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Meet Zia: Zoho’s AI-powered assistant for its CRM portfolio

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CRM company Zoho today unveiled Zia, its new AI-powered sales assistant, that is designed to detect anomalies, suggests workflows and macros, and also advise salespeople the best time to contact a prospect. The company also launched Blueprint, a tool for building and implementing business processes.

In addition, the company has included a host of new features in its customer relationship management software, Zoho CRM, such as scoring rules and the SalesSignals platform, to help boost sales productivity.

“Salespeople put work into their CRM. But does the CRM work in return to make it easy for salespeople? Debuting with Zoho CRM now, 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,” explained Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho.

Zia: Sell smarter with Artificial Intelligence

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: The AI assistant 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.

Zoho equips companies to 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. Zoho has now found a way for signals to be obtained from third-party applications with the launch of SalesSignals platform. The platform will support ten integrations, including SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, SMS Magic and DocuSign. It can be extended to receive signals from any third-party application making CRM the central hub to capture all customer activity.

Scoring Rules

The CRM player has also introduced Scoring Rules, a feature that can help salespeople to 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. According to Zoho, this is ideal for businesses working with a large number of leads.

Blueprint

Zoho claims that for larger organizations, making everyone follow the same sales process without constant monitoring is where the biggest challenge lies. Hence it has introduced Blueprint in its CRM to help build and execute sales processes from within CRM. This ensures compliance from the entire team, making the process both systematic and repeatable.

PhoneBridge Platform

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

“With Zoho CRM, the focus has been on a salesperson’s productivity. From Zia to Blueprint to SalesSignals to telephony platforms, each feature is designed to make salespeople more productive. As our CRM platform deepens, we are increasingly seeing large deployments,” added Vegesna.

Availability

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.

Sharmistha Mukherjee
A tech savvy humanBOT, Sharmistha is a professional writer A tech savvy humanBOT, Sharmistha is a professional writer who engages in technical writing to simplify the use of a product or service. With a high inclination towards IoT and Artificial Intelligence, she fancies exploring all plausibilities around the subjects. Her interests revolve around connecting to people and excavating the "unexplored" through first hand investigation.