Zoho has recently released the latest addition to its customer experience CRM platform offering the one-two punch of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. Zoho CRM Plus lets small businesses without big IT budgets compete with the bigger players by letting different departments like customer support, marketing, sales and operations work together.
A Look at Zoho CRM Plus
Small Business Trends got in touch with Taylor Backman, Sr. Product Evangelist, Zoho, to find out more about the latest CRM version that incorporates Zia, the company’s AI powered assistant and Zoho analytics.
Customer Experience Platform
Backman stressed one the bigger advantages for the perpetually time-challenged small business owner is what’s called the Customer Experience Platform that unifies several tools under the digital CRM Plus hood.
“Zoho CRM Plus contains the type of powerful technology that has traditionally been reserved for deep-pocketed big businesses that employ armies of IT people,” he wrote in an email. “Zoho CRM Plus solves complex cross-functional business problems that businesses of all sizes struggle with, right out of the box.”
Zoho CRM Plus Journey
He went on to describe how the Zoho CRM Plus journey started four years ago as a response to small businesses’ need to bring a variety of applications like sales, marketing and support together. They been able to fuse a number of different apps into one platform. Backman describes how the results save time and money for smaller businesses.
Unified Interface
“There’s a unified interface across services; a unified search to find info across services; a unified administrative panel for quicker set up and user provisioning,” he wrote. “We’ve been able to do this because we’ve built all these services on the same technology stack, from scratch.”
Zoho CRM Plus is specifically designed as software that can do a lot of work for a small business. For example, the Zoho intelligent assistance, Zia, can analyze different requests for support and take actions by recommending answers gleaned from a knowledge base that’s user created.
Real-Time Chat Bots
“Even better, you can use Zia to create real-time chat bots to field customer questions while small businesses free up resources to be used elsewhere,” Backman explains. “Second, there’s the Analytics updates. Small businesses will get dozens of pre-made reports in beautiful dashboards that allow them to see how the organization is performing across business functions.”
Customer Request Reports
Here’s an example of how it works. You can ask Zia to show you a variety of support requests for one month. The information gets pulled and a report gets created and small business owners can customize the number and dashboard with the information on it.
Backman concludes by stressing the flexibility of the new product bodes well for future updates.
“The platform concept is so crucial, because it allows us to develop new technologies and capabilities and make them available across departments, solving all sorts of problems for businesses in the process.”
Image: ZOHO