The number of customers using Zoho’s CRM in India grew by 33% year-on-year in 2023: Prashanth Krishnaswami

Prashanth Krishnaswami, Zoho's global head of market strategy, says different teams can now track proposal progress and provide proactive feedback.

Customer experience (CX) is no longer confined to a single department. However, traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems, often isolated within the IT and sales teams, can obstruct collaboration and visibility across an organisation.

To refrain from such obstruction, Zoho, a multichannel marketing automation software, has introduced "CRM for Everyone" to evolve the CX tech stack to account for wider collaboration across different teams.

Two features of CRM for Everyone are Team Modules and Requester Profiles. Team Modules help teams gather the data they need, set access permissions, apply their processes, and manage all customer operations from one place.

Requester Profiles is a new user profile in Zoho CRM that lets members from other teams request specific services and deliverables. They can track the status of their requests and actively engage with teammates to improve turnaround time and quality. This feature adds clarity and visibility, ensuring accountability across teams and activities.

Prashanth "PVK" Krishnaswami, global head of market strategy and thought leadership - CX, Zoho Corporation, shares that CX has steadily evolved from being sequential and process-driven to collaborative and journey-driven.

He says that with the new CRM for Everyone platform, the sales and solutions teams can have a dedicated space in the CRM. Their entire process of preparing proposals can be tracked within the CRM, allowing everyone involved to see the progress and step in to provide feedback proactively.

“They can also track accountability to ensure a timely response to the customer. If there is a delay, the team can proactively step in and take necessary actions. The impact of the response to a proposal on the deal can be analysed, and the insights gained can be applied to future proposals. All of this information is readily available within the CRM and can be retrieved at any point for reference,” adds Krishnaswami.

As the product has not yet been launched for general access, the price of the new CRM for Everyone platform has not been disclosed publicly. However, Krishnaswami mentions that the price for the marketing team will be lower than that for the sales team. The company plans to make it available to the general public in the coming months.

With the new platform will come new strategies. To demonstrate the benefits of CRM for Everyone to reluctant stakeholders, Krishnaswami recommends that sales leaders focus on two broad objectives initially: revenue and retention. These objectives can then be further defined to suit.

He elucidates that if several teams are involved in closing a specific deal or a deal in the pipeline, then those teams should be brought on board first.

“The teams that contribute to the sales pipeline could include members from the legal, finance, or operations teams, all of whom will be contributing to the revenue pipeline. This approach allows us to bring teams together without disrupting their current work, thereby positively impacting both revenue and protection,” he explains.

For the new CRM features, Zoho is investing in a series of educational content, including textual content, screenshots, product tours, videos, and workshops. For some of its larger customers, it is focussing on one-on-one training.

“We want them to understand the value of the commitment and effort involved in doing this so that they do not rush into it and create chaos. Therefore, we are investing in a lot of the content that helps them structurally implement and adopt CRM for Everyone,” states Krishnaswami.

India as one of the fastest-growing markets for Zoho

Krishnaswami highlights that in 2023, the number of customers using Zoho’s CRM in India grew by 33% year-on-year, making it the second fastest customer growth region after the US.

He believes that businesses in India are becoming much more streamlined and are beginning to recognise the value of applying technology, thanks to various digital initiatives and encouragement from the government.

Additionally, he notes that there is a lot of interest in automating communications with customers or customer support and managing multiple channels like email, phone, and WhatsApp.

“India is an enormous market, so even a small amount of organic interest translates into significant absolute numbers. We have also systematically invested in various initiatives related to the brand, as well as in infrastructure and data centres in India. We have been able to invest in all of this over the last five or six years, and a lot of those investments are still paying off.”

Zoho integrates AI contextually into its software and makes it available to professionals. Looking ahead, Krishnaswami says that the company’s goal is for only the IT teams of organisations to know exactly what is happening under the hood and which AI model is being used.

On the other hand, an average user who uses Zoho’s software should ideally not know whether the software is AI or not and aims to make it invisible to them.

He adds that Zoho is also investing in integration with other vendors in the market and expanding across the world in underserved pockets as well such as Africa and some parts of the Middle East.

“We are spending a lot of time developing technology for these markets as well. Our goal is to provide more unified software solutions for each team. For example, we offer Finance Plus for the finance team, CX for all customer experience needs, CRM Plus for sales and marketing, and People Plus for the people team,” he conveys.