Zoho Announces CRM for Everyone – Democratizing CRM for All Teams on One Platform

Zoho CRM for Everyone gives every team in any business their own space to actively contribute and accelerate customer growth and improve customer experiences.

Zoho Corporation first introduced Zoho CRM for Everyone in Southeast Asia at the Zoholics User Conference in Manila.

This feature update includes a new set of features aimed at democratizing CRM across all teams involved in customer operations activities.

Zoho CRM for Everyone empowers sales teams, the primary custodians of customer relationships, to communicate and coordinate across customer deliverables in areas such as solution engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy from a single location. These capabilities help improve visibility into every stakeholder in the customer journey, reduce coordination gaps, reduce lead times, and improve the quality of the customer experience.

“Traditionally, CRM has been built by IT and designed for sales workflows,” said Gibu Mathew, VP and GM, Zoho APAC. “Over the years, it has accumulated a wealth of customer context, but access to CRM is strictly rationed and teams are forced to work autonomously with limited context. This is fundamentally antithetical to delivering great customer experiences. Zoho CRM for Everyone exists to break down these silos, unifying all customer operations teams on CRM to deliver better customer experiences.”

Modern CRM strategies require enterprise-wide collaboration and visibility to drive revenue. Zoho’s vision for “CRM for All” enables businesses to align with contemporary sales and engagement strategies by moving beyond the outdated concept of CRM as a record or database. It positions CRM at the heart of revenue-driven projects, fostering connected collaboration and a project management approach to operations. This approach enables cross-functional actions that build lasting customer relationships, ultimately generating more profitable customer interactions.

The APAC region is forecasting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR 2024-2028) of 14.08% in CRM spending(1), which will translate into a market volume of USD 25.24 billion by 2028, which is higher than the average rate of 10% observed in other regions. When investing in CRM solutions, it is important to consider whether the chosen solution can scale with the growth of the business and provide benefits to the entire organization.

Zoho CRM For Everyone lets account managers, for example, tap a solutions engineer to coordinate a quality product demo for a customer. A specialist can track the step-by-step rollout of the onboarding experience for each customer. A marketing specialist can perform a win-loss analysis for specific deals. A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies.

All of these different activities can be managed within the CRM with deep customer context and cross-functional visibility. They can all use different back-end applications for deep work, but can now converge on the CRM to manage shared responsibilities to the customer.

To make this possible, the following underlying features have been bundled in Zoho CRM:

Team Modules

Sales teams can create their own team-level data modules (in addition to organization-level modules) while being governed by IT teams. Team modules can have their own fields, permissions, workflow automation, and other team-specific customizations. These modules are hosted in a dedicated space for each team. Together, this unifies all customer-facing processes on a single platform enriched with full customer context.

Applicants

When a team member needs a deliverable or input from a colleague on another team, they can simply make a request in the appropriate team module. These requesters can track the status of their own requests, eliminating any guesswork involved in collaborative work.

Updated user experience

To enable this fundamental shift in usability, Zoho CRM’s interface has been redesigned for better usability across all roles and functions. Teams can organize their data into modules and modules into team spaces. Users can quickly switch between these modules and adopt no-code or low-code experiences to manage their workflows without basic IT skills. With this release, Zoho CRM also takes a big step forward in accessibility with features covering areas such as vision, motor activity, and interactions.

Zoho CRM For Everyone not only opens up access to CRM cross-functionally, but also empowers each team to manage their own workflows autonomously within the enterprise IT framework. This is the first true democratization of the CRM paradigm. Zoho will add more features to Zoho CRM For Everyone that will make CRM the core of all customer operations and enable a wave of customer experience transformation.

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