Zoho CRM turns smart with AI-powered assistant to make salespeople's job easy

CHENNAI, INDIA: Zoho today unveiled Zia, the Zoho CRM's new AI-powered intelligent sales assistant that detects anomalies, suggests workflows and macros, and also advises salespeople the best time to contact a prospect.

"Salespeople put work into their CRM. But does the CRM work in return to make it easy for salespeople?" said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist of Zoho. "Zia, Zoho’s intelligent assistant, is designed to do exactly that. Zia will contextually suggest ways to automate workflows and macros and detect anomalies, based on the sales rep's CRM usage patterns. Soon Zia will expand her skills to other Zoho apps."

Zoho also launched Blueprint, a Zoho CRM tool for building and implementing business processes and a host of new features, such as scoring rules and the SalesSignals platform, to help boost sales productivity.

Sell Smarter

Anomaly detection: Zia analyzes the CRM usage of salespeople to identify sales patterns and predict where an anomaly may occur. This feature lets salespeople know when they're doing well, and when they're not.

Macro and Workflow suggestions: Salespeople can automate tasks that they manually do every day by creating macros and workflows. Now, Zia notices the repetitive tasks for them and suggests macros and workflows, which they can create in a click.

Best time to call: Zia studies CRM data and customer interactions to let salespeople know the best time to contact a prospect. This feature saves them time and increases their chances of closing deals.

Sell Faster

SalesSignals Platform: Signals keep salespeople informed in real-time about customer actions at various touch points like social media, satisfaction surveys, and support tickets, helping them act in time and make speedy sales. What's better? Signals can now be obtained from third-party applications. With this launch, SalesSignals platform will support ten out-of-the-box integrations - SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, SMS Magic, DocuSign, and others. The platform can be extended to receive signals from any third-party application making CRM the central hub to capture all customer activity.

Scoring Rules: Salespeople can now configure rules for assigning scores to leads through various parameters. The CRM then prioritizes the leads based on their scores. This feature enables salespeople to focus on the most important lead first, and make faster conversions. This is ideal for businesses working with a large number of leads.

Sell Better

Blueprint: For larger organizations, making everyone follow the same sales process without constant monitoring is where the biggest challenge lies. Blueprint in Zoho CRM helps build and execute sales processes from within CRM. This ensures compliance from the entire team, making the process both systematic and repeatable.

Zoho has also released Zoho PhoneBridge Platform, where cloud PBX and call center management solutions can build telephony integrations for Zoho applications. Zoho has partnered with 15 new telephony vendors to provide its users with integrations that offer powerful call management features, including single-click dialling and automatic call logging.

While Zia and Blueprint will be available in the Enterprise Edition and above, scoring rules will be available in the Professional Edition and above.

The SalesSignals platform will be available across all paid plans, from the Standard Edition and above.

Zoho CRM is free up to 10 users. Paid plans begin at $12/ user/month for the Standard Edition, $20/user/month for the Professional Edition and $35/user/month for the fully featured Enterprise Edition. Zoho CRM Plus, is available for $50/user/month. There's also a new Ultimate Edition, catering specifically to large businesses with features like dedicated database clusters, service level agreements and dedicated support staff.