As we near the end of this year, we have more exciting features coming your way in Zoho CRM. In this post, we want to highlight some of our big updates and enhancements to give you a head start on putting them into action for your business and improving your operations. This way, you can close out a great year and start off the next one on the right foot!
Elevate your user experience in Zoho CRM with updates to Canvas
You can now extend the power of Canvas to your record creation forms and fast-track how your team captures customer information in Zoho CRM. Choose which fields are necessary, style and format them the way you want, emphasize important information that needs to be captured, and wrap all of it in your company's branding.
Learn more about forms in Canvas
Effortlessly manage processes with the new Kiosk Studio enhancements
Kiosk Studio enables you to build data- and decision-driven processes that are easy to follow and execute in Zoho CRM with zero code. We've made some enhancements to give you more flexibility in how you build out your process in the kiosks you create:
Name your screens and adjust them as needed - You can now assign titles to each screen to make it easier for your users to understand where they are in the process. You can also choose between two different sizes for your kiosk window—600px for an experience more like a pop-up window or 1,000px if you need more screen space to work with.
Kiosk Studio supports three additional field types - To give you more flexibility in capturing and working with data that's relevant to your business, we now support decimal, URL, and percentage fields in kiosks.
New additions to actions - As part of your process, you now have more options for the actions you can perform during processes, including quickly converting leads into contacts, scheduling calls and meetings, and even using merge fields to merge values from your kiosk or pull data from via getrecord action.
Mandate kiosks in blueprints - To make your processes more streamlined and guided, you now can mandate and trigger a kiosk from inside a blueprint as you transition from one stage to another.
Work with cleaner data using the improved validation rules
Your team can now push clean data into your system with validation rules that enable you to define the baseline criteria for all data entering Zoho CRM and stop bad data at the gate.
With the latest enhancements, you have more flexibility on how you validate incoming information and what you do with it.
Quick validation - You can now validate information at the field level as you fill out information in a record without having to click the save button every time you want to validate the information.
Save records with an alert - Sometimes, you may want to let users save a record with the information they've entered but give them a warning that they might have to recheck the data. This is now possible thanks to validation rules.
Choose where your error messages are displayed - You now have complete control over where error messages are displayed. Show error messages directly next to the field being validated, or consolidate error messages from different fields into a single message if the fields are interdependent.
Learn more about enhanced validation rules
Prioritize records better at a glance
It's difficult to keep track of records that need your attention when you have multiple leads and deals in the pipeline to work with. Zoho CRM's Kanban view eases that burden by arranging your records in accordance with your sales pipeline, giving you an easy way to check, identify, and work on records that matter.
Instead of editing the view any time you needed to categorize your records based on a different field, you can now create multiple Kanban views with different categorizations and switch between them seamlessly based on your needs.
Learn more about multiple Kanban views
Easily find the records you need
Zoho CRM's search function is a vital part of your team's daily toolset, as they rely on it to find records that need their attention quickly. We've introduced some handy new search options so you can hone in on the records you need more effectively.
Restrict your search to a particular module - Previously, this was only available in the advanced search results page, but we've now added it to the search box to help you get more relevant results in the first try.
Increase precision using record names and tags - You can now get a more refined set of search results by searching for a record's name or tags—or both. For example, if you want to search for a contact by name, you can use these options to narrow down your search results. Simply press # in the search box to access this option.
Additional context for results - Search results that appear as you type in the search box will include useful information to help you locate records more quickly.
Follow-up actions - Additionally, once you locate a record, you can send an email or make a phone call right from the results. For example, you can send a follow-up email to a contact right after you find them in the search results.
Filter and sort your results - You can now filter results not just by modules, but also by criteria related to record ownership, creation, and modification.
You can also access the Ask Zia capabilities from the search bar to access computed results, custom views, reports, dashboards, and more. Simply hit the "/" button in your search and ask Zia for what you need!
Learn more about enhancements to global search
Associate relevant records with updated lookup filters
Lookup filters in Zoho CRM make data entry easier and more accurate by enabling you to filter the records that you're trying to associate. We've gone one step further and introduced an enhancement for your lookup filters.
Dynamic filters enhance the functionality of lookup filters by adapting in real time to the data you're working with.
Once you configure a dynamic lookup filter, the lookup results will change dynamically based on the field values of the current module. In other words, a dynamic lookup filter compares the fields of the lookup module with fields within the current module.
Additionally, for lookups present in a subform, users can filter records by doing field-to-field comparisons with fields both in the layout and in the subform itself.
Learn more about enhancements to lookup filters
Find duplicates in your system with enhanced deduplication
Previously, when you added a lead, Zoho CRM only checked converted leads for duplicates. This sometimes left gaps, where contacts added directly could slip through without being checked for duplicates.
With the latest update, Zoho CRM users can now check for duplicates within the Contacts module directly by selecting "Contacts" in the Duplicate Check Preference dropdown menu and specifying which unique field should be used for comparison.
This enables the system to search for exact matching records in both Contacts and Leads, thereby preventing duplicate entries when a record already exists.
This enhancement significantly reduces the risk of duplicate records and ensures data integrity within both your Leads and Contacts modules.
Learn more about enhancements to deduplication
Experience new enhancements to our advanced filters
Say goodbye to the cumbersome task of typing string values for multi-select picklist fields in your advanced filter menu and hello to a simple dropdown interface.
In the case of multi-select picklist fields, users had to enter values manually, which would then would appear in a string. This often proved to be quite challenging, thanks to a lack of awareness of all the values present in the system. To simplify that process, you can now view your multi-select picklist values in a dropdown and make selections from it.
We've also added multiple new operators to the filter itself to give you more control over the data you see:
Include All
Include Any
Exclude All
Exclude Any
These updates—both the dropdown as well as the additional operators—are available for custom views, smart filters, reports, portals, analytics, and GDPR. Eventually, they will be added to other areas of Zoho CRM as well.
Another enhancement we've made to our advanced filters is the ability to identify records that satisfy conditions across different modules using the new cross-module filters capability.
Filter by related modules (standard and custom) - You can now filter records in a module based on related modules. For example, you can filter contacts according to deals. To help you narrow down your results further, you can add fields from a related module to the search criteria.
Filter by subforms - You can now filter by the presence (or absence) of line items. Additionally, you can add criteria using the subform's fields to find the specific records you need.
Learn more about our enhancements to advanced filters
Mass-convert your leads with the right information
Previously, users were restricted to a predetermined set of fields from the standard deal layout while mass-converting leads, weren't able to provide input for necessary fields, and sometimes ended up providing input for unnecessary ones. As a result, they had to perform additional field updates after conversion.
With this enhancement, you can choose and fill out only the essential fields from any Deals module layout during mass conversion. This affords you the convenience to update fields based on your preferences. Fields that aren't selected here are populated based on lead conversion mapping.
Learn more about enhancements to lead conversion
Let your team work in their preferred languages in Zoho CRM
To ensure that users in diverse regions can use Zoho CRM efficiently, we've enhanced our translation feature to accommodate more languages, thereby improving localization and offering a more inclusive experience for global teams.
These additional languages can be translated for specific values found in the language file, including module names (e.g., Leads, Contacts), field labels, related list labels, subform labels, and picklist values. Other elements of the CRM interface—like setup page components and default buttons—will remain in the default system language.
This helps you localize values that your team frequently interacts with and makes it much easier for your regional teams to work inside Zoho CRM.
Bulk-update your subforms
Subforms are a great way to capture data from across your CRM under a single record. One of the biggest challenges in how Zoho CRM's subforms have worked is that you could only add one line item at a time, which is inefficient.
To help your organization be more effective when associating with large numbers of line items with records, we now support the option to update your subforms in bulk. Once enabled, you can simply click the "add multiple rows" option and pick all the values you need from a pop-up window. It's that easy.
Learn more about updating Subforms through lookup fields
Capture a predefined set of data across your records
We're excited to introduce the Static Subform option, which is designed to offer a more controlled and consistent approach to data entry in Zoho CRM. Administrators can now pre-define certain fields and the exact number of rows in a subform.
For example, you can set up a subform to include specific columns consistently, such as "Document Type" and "Issuing Authority." The rows for these columns remain constant, featuring values like "Driver's License," "Social Security Card," and "Passport" for "Document Type," and "State Department of Motor Vehicles," "Social Security Administration," and "U.S. Department of State" for "Issuing Authority." Unlike a standard subform, where users can dynamically add or remove rows, a static subform ensures these rows are consistent across all records.
Capture data more easily with enhanced wizards
Wizards are a great way to streamline how your team captures data by breaking down your record creation process into easy-to-digest screens into specific fields that need to be captured.
We have a couple of new enhancements that make it easier to create a wizard as well as give you more control over how your fields are displayed as you move through the screens.
Generate wizard - Instead of manually creating every screen in your wizards and handpicking each field, you can now automatically generate a wizard based on the layout's fields and sections or select the sections that are necessary.
Summary - You can now display a summary screen that presents all the information the user has entered, which enables your team to review the information carefully before creating the record.
Learn more about the enhancements to Wizards
Improve your self-service experience with portals
To help elevate your self-service experience, we've enhanced portals with the ability to share records that match specific criteria instead of just records that belong to the customer accessing the portal. This gives your business greater control and flexibility over the information you expose across your portals and widens the scope of actions your customers can take, all of which leads to a better customer experience.
Criteria-based data exposure is the ability to expose modules and data based on conditions. You can use these conditions to control what data is exposed and when, or to render contextual results for portal users.
In addition to linking primary and related modules using lookup fields, admins can now define two types of criteria to expose other records with a particular trait in the module: match with fields and match with values.
Match with value: This criterion should be familiar to you as a seasoned Zoho CRM user. You can determine record eligibility by defining a field, operator, and qualifying value.
Example: Deal type is new business. All deals that are new businesses will be displayed to the portal user.
Match with field: Here, the relationship between the related module and the primary module is established by mapping their fields. That is, the relationships between records in primary and related modules are established via fields with the same values.
Example: Display implementation agents that offer their services in the client's billing city.
Learn more about the updates to Portals
Centralize email communication across all custom email addresses
In Zoho CRM, you can associate multiple email addresses with your customers' records, which is a necessity given that customers may have different email addresses for different purposes, such as for personal use, work, or aliases used to forward important communications to groups.
We've gone a step further and have enabled you to synchronize all the email communications you have with your customers through these custom email addresses.
Once enabled, all email communications sent to email addresses stored in your custom email address fields will be centralized under each record, giving you a comprehensive view of previous interactions and enabling you to filter these emails as needed to focus on the ones that matter.
Learn more about the update to custom email addresses
Get complete customer context even after conversion
Bringing in prospects usually involves multiple conversations and engagements before finally converting them into customers. These interactions may contain vital information that's relevant to future interactions and deals you have with the customer.
To ensure that this context isn't lost, we've introduced an enhancement that enables users to view the entire history of interactions your organization has had with any given customer in the customer's timeline. All interactions before their conversion are captured in chronological order, ensuring that every user has complete context when they engage with the customer.
Learn more about accessing lead history after conversion
Manage automated communications for different outreach efforts
When generating leads across different activities, it was previously impossible to set up multiple auto-response rules and send out initial messages when a lead came into your CRM system.
You can now set up multiple auto-response rules for the same Zoho CRM module, each focusing on different webforms that you've set up for different channels of lead generation.
Learn more about the enhancements to autoresponse rules
Facilitate better coordination across your business
Great customer experiences hinge on different teams coordinating effectively to make sure they meet customer requirements on time. This requires that contextual information is sent seamlessly from one team to another, and that teams are able to interact efficiently. We've integrated with powerful collaboration platforms to power coordination in real time from Zoho CRM.
In addition to our current offerings, you can now integrate with Microsoft Teams and Google Chat.
By integrating these powerful collaboration platforms with Zoho CRM, your sales team can work collaboratively on customer deals, including effortlessly sharing individual records from Zoho CRM with individual users or groups/channels to start discussions or provide context.
You can automate notifications from deal updates, customer responses, and more for users or groups, as well as keep everyone in the loop as to how your business is performing by sharing reports and dashboards periodically to relevant stakeholders—using the collaboration app of your choosing.
Explore the Google Chat Integration | Explore the Microsoft Teams Integration
Prioritize the right deals in your pipeline with forecast enhancements
Forecasts are vital to planning and tracking your progress towards revenue goals on an individual and organizational scale. To ensure that you can set ambitious goals and hit them consistently, Zoho CRM now labels deals based on the level of attention needed to close them within the forecast period.
By comparing the deals in your current pipeline with historical data, Zoho CRM will identify patterns and tag deals as "Likely to win," "At risk," and "Low priority."
These tags can then help your team assess deals in the pipeline, their values, and their priority levels to create a plan of action that enables them to close the most valuable and likely ones by the end of the forecasting period.
Learn more about enhancements to forecasts
Make data-driven decisions with our enhanced analytics
Dashboards are essential for decision makers in your company, as they offer business-critical insights at a glance. Here are some key updates that improve this area of Zoho CRM and help your business leverage data and improve business operations:
Lock shared dashboards - Dashboards can be shared between users to provide access to different key metrics. To improve security and preserve data integrity, we've introduced the ability to lock these shared dashboards to prevent unauthorized users from modifying them accidentally.
Improved number formats for values - You can choose between K (thousands), M (millions), B (billions), L (lakhs), and C (crores) to make numerical data in Zoho CRM easier to digest at a glance.
Show record numbers next to your KPIs - You can now show record counts alongside metrics in your KPI components.
Criteria filter support for components - Your team can apply filters to components using user, picklist, date, and date/time fields from both primary and secondary modules to drill down into data without affecting your configuration.
Restore recently deleted dashboards and components - This feature enables users to restore deleted dashboards and components within 30 days, which minimizes the impact of accidental deletions and facilitates data recovery.
Enhanced analytics suggestions by Zia - By analyzing your data, reports, and charts, Zia can provide you with useful suggestions for different analytical components that align with your organization's needs and business processes. Currently, Zia's suggestions are available for cohort, quadrant, and anomaly detector components.
Get better insights from your reports
Reports are essential for helping your team derive insights, recognize patterns and gaps, and identify areas of improvement across their business units. We've made three important updates to Zoho CRM's report system that make it easier to understand the information in your report, filter your reports, focus on details that matter to you, and more.
Cut through the noise to find data relevant to you
Reports often cover a wide range of factors and associated data when they're created, but for the people accessing any given report, not all of the data present is relevant to them. We wanted to ensure that users have a quick and easy way to filter out irrelevant information and get their hands on relevant information in a report more quickly.
With Zoho CRM's new quick-view filter functionality in reports, users can add up to five of the following filter criteria to reports: date, date/time, checkbox, user lookup, and picklist. These filter criteria allow for greater freedom in how users sift through report data.
Learn more about quick view filters for reports
Group data with greater control for more meaningful insights
Let's say you're trying to identify high-value customers from your customer base or markets where your products and services are in high demand. Doing this just with reports and raw numbers can be time-consuming and exhausting, and could cause you to miss out on records if you're not careful.
To make the data grouping and categorization in your reports easier, we've now introduced the ability to group data by creating two types of columns:
Number-based category column - Categorize numerical values in your reports into various categories that you define and name, as well as low and high ranges for each category.
For example, you could define the criteria for different customer types based on the numerical range of their annual revenue or the revenue you generate from them in sales. Doing so will help you identify the different categories each customer belongs to at a glance.
Picklist-based category columns - Similarly, you can categorize the records in your report based on a specific picklist value associated with each record. You can group certain picklist values under each category to derive tighter control over how each record is categorized in your reports.
For example, let's say you want to identify the best markets you are currently operating in. You can denote which countries your customers are from, group them into different categories based on region, and associate different countries to different regions. This will help you identify the markets/regions where you do well and those where you need to focus more—all at a glance.
Learn more about enhancements to grouping in your reports
Pull data from across your stack and power your operations with queries
You may have important business data spread across different modules in Zoho CRM, or even different apps that are part of your business process. In order to help you make use of this data effectively across various business-critical processes, we've introduced queries.
Queries enable you to retrieve data from across Zoho CRM and other third-party apps dynamically, and present them the way you want inside the CRM system.
Leverage the power of data retrieval using REST APIs and COQL, and decide how you work with that data using schema management, response serialization, and other data-handling functionalities.
You can even associate queries to different features in Zoho CRM to make use of the data you retrieve. To start with, we've supported the use of queries in Canvas views and as part of Kiosk Studio so you can display the data you retrieve in a Canvas view or a screen in your kiosk as part of your processes.
Expand the boundaries of Zoho CRM's capabilities with an all-new IDE
Explore the all new IDE in Zoho CRM and enjoy a more powerful and immersive coding experience with a new look and advanced features. This newly designed IDE gives you more freedom to push the boundaries of what's possible in Zoho CRM.
Try out the new code editor - The new code editor includes a syntax highlighter and smart auto-completion of code in Deluge. Specify a function's name, return type, category, and arguments with its data types in the editor itself. This allows for easy identification of each function's arguments, the category of the associated function, etc.
Run your codes without impacting your current setup - With the new editor's Run feature, you can simply execute functions to test them on the fly. The Run function doesn't change the function or save the code, like the previous editor's Save and Execute function; rather, it simply executes without saving.
Review changes you make to your code - The Review component in the left panel acts as a diff-editor and highlights the changes you've recently made.
Jump back to previous versions of your code with a click - The new IDE's Revision feature saves up to 30 previous versions of your code, allowing you to quickly change back to an older logic if the need arises. Additionally, it maintains a changelog that details code revisions as well as the user who made those revisions for future reference.
Code the way you want - Customize your Functions IDE to suit your tastes, from toggling dark mode to customizing fonts and word spacing and enabling syntax assistance.
Quicker time to deployment in Sandbox
If you ever wanted to try a new setting, customization, workflow, or blueprint but didn't know how it would impact your CRM, Zoho CRM's Sandbox has been the go-to test bed to try out your changes safely. We're constantly enhancing this space to help you experiment with a wider range of functionality before you push these changes to your production account.
The latest addition to Sandbox addresses one of its most important aspects: resolving conflicts that arise from the changes you make.
Improved "Dependency and Conflict" display - Whenever a conflict arises due to a change you've made to the system in the Sandbox, you can see detailed information about the items involved, such as the module and the field names associated with the conflict. This helps you identify the exact issue that's causing the conflict and take steps to resolve it.
Resolve conflicts from the Check Dependency page - When conflicts arise as you check for dependencies, you can resolve issues such as missing associated items, duplicate names, and developer-user associations directly from the Check Dependency page.
Execute powerful scripts on demand
Client Script has offered great flexibility for businesses looking to address unique needs across Zoho CRM. You can perform a wide range of actions, including populating data, UI customization, interactions with third-party apps, and more as you create, edit, and work with records in Zoho CRM.
But these scripts were restricted to specific modules or pages to which they were associated; you couldn't trigger them whenever you needed them. This is where Commands in Client Script come into play.
Commands add a new dimension to Client Script, enabling users to trigger them anytime and anywhere in Zoho CRM and extend their event-driven functionality beyond just specific modules and pages. Users can either use custom keyboard shortcuts or command palettes to execute Client Script.
They can also quickly execute Client Script from anywhere within Zoho CRM to trigger complex actions like calculating EMI, retrieving customers' order details, and more—all from a dedicated Command Palette or with simple keyboard shortcuts. This enhanced usability helps improve productivity and user experience.
We're still working on a number of new features and enhancements to improve Zoho CRM and strengthen the positive impact it has on your business, but for more information on them, you'll have to wait for our next update! That's it from us for now. We wish you all a very happy new year and happy selling in 2025!
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