New merchant accounts follow a structured application process, with modules capturing product and equipment details. As accounts move through different stages, workflows automatically notify the right teams—for example, alerting Relationship Management to take action without requiring any manual handoff from sales.
Additionally, when merchants reach critical milestones, Zoho CRM triggers personalized messages that proactively guide them through the next steps. For instance, reminders about PCI compliance are sent automatically, complete with self-help resources and a direct booking link to a meeting with the Client Experience team—in case the merchant isn't compliant yet. This proactive approach demonstrates PandaPay's commitment to going the extra mile and ensuring merchants always feel supported, informed, and connected.
Transforming client support with the Zoho Desk integration
Zoho CRM powers PandaPay's post-sale service by working hand in hand with Zoho Desk and SalesIQ to create a unified support experience. When an existing client reaches out through the SalesIQ chatbot, their query is routed into Zoho Desk as a support ticket and identified by the client's email address. If the issue requires more than technical assistance, a workflow creates a case in Zoho CRM, links it to the relevant contact and account, and ensures that the team can coordinate the actual work within Zoho CRM while maintaining communication through Desk. Once the case is resolved in CRM, the linked ticket in Zoho Desk is automatically updated and closed.
This tight integration not only saves time but also gives PandaPay a detailed record of every step taken for each client—far beyond simple ticket resolution. Every case is linked to the merchant, categorized properly, and enriched with manuals published on Zoho Connect, checklists, and ticket history. Instead of searching through fragmented tickets, the client experience team can access the exact resources they need directly in the client's case record in Zoho CRM. This consistency empowers the team to resolve issues faster, respond more effectively, and deliver the reliable, caring support that strengthens long-term merchant relationships.
Proactive merchant engagement with RouteIQ
As part of its adoption of Zoho CRM, PandaPay integrated with RouteIQ to support its RoadTech team and enhance client experience management. The tool provides the team with a clear view of merchants to visit, helps optimize routes, and enables efficient scheduling of on-site visits. Using the mobile app, RoadTech reps check in and out on-site, with all visit details automatically logged in the CRM. This gives managers full visibility into visits, time spent, and client interactions. The team uses these visits to resolve issues quickly, proactively engage with clients, strengthen relationships, and ensure an exceptional service experience. While currently focused on client experience, PandaPay is also considering expanding RouteIQ's use to support the sales team in the future.
Complementing this is PandaPay's RoadTech program—a first in the industry. Instead of simply mailing out replacements when terminals fail, RoadTech specialists visit merchants on-site, swap devices, provide temporary replacements, and deliver the repaired terminal once ready. This hands-on approach reflects PandaPay's promise to go above and beyond for the merchant and demonstrates its commitment to exceptional after-sales support.
Boosting success with deeper insights
PandaPay uses Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics together to give its sales teams complete visibility into their performance. On their CRM home page, team members can track daily and weekly calls, meetings, deals created, applications submitted, merchants activated, and email activity with statuses. KPIs, deal funnels, and month-over-month comparisons are also available, pulling data from both CRM and Analytics. This unified view helps the sales team stay focused, proactive, and accountable.
For leadership, dedicated dashboards provide a deeper view into visits, support activity, and overall program effectiveness. A map displaying all active and inactive clients offers a dynamic geographic view that can be filtered by various factors. This visualization helps identify key white space regions for potential sales opportunities and supports retention efforts by highlighting account ownership patterns. By combining these insights with data related to on-site visits, time spent with merchants, and program impact, leaders gain a clearer understanding of how initiatives like hands-on support and RoadTech are driving results and guiding strategic decisions.
Effortless partner training
PandaPay works with ISOs as partners who sell under their own brand but don't have access to its Zoho systems. To streamline training, the company uses TrainerCentral, integrated with Zoho CRM's Partners module (originally called the Vendors module). New partners submit a Zoho Form that creates a record and contact in Zoho CRM; with one checkbox, they're invited to TrainerCentral and assigned the right training plan.
This automation eliminates manual administrative work and ensures every partner is enrolled quickly—reflecting PandaPay's commitment to seamless processes that give merchants complete confidence in the company.
Improving user efficiency with a customized UI
With too much information on screen, users can feel lost. For PandaPay's client experience team, this meant scrolling and straining to find what they needed. By customizing the CRM interface with Canvas, PandaPay created a clean, focused view where everything essential is available at a glance, making customer-facing work far more efficient and focused.
Zia
PandaPay leverages Zia, Zoho CRM's built-in AI assistant, to make smarter, faster decisions. Zia enriches client records with meaningful data, highlights trends, and surfaces key insights that might otherwise be missed. Zia's generative AI capabilities assist users in drafting email templates and responses, which ultimately helps teams communicate more effectively with merchants.
Integrating with Zoho Social to measure client satisfaction
At PandaPay, customer reviews are a critical way to measure communication effectiveness and satisfaction. By integrating Zoho Social with Zoho CRM, every Google review is automatically pushed into a custom CRM module through a workflow rule. This enables the team to track feedback, link reviews to the employee responsible for resolving the issue, and ensure timely follow-ups. Every review, positive or negative, receives a response, turning feedback into an opportunity to strengthen relationships and demonstrate PandaPay's commitment to exceptional service.
Elevating the merchant onboarding journey
Merchant onboarding used to be one of PandaPay's biggest challenges. Deals often came to a halt because of missing information, incomplete applications, or errors in documentation. This not only delayed activations but created frustration for both sales teams and merchants as well—sometimes even costing new business. With Zoho CRM, PandaPay has transformed the merchant onboarding process with built-in validations, mandatory fields, and submission checklists—all of which ensure applications are complete before moving forward and drastically reduce the risk of errors. What once was a source of lost opportunities is now a smooth, automated pipeline. The overall onboarding success rate has significantly improved, which has led to faster activations and stronger client relationships.
Accelerating employee readiness
Payment processing is complex, and onboarding new support agents used to take up to a year before they became fully effective. With Zoho Connect resources embedded in tickets, AI-powered response suggestions, and step-by-step checklists, new employees now have everything they need right at their fingertips. What once took 12 months now takes just three (a 75% reduction), turning new hires into valuable contributors much faster while ensuring they can always deliver on PandaPay's promise of reliable, caring support.
More integrations supporting PandaPay's success
PandaPay has extended Zoho CRM with several integrations that bring all merchant interactions into one place:
Telus Business Connect enables teams to make, log, and track calls directly in Zoho CRM.
Zoho Sign is useful for sending contracts, NDAs, and other documents, with originals, signed copies, and certificates all accessible in the CRM for full visibility and compliance.
Zoom enables client meetings and makes it easy to schedule, host, and link meetings back to client accounts.
Benefits
"With Zoho in place, the value of the company has had exponential growth as a result."
PandaPay has achieved measurable improvements across every area of its business after deploying Zoho CRM:
Reduction in employee onboarding time by 75%
Reduction in merchant attrition rate to below industry average
Improved merchant onboarding success rate, leading to faster activations and fewer lost deals
Consistent, faster case resolution
Greater visibility and transparency
- Scalable growth by replacing fragmented systems with one connected platform
- Industry typeFinancial Services
- EmployeesAbove 50
- Type of businessB2B
Looking forward
PandaPay continues to expand the possibilities of Zoho CRM, with upcoming plans to integrate Google Maps for smarter territory management. This will enable the sales team to assign leads and manage regions with even greater precision, and thereby strengthen their ability to serve merchants wherever they are. With innovation as a constant driver, PandaPay is setting its sights on reaching the $1 billion mark over the next five years—scaling on a foundation of efficiency, transparency, and customer-first service.
"Zoho is how we differentiate ourselves from competitors. Many of them rely on fragmented, independent systems, while Zoho gives us one connected platform that keeps everything running seamlessly."
John McMahonChief of Operations, PandaPay
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