Zoho rolls out CRM for Everyone

Business management solutions provider Zoho announced that its customer relationship manager, previously only for sales teams, has been modified and enhanced with AI to now become the CRM for Everyone solution. This is because, according to Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist with Zoho, more people deal with customers than just the sales team. 

“Before, CRM was relegated to salespeople, but a lot of folks deal with the customer, so how do you get access to CRM for all these groups? This is where CRM for everyone comes in. Your legal team, market team, service team can now access the CRM,” he said. 

However, it is not very useful for, say, the legal team to only be able to interact with the system in the context of sales. With this in mind, the redesigned solution now sports extensive customization abilities that let users tailor the CRM to their specific needs. A big part of this is the ability to create new modules, aided by Zoho’s embedded AI Zia. 

For example. Zia can be used by lawyers to create a module for managing contracts. “I can say, ‘Create a contracts module where I can upload contracts and link them to deals.’ Simple. Zia now analyzes the context of your business and the context of the modules you have access to, as well as other modules that it can link to,” said Vegesna.

Based on that information, Zia then suggests which components should belong in the module, such as vendor, contract ID, contract value, contract type, etc.

“I can choose to create it and that creates a module,” said Vegesna. “Zia makes module creation easy.”

It’s a similar process for creating custom workflows, he added: Users tell the AI what they want (e.g., be notified by email when a deal is closed with a value greater than $30,000), and the AI then creates the trigger events in the appropriate modules, then sets up the workflow schedule itself, then acts as an agent to execute them. 

The solution also supports report creation, using Zia AI to create it based on the user’s permissions. As users can see the AI’s build process in real time, they also have the ability to interrupt Zia to make additional changes, then ask Zia to resume after the override. Zia also supports a feature called “Image to Canvas,” which allows users to upload an image and have the AI incorporate it into the CRM as a design element. For example, if an HR team wants to create a list view that matches employee ID cards, it can upload an ID card image, and Zia will generate a custom Canvas view automatically.

“Multiple people in an organization need access to customer information, yet historically, CRMs have been relegated to only sales teams,” said Zoho CEO Mani Vembu. “As we democratize CRM with the launch of CRM for Everyone, we also need to build in capabilities that make it easy for anyone to build and extend CRM with simple prompts, without having to be an expert in the system. This is where Zia’s advanced capabilities come in. Now, anyone can create capabilities, workflows or reports in CRM with a simple prompt. They can also make their CRM look the way they want with Zia’s image-to-design capabilities.”

CRM For Everyone is generally available to global businesses as of today. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, AI capabilities are included in license costs for customers. Under CRM For Everyone, Team user (non-sales CRM user) licenses start at $9 per user per month on all paid editions of Zoho CRM.