Zoho Deepens Analytics and AI in Customer Experience Platform

Zoho CRM Plus, powered by Zia and Zoho Analytics, delivers seamless flow of insight to help businesses masterfully create positive customer experiences

Pleasanton, Calif—November 15, 2018 —Zoho today unveiled the next generation of Zoho CRM Plus, its all-in-one customer experience platform that empowers Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Operations to work as one. Now, Zoho customers have complete visibility of their customers across departments rather than partial views. Fueled by Zia, Zoho's AI-powered assistant, and the enhanced Zoho Analytics, Zoho's business intelligence and reporting platform, Zoho CRM Plus helps businesses deliver superior customer experiences, by allowing users to deeply understand customer sentiments, delight customers across channels, and adeptly prescribe actions to keep customers content throughout their journey—all from one place.

"Companies now recognize the importance of AI in creating positive experiences for customers. The focus now has shifted to bring AI across an integrated platform, creating a consistently positive experience across and throughout the customer journey," said Brent Leary, co-founder and partner, CRM Essentials. "With CRM Plus, Zoho has introduced a compelling platform where Sales, Marketing, Support and Operations are built on one technology stack, allowing its intelligent assistant, Zia, to access data across all of its applications, automatically providing teams with valuable insights enabling them to deliver better customer experiences across all channels."

The power of Zia and Zoho Analytics across this new Customer Experience Platform, coupled with significant updates to Zoho Desk, Zoho Social, and SalesIQ, businesses can now simply unify all customer-facing teams on a single interface and leverage real-time, contextual intelligence pulled from the front- and back-office, across all customer touch points, in just a single action. The platform sets a new standard for seamless omni-channel customer engagement, sentiment collection and analysis, and prescriptive actions across departments to increase the bottom line.

Putting Zia at the center of customer experience

• Customer sentiments are automatically available to service agents as they receive incoming tickets. Based on prior knowledge, Zia also suggests responses to customers on behalf of support representatives.
• Sales teams are equipped with real-time insight such as the best time to call a prospect or likelihood to close a deal when they follow a stream of actions. Zia analyzes marketing and sales activities and predicts chances of deal closures. Zia also monitors that trend against actual business health and predicts anomalies, so teams can stay ahead of potential problems. Using Ask Zia, teams can access insight from the past, present, and future with a simple voice command or text message.
• Zia Voice is now available as an SDK, allowing companies to provide Zia functionality to their customers. Businesses can now easily program AI-enabled conversation assistants to service customers using a conversation assistant. The combined powers of Desk, CRM, SalesIQ, and Zia enable businesses to provide the right solution to customer problems at the right time, while also helping sales and support agents be more productive and informed.

Process automation to improve cross-functional business collaboration

• Customer-facing teams can now manage processes like sales discounts and product returns involving multiple internal stakeholders, without losing track of accountability.
• The Customer Experience Platform automatically indicates and helps manage bottlenecks that delay deal closures and impede case resolutions, thereby reducing friction in the customer experience.
• Every stakeholder involved in the process has the appropriate context from all the previous stages, thereby making tactical decisions more straightforward. Employees from marketing, sales, and support functions can use process-management capabilities in Desk and CRM to simplify complex processes, work together, and exceed customer expectations.

Real-time insights built for decision-making

• With the unified Customer Experience Platform, the C-Suite can weigh decisions based on insight across the organization—from marketing, sales, and support to finances and HR in the back-end. Interactive, in-depth dashboards provide dissectible views of impact for every potential business decision.
• Announced today, Zoho Analytics provides an AI-driven assistant and an extensive range of data connectors making descriptive, and predictive insight, easily accessible across teams. It features 300+ pre-built reports and dashboards that provide real-time data on the various aspects of your business' health. Additionally, users can build their own reports and dashboards to suit specific needs.
• Powered by Zoho Analytics, businesses can now calculate and track important and complex business metrics, such as deal stage velocity and campaign correlation. For instance, using Ask Zia, a top executive can derive a correlation between marketing spend, the number of support tickets received, and the corresponding impact these two have on sales, and what decisions need to be taken to increase sales.

Flawless omni-channel support

• Customers can receive help on one channel with context from all other channels previously used. Whether it is on social, phone, chat, email, or text, service agents will receive notifications and support history on one common interface and settings, instead of across multiple tools and browsers.
• Businesses can easily resolve issues that span multiple internal teams, whether it's a sales or a support conversation.
• Businesses can grasp an accurate pulse of customer sentiments by easily executing surveys at various touch points along the customer journey. This targeted, qualitative insight will allow teams to more deeply understand customer perspectives and fine-tune how they respond to inquiries and needs.
• The seamless integration between Social, SalesIQ, Desk, CRM, and Survey allows for running a single thread of customer conversation that's contextual and easily shared across all customer-facing teams.

"Zia has advanced significantly since her initial launch early last year. With the combined powers of Zia and Analytics behind Zoho's Customer Experience Platform, we are opening up a seamless and contextual flow of information across channels and departments, making it simple for teams to work as one to smartly transform their customer relationships," said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist, Zoho. "CRM Plus is no longer just a suite of applications. It is now a sophisticated and intelligent platform where businesses can thoughtfully and proactively craft exceptional experiences across the entire customer journey."

Customer Statements:

"Zoho CRM Plus is a powerful and unified customer experience platform. It is the perfect omni-channel solution that empowers us to effectively reach out and engage with our customers right where they are. Combined with powerful analytics and integration with Jive's hosted voice solution, this unique platform allows us to keep track of every customer interaction on a single interface, helping us increase our productivity across the business and improve our customers' satisfaction." - Dano Ybarra Vice President, International Sales and Business Development, Jive Communications

"Zoho's Customer Experience Platform is extremely powerful yet simple to use. It has enabled us to collaborate across all of our customer-facing teams due to having the apps on one interface, while reducing reporting delays because we are able to track our ROI using Zoho Analytics. Because this is a unified platform, there were no integrations needed, enabling us to successfully implement it across our India, Australia, and China offices within just 10 days. We have not looked back since!" - Joydip Ghosh, Director Marketing APAC at Wilson Learning Worldwide

"Businesses have long suffered from disconnected data in their quest to deliver exceptional omni-channel customer experiences. They tried adding artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to solve these, yet there are many limitations due to the myriad integrations between sales, marketing, support, operations and other many applications. Vendors that provide flexible and dynamic cloud-based platforms, allowing for easy integration and consolidation of data models, create the value proposition businesses demand in a digitally connected world to move forward." - Esteban Kolsky, Founder, ThinkJar Research

Pricing and Availability

All the features are available immediately on Zoho CRM Plus. Zoho CRM Plus is available for $50/user/month when billed annually. For more information on Zoho CRM Plus, please visit www.zoho.com/crm/crmplus. Please follow #ZohoCX for live updates on the Customer Experience Platform.

About Zoho

Zoho is the operating system for business—a single online platform capable of running an entire business. With apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho is one of the world's most prolific software companies. In 2017, Zoho introduced the revolutionary Zoho One, an integrated suite of applications for the entire business.

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 40 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. Zoho Corporation is privately held and profitable with more than 6,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in Austin (US), Utrecht (The Netherlands), Singapore, Dubai (UAE), Yokohama (Japan), and Beijing (China). For more information, please visit www.zoho.com.

Media Contact
Sandra Lo
1-925-924--9500
slo@zohocorp.com