Zoho CRM Q1 2025 update
We're starting this year off strong with multiple powerful updates and awaited enhancements to your favorite features. We're also pushing hard to enhance our AI offerings across various aspects of Zoho CRM to elevate every aspect of your sales operations.
WhatsApp for Business updates
Experience multiple quality of life updates in how you work with WhatsApp for your business. Create message templates and get them approved. Associate them with automated actions in Zoho CRM or, if the situation calls for it, send them to customers directly. In addition to these, enjoy a better experience using our WhatsApp integration with the new Threaded reply and Preview Audio messages functionality that we've added to the product.
Learn more about what's new in WhatsApp for Business integration
Introducing a new avenue to connect with customers: Line Integration for Zoho CRM
With a combined user base of close to 300 million in East and South East Asia, Line is one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world. We are now opening up this channel for users of Zoho CRM as well.
Line Integration in Zoho CRM allows you to integrate your Line Business account with Zoho CRM and carry out conversations with prospects and customers alike. Choose how conversations are assigned to sales representatives and let them carry the conversations once your audience reaches out through Line, all from inside Zoho CRM.
Manage these conversations, share attachments, add these people as new records in the system or associate them with existing ones, right from inside the product with contextual CRM data at your fingertips to power your conversations.
Unlock hidden opportunities across your accounts
You might be familiar with the statistic that says it's easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find new leads and sell to them. Most businesses might already have a repository rich with accounts that you have spent a lot of time and resources building great relationships with. So wouldn't it be great if you could take advantage of those efforts and initiate cross-selling and up-selling opportunities with them?
ABM for Zoho CRM, available as an add-on, is our latest addition to the customer experience toolset. It's made to help businesses drive greater value from their existing accounts.
ABM starts off by identifying your best accounts based on the revenue they generate or filtering out accounts based on a criteria you define. Once identified, these accounts are enriched with additional information scraped from across the internet, so your team has a rich profile to work with.
Once enriched, your accounts are segmented based on filters you define. You can also segment your accounts in ABM based on effective, industry-recognized techniques including RFM, firmographics, engagement, voice of the customer, and recommendation.
Once you have your segments up and running, you get rich sales context from across your operations for your accounts and customers, giving you insights that help you plan future engagements and campaigns.
You can also leverage these insights and put them into action through Zoho CRM's CommandCenter to build unique journeys for your targeted accounts, or push these accounts into Zoho Campaigns, to plan and execute personalized campaigns to open up new opportunities.
As always, results are everything. Check how each segment is performing after your campaigns and interactions through a dedicated dashboard.
Drive consistent growth by engaging the most promising accounts with ABM for Zoho CRM.
Enhancements to CPQ
For any fast-paced sales team, CPQ becomes an invaluable asset in understanding customer needs and sending out personalized quotes that improve chances of conversion. Here's what's new in our CPQ offering.
To ensure Guided Selling can seamlessly fit into the workflow of any sales process, we've expanded support to include custom modules as well. You can now set up a guided selling flow across any module that your business uses to manage sales operations.
Enhancements to Kiosk Studio
Kiosk Studio has become one of our most popular features since its launch, allowing business owners to build kiosks inside Zoho CRM that help sales representatives execute various processes seamlessly. We've made some enhancements to Kiosk Studio that give you more control over how you build and run these kiosks. Here are the highlights:
New in GetRecords - Display records in a table view without selection, reuse GetRecords as a standalone component, and view record details from the screen.
New actions - Perform actions like opening a link or a specific record from your Kiosk screen with just a click.
Improved user experience - Clone kiosks, reorder buttons, and display screens without buttons.
Enhanced email & field support - Use email fields in notifications and update actions, plus support for logged-in user variables.
Don't let spam distract you from customers
When your sales team should be focusing on connecting with prospects and customers to create more opportunities and strengthen relationships, the last thing they need is to have their time wasted on dealing with calls that end up being spam.
Through our native telephony system, as well as our integration with third-party telephony providers, you can now create and manage a block list of contact numbers within your telephony system. In addition to this, you can directly block numbers from your call history tab.
Stronger ties with the Microsoft Ecosystem - Microsoft Teams Phone and Microsoft Teams Online Meeting
We pride ourselves in ensuring that our customers have an easy way to integrate and work with apps that they love inside Zoho CRM. We're expanding our footprint on the integration front with two new integrations with powerful Microsoft offerings.
Microsoft Teams Phone - You can now integrate Microsoft's cloud telephony service with Zoho CRM to call prospects and customers with a single click, auto-log calls, get sales context when engaging customers, and more, right from inside Zoho CRM.
Microsoft Teams Online Meeting - Integrate with Microsoft Teams and connect with prospects and customers by planning, scheduling, inviting, and initiating online meetings in Teams, from inside Zoho CRM.
Enhancements to Subforms
Subforms in Zoho CRM are vital to centralizing data under a record from all across your CRM system. But managing access to a Subform was a tough task given that you had to define access permission at a field level.
We've now enabled the ability to define access permissions (View, Create, Edit, and Delete) for each Subform. This allows you to manage the entire Subform and extend this permission to portals as well to easily manage access from external parties.
Additionally, we have a couple of enhancements to improve the overall user experience in working with Subforms.
Pin multiple columns - You can now pin multiple columns in the subform, allowing you to navigate across the subform without losing sight of key information.
Adjust column width - Admins of your Zoho CRM account can now adjust how wide columns are in your subforms and offer your team a cleaner interface as well as substantially reduce horizontal scrolls.
Ajax/spot edit support - You can now perform actions such as add row, edit row, clone row, and delete row. Additionally, sort rows and filter the rows based on criteria.
Enhancements to formula fields
Businesses by nature require you to calculate, track, and understand various metrics in real time and over time to ensure long-term success. In Zoho CRM, you can include such calculations within records using the formula field.
To ensure you get the most out of these formula fields, we've introduced a few enhancements that improve the usability and accuracy of the data they calculate.
Auto-refresh time based formulas - Instead of just executing and calculating the field when a record is manually updated, we've introduced a checkbox to the formula field property labeled. Automatically refresh formula fields containing the Now() function in real time. This ensures relevant formulas are executed with every visit or edit to records.
Stop formula executions based on criteria - Conversely, you may want your formulas to stop executing once a record reaches a specific state, like calculating the time it took for a customer to churn or the number of days a deal stagnated at a specific stage and more. With this enhancement, you can stop computations or freeze values based on specific criteria.
Power smarter teamwork with team selling and revenue split
Winning deals is always a team effort with varying levels of inputs from members across your organization; sales, pre-sales, marketing, legal, support, and customer success teams. With how traditional CRMs function, it is hard for businesses to get clarity on the contributions of these people as the system only recognizes the deal owner.
To ensure your team is recognized for the effort they put into each deal and attribution is done meaningfully, Zoho CRM has now introduced "Team Selling" and "Deal Split" for deals modules.
Team Selling
Team Selling allows organizations to bring together multiple contributors on a deal, providing them with appropriate access and visibility. Instead of relying solely on the deal owner, teams can now work together efficiently, adding notes, tracking progress, and also sharing important updates within the CRM.
Deal Split
Deals Split allows you to allocate the revenue that a company gets from a deal proportionally among team members based on their roles and efforts. There are two ways you can split your deals to attribute it to the relevant people:
Revenue split - Members who contribute directly to the closure of the deal are included under revenue split. They will have their credits allocated directly based on the deal amount.
Overlay split - Members who have an indirect influence on the deal are included under the overlay split.
Enhancements to Forecasts
We've been hard at work improving our Forecasts system to ensure they meet the diverse and complex needs of all of your businesses. Some of our major updates to Forecasts in Zoho CRM include the addition of bottom-up forecasts and custom forecasting periods.
Now, we have a few more enhancements for you to explore for your business.
Custom forecast hierarchy - To ensure only relevant people are assigned targets and taken into account for measuring performance, you can now customize your forecast hierarchy. This allows you to exclude individual users, entire roles, or even entire territories from your forecast; if you use the "Reporting-to" hierarchy, you can exclude senior employees and their subordinates from the forecasts.
Forecast adjustments - More often than not, your forecasts are not set in stone and can fluctuate due to multiple factors. To ensure you have the most accurate information to help you make those business critical decisions with confidence, Zoho CRM now lets deal owners adjust forecasts of their open deals, as well as lets managers make adjustments based on their assessments of deals and the abilities of their subordinates.
Anomaly detection in forecasts - As your team works towards their goals for a forecasting period, Zia will constantly monitor performance. If there are any deviations in the overall progress, it will automatically notify sales leaders of this anomaly, allowing your team to immediately address any budding issues.
New ways to visualize key business metrics
Understanding the story behind your metrics is as important as making sense of the numbers themselves. One of the most invaluable tools for making sense of your metrics are analytical charts. Zoho CRM already offers a wide range of tools to visualize your data to identify underlying patterns and correlations, and now we're excited to bring you new tools to use to break down your metrics.
Sankey charts - These help you visualize the volume of data moving across different stages of your process. Easy to configure, and with multiple grouping options, you can see an even more detailed mapping of your data flow, such as tracking how high-priority deals in a particular region distribute across various product lines.
Treemap charts - Represent hierarchical datasets in a rectangular layout where parent categories are represented as larger tiles with their sub-categories nested within them. The size of each tile is proportional to its corresponding value, making it easy to compare different segments within the hierarchy.
Butterfly charts - When you want to compare two datasets in parallel, Butterfly charts are the way to go. This chart plots the data as two horizontal bars with the X axis in the center, thereby resembling butterfly wings.
Cluster charts - A Cluster chart is similar to stacked column charts, which instead of stacking horizontally, the data is represented as vertical bars. As you create a column chart with multiple groupings, you can change the type of column chart to a Cluster chart to achieve this representation.
In line with the above charts, we've also introduced the Waterfall component.
- Waterfall Components - See how certain metrics evolve with the Waterfall component in Zoho CRM. Choose from different types: Basic, Cumulative, Breakdown, and Projection variants to see how various factors impact a certain metric over time.
Data sharing rules get a makeover
One of the most important aspects of any modern business is getting the right information into the right hands, while also ensuring your customer data is protected. Data Sharing settings in Zoho CRM is the one-stop shop to manage how CRM data is shared across users, roles, and groups you've defined in Zoho CRM.
We've now given it a fresh coat of paint, making it easier to navigate and find specific rules that need to be updated, as well as adding certain functionalities that have been missing until now. Here's a quick summary of the changes to the Data Sharing settings in Zoho CRM.
Two tab navigation - There are dedicated tabs for managing Default organization permissions and Sharing rules.
A detailed view of sharing rules - A detailed list of all of your sharing rules organized module-wise is available for quick references and updates.
One touch activation/deactivation - All of your sharing rules can now be enabled or disabled with a single click.
Clone sharing rules - Quickly set up a new rule by cloning existing ones and updating the criteria and conditions before deploying it across your organization.
Search & advanced filters - Filter sharing rules based on modules, or use the search bar and advanced filters to find specific rules to modify with ease.
Refine your CRM dashboards with a click
If you're a numbers person, you more than likely have multiple dashboards set up with various components tracking the performance of your sales operation. Now let's say that instead of an overview of your entire sales operation, you simply want to drill down and check up on a particular product line or a region. You need to go through every component and drill down to see the data you want from there.
With filters for dashboards, you can now get the view you need in a few clicks. Like with filters anywhere else in Zoho CRM, you can simply define the criteria of the data you want to look at, and the system will drill down to that particular data set across your entire dashboard at once.
Rollup and summarize data
With the introduction of Rollup Summary in Zoho CRM, we offered a wide range of predefined rollup summary fields that, as the name suggested, rolled up various metrics in your business to give you a summary at a glance—information like total deals, revenue per account, lost deals revenue, or maximum sales cycle duration, and so on.
But the needs of a business can vary widely from one another depending on the sales process, industry, operations, and more, so the default rollup summary fields may not address the needs of every organization.
With our new custom rollup summary fields, you can now create summaries that reflect your industry's unique requirements. This enhancement enables more customized data views, which enables you to choose any related list and summarize any integer or date-based fields from it.
An expanding scope for Client Scripts
Client Scripts offer a powerful and flexible way to manage how people interact with information in Zoho CRM. You can do anything from complex calculations, connect with third-party applications, and even control the visibility and interactivity of data and buttons in your CRM.
We're now expanding the scope of where these Client Scripts can be deployed and how your business can make the most of them.
Client Scripts for Subforms - Client Scripts are now supported for subform events and have subform specific client APIs. Subform events are triggered from user actions, such as adding or deleting rows or updating data in a subform. These events allow you to run Client Scripts for validation, automation, or dynamic updates. By leveraging Subform Events, you gain precise control over subform behavior.
Client Scripts for Portals - You can now make changes that accommodate portal-specific scenarios and extend various Client Scripts to your portals to manage how your customers, partners, and vendors interact with data. For example, only vendors can update an order status through your portals, and you can make the records read only.
Deploy custom AI solutions in Zoho CRM with QuickML
We offer a wide range of AI functionalities through Zia, Zoho CRM's native AI offering. However, there might be scenarios where businesses need to build AI solutions to address niche and unique challenges.
That is where QuickML, our custom ML builder from Zoho Catalyst comes into play. With the enhancements, You can build custom ML pipelines that leverage data in your CRM and connected third party applications to experience the following benefits.
Gain complete control over their data for cleansing, processing, and algorithm optimization.
Build end-to-end no-code machine learning pipelines directly within CRM, saving time and streamlining processes.
Tailor AI models to fit complex use cases specific to their organization.
Learn more about QuickML in Zoho CRM
Enhancements to Zoho CRM's Voice of the Customer (VoC)
To ensure your business enjoys long-term success and growth, it is vital that you always have an eye on how your prospects, leads, and customers feel about your business. Zoho CRM's VoC, since its introduction, has let you monitor a wide range of touchpoints to understand how people feel about your business in real time.
Now, we're introducing multiple enhancements to make VoC more powerful and deliver holistic insights by taking data from a wider range of sources to help your business understand your customers better.
Modules as VoC source - In addition to existing sources, you can now connect external apps and pull data like YouTube comments and product reviews into a module to power VoC insights, or into dashboards, and automations to plan your business strategies and future customer engagements.
VoC insights in Kiosks - You can now pull VoC insights and display them as part of your Kiosks to cross reference how your prospects and customers feel about your products, services, and support before engaging them further.
From Keywords to Key phrases - Cut down ambiguity and guess work when analyzing your VoC dashboards with cloud charts that can display key phrases your customers are using when interacting with your business. Get better clarity at a glance when you explore your keyword cloud charts.
Drilldown into underlying data - VoC insights are more than just words and numbers; they are a representation of what your customers feel and express. Drill down into each VoC component to see the people that drive these insights and take quick actions to connect with them right from your dashboards.
VoC dashboards in your homepage - To ensure you can stay on top of how your customers feel, you can now add the various VoC components you have access to into your homepage dashboards.
VoC insights in advanced filters - To help you identify and prioritize records that might need your attention the most, we've enabled VoC events in advanced filters, allowing you to filter out records based on events, keywords, and responses.
Zia's evolving every day
One of the quickest evolving aspects of Zoho CRM are the capabilities of Zia. Over the last few years, we've added multiple AI functionalities like prediction models, recommendation models, anomaly detection, communication intelligence, and more, all of which run natively inside Zoho CRM. Here are some of the new capabilities that you can explore in your AI tool set.
Introducing Zia Agents
Like a lot of our counterparts in the CRM world, we're jumping head first into the world agentic AI. A couple of months ago, we made an announcement detailing our goal of deploying autonomous agents across our product portfolio, with specialized agents across each area of your business operations.
We're beyond excited to inform you that we're starting off strong with native agents in Zoho CRM: an SDR agent and a sales coach agent to help you optimize and grow your sales operations.
Focus on your most valuable leads with the help of built-in SDR Agent
As an organization, you want your sales team to dedicate their time and efforts to promising leads. So why not let our SDR agent take over the task of making sure the right leads get through to your team?
Once deployed, the SDR agent can consistently nurture leads through emails, respond to lead inquiries by leveraging your knowledgebase, and once a prospect shows buying intent or of they specifically request an interaction with a sales representative, the agent can quickly route the leads back to your team for a more personalized and human connection.
Hone your skills to perfection with an intelligent coach
What if you had an intelligent sales coach watching your back? Someone who could analyze every interaction, every touchpoint, and every step in the journey of a deal to distill that information into meaningful and actionable insights?
Our sales coach agent takes on that role to run support for your sales team working hard on your deals. Reach out to the sales coach to get insights into what went well or what went wrong, actions you can take to push the deal further down the pipeline, and more with the click of a button.
If you want to make sure your sales representatives are prepared for every possible scenario, have them work with the sales coach on various pitch scenarios. The agent comes up with different scenarios, use cases, and problem statements that can let the sales rep plan their approach and tailor their messaging to each unique scenario at hand.
Additionally, the sales coach agent also provides meaningful feedback from these coaching sessions, allowing representatives to refine their pitch and grow their confidence.
We're starting our agentic journey off with these powerful tools for your business, and we plan to introduce multiple agents across every part of your business operation to help your team be more efficient and drive growth.
Ask Zia is now smarter, better, and faster
Ask Zia has been a pivotal part of our AI functionality ever since we released Zia in 2018. Acting as your AI sales assistant, you could ask Zia a wide range of questions, and Zia would pull up metrics, dashboards, insights, and more to help you run your business better.
We felt that this aspect of Zia was long overdue for an upgrade, and now it is more powerful than ever before.
You can chat with Zia using three distinct message intents—Insights, Help, and Action—each designed to support your CRM journey uniquely.
Insights handles data-related questions and provides instant summaries, making it easier to understand your CRM data without creating reports manually. For example, “Show me the deals closing this month.”
Help answers how-to questions like “How do I create a workflow rule?” with step-by-step guidance for using CRM features and settings.
Action lets you perform specific tasks such as creating modules, workflows, reports, and generating summaries.
Additionally, you can maintain multiple chat sessions within Ask Zia across different intents, allowing you to go back and forth without losing any of your outputs from previous interactions. You can choose to delete these chat sessions at any time before starting a new one, and you can provide feedback on how useful or relevant the responses were.
Bring your imagination to life with Canvas
Since its introduction in Zoho CRM, Canvas has been a powerful tool to help you reimagine Zoho CRM into something that is truly your own. Change how each page looks for your users; from the record details page and list views to quick create forms, you have control over how these look visually.
We've now made it much easier for you to customize your CRM with our latest enhancement to Canvas.
With Zia's advanced image and character recognition capabilities, you can simply upload an image of how you want your Canvas view to be, and Zia will generate a template that mirrors the image you uploaded. You can choose to auto-map the fields in the image you uploaded with fields from your CRM system, or you can choose to manually map these fields once the template is created for greater control over the creation process.
See your Canvas vision come to life with Zia, at the click of a button.
Transform images to actionable records
We're introducing intelligent character recognition (ICR) that can go beyond recognizing printed text but also recognize patterns and context, allowing for greater flexibility in addressing business needs.
ICR supports a single template configuration, making it ideal for specific use cases like ID cards or other card-based images. This means you can create a record from a card-based image where Zia's ICR extracts key information (such as name, contact details, and preferences). These extracted fields are then seamlessly mapped to the corresponding CRM module fields.
Additionally, ICR can also help you augment existing records by either adding new information to existing records, or update any piece of outdated information. If you upload a new document that is mapped to an existing record, you have the option of updating existing fields with information from the new records.
Powerful customizations are just one prompt away
Zoho CRM offers multiple powerful means of customizing it to suit your business needs. Some of the most widely used ones are the ability to create custom modules to gather and organize data needed to keep your business running, and workflows that let you automate a wide range of actions that are a part of your business process.
With the increasing reach of GenAI in SaaS technology, we're pushing the boundaries on what you can do with simple prompts in Zoho CRM. With our latest enhancement to Zia, you can build complete and fully functioning custom modules and workflows with simple prompts.
For a custom module, start the process from either the Ask Zia interface, the module builder, or the quick create screen. You can provide a prompt that goes over what the module is and its purpose, and Zia will generate one for you with relevant fields, sections, and even suggested relationships with other modules, accelerating the pace at which you go live with a new operation.
Similarly, you can follow the same process for your workflows. From either the Workflow Rules setup or the Ask Zia interface, offer a simple prompt on what you want the workflow to do and watch Zia generate a baseline workflow which you are free to use as it is, or make changes until you feel it's good to go. It's as simple as that!
Run custom actions through predefined prompts at the click of a button
What if your sales team could get the customized summary of a lead or a deal that is contextual to your business before they schedule a call? What if your marketing team could generate a contextual and personalized email for a follow-up? What if your analysts could surface insights like SWOT analyses, competitor summaries, or pipeline bottlenecks—directly from within CRM records?
Now you can do all of this and more with the prompt builder in custom buttons. You can now associate prompts for the various custom buttons you create, and Zia will execute the prompt once the button is clicked, giving you the output that is contextual to the CRM record you are looking at.
With the prompt builder, each button becomes a smart entry point to context-aware AI assistance, purpose-built for your workflow.
Let Zia guide you towards the next best action
With Next Best Experience, you're always given the best action to take to make progress on your opportunities.
With the latest enhancements, NBX now leverages every record touchpoint like interactions, signals, and transactions to provide actionable, context-aware suggestions that guide you in nurturing leads, retaining customers, and optimizing your sales pipeline, ultimately making guided selling smarter, more timely, and perfectly aligned with your business goals.
Zia Scores is now available across modules
With a major overhaul, Zia Scores is now more powerful and versatile than ever before. You can now create a scoring model with Zia for any module in Zoho CRM, and most importantly, Zia Scores is open to a variety of scoring types: such as Field Attribute Score, Engagement Score, Follow-up Score, Health Score, and Conversion Score.
Additionally, Zia Scores has been brought under Scoring Rules to ensure a uniform user experience for people working with these functionalities.
With Zia Scores being brought under the banner of Scoring Rules, an added benefit to this is that Zia Scores can now be used to automate various actions similar to your manual lead scores, allowing for improved engagements with driven by AI insights.
Course correct your business operations with personalized prescriptions
Strategy Influencer in Zoho CRM is a powerful tool that analyzes various aspects of business that you define, identifies all positive and negative trends as well as their driving factors, and provides you with corrective actions you can take to address any bottlenecks in your business.
With this enhancement, you can share these dashboards to individual users where the insights and prescriptions they see will be tailored based on their role and data. This ensures every user gets insights and corrective actions that are unique to them, delivering meaningful impact on their own performance as well as raising the bar for the business's operations as a whole.
Improve Zia's predictive capabilities by leveraging usage data
In Zoho CRM, you can now leverage usage data of your products or services through import, API, URL, or any other supported file type to help you identify how your customers are using your products and identify issues that cause friction leading to churn.
Once you've linked your usage data with Zoho CRM and you have mapped events from your usage data with fields in Zoho CRM, Zia will use this information to fuel more personalized recommendations as well as more accurate predictions across the board, including the likelihood of churn.
Leverage custom buttons across Zia Insights
Zia offers a wide range of insights across different areas of your operations, from predicting various variables to recommendations and even meaningful insights pulled from the vast volume of customer data.
Now, in addition to simply consuming these insights across Zoho CRM, you can act on them by associating custom buttons on pages where you consume them.
When you have a lead with a high lead score, assign it to your best representative with a click. When you see a high churn score, click a button and start a campaign to re-engage and improve relationships. When you see a recommendation, click a button and create a new deal to get the ball rolling.
That is a wrap for all the exciting updates we have for everyone, from everyone here at Zoho CRM! As always, this is just the beginning, and there are some heavy-hitting and exciting updates that we're chipping away at to completion in the back. We cannot wait to bring these to Zoho CRM and help your business manage your operations better and connect with your customers in more meaningful ways.
Explore these features; let us know what you like, what you don't like, and enhancements you would love to see inside Zoho CRM in the future!
Farewell for now; we'll see you back here in three months for the next update! As always, happy selling from everyone here at Zoho CRM.
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