DotPe leverages Zoho CRM Plus's customizations and robust system to achieve above and beyond

The company

Founded in 2019 by Shailaz Nag, Gyanesh Sharma, and Anurag Gupta, DotPe emerged as a vital solution during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses urgently needed to go digital. The company specializes in digitizing small-level merchants and providing them with comprehensive billing and inventory management solutions and a robust online presence. DotPe's platform enables merchants to create personalized web stores where customers can browse catalogs, select products, add items to their carts, and make payments. The platform encompasses the entire journey for both merchants and customers, including placing orders, sharing feedback, and tracking delivery statuses. 

This end-to-end solution has enabled over 10 million merchants to thrive digitally—driving both customer engagement and business growth.

The challenge

During its early days, the company relied primarily on Google Sheets and another platform, both of which proved ineffective when it came to meeting their ambitious goals. They aimed to onboard 2,000 to 3,000 merchants monthly, but the platform they were using wasn't interactive enough. In a startup environment, adaptability is paramount; plans made one night might require changes by the following morning, and the startup ecosystem demands systems that are highly responsive and capable of real-time customization. To meet these challenges, DotPe sought a new solution that could handle the dynamic and volatile nature of their operations.

The solution

Pratyush Saurabh, Senior Manager of Strategy and Business Ops, has been associated with DotPe for four years and his role involves strategizing to scale new initiatives, reaching out to new audiences, and creating processes that align with both business and operational stakeholders. Pratyush recognized the company's dire need for a platform that could track each lead's journey from initial contact to happy customer.

After a thorough five-month evaluation involving multiple stakeholders, DotPe determined the scale of their business expansion, and they chose Zoho CRM Plus for its customizability. The platform's flexibility allowed for the creation and integration of custom functions, workflows, and modules tailored to specific processes and teams. Over the next six months, they implemented the expansion at the scale they had envisioned, which included the addition of personnel, processes, and customizations. Zoho's sandbox environment was particularly helpful at the time of implementation, Pratyush says.

Tracking the entire customer lifecycle with Zoho CRM

Before implementing Zoho, DotPe's sales process was incomplete, as it lacked visibility into how leads progress into prospects. The company could only begin tracking from the moment a payment was made or when the lead was already warm. However, Zoho CRM has streamlined their sales process and enabled them to quantify how many leads haven't yet become prospects. Zoho's capabilities have also enabled the integration of external lead sources directly into the platform, ensuring that they can capture every visitor as a lead and mark the beginning of their journeys. This improvement brings greater clarity and efficiency to their sales operations.

Leads are generated from their website or social media channels through integrations with the CRM system. Once a lead is captured, it remains a lead until it's marked as "Interested." Before this classification, all relevant merchant information—such as the potential number of stores, footfall, average revenue, actual revenue, the number of orders, GST details, address, and phone number—is collected through various activities associated with each lead.

When a lead is marked as "Interested," it's then converted into a deal. The deal process then involves sending each client a pro forma invoice, obtaining approval, processing payment, signing the agreement, and completing the onboarding process. This sequence of steps constitutes a successful completion of the sales cycle.

These leads are also automatically assigned to sales representatives through easily configurable assignment rules that align with the company's required conditions.

Enhanced insights with Zoho Analytics

As a senior manager, Pratyush relies heavily on Zoho Analytics, a key product that significantly aids him in his role. He finds Zoho Analytics highly configurable, particularly in creating SQL queries and various types of tables and joins. This flexibility allows for numerous permutations and combinations and results in a wide range of analyses. Pratyush has created numerous dashboards, though he reviews only a select few regularly due to their sheer volume.

Zoho Analytics is Pratyush's tool of choice when he has the time to invest in detailed data analysis and table combinations using SQL. However, for quick insights—or when time is limited—he prefers using Zoho CRM's Reports module, which offers quick and convenient access to necessary information.

Increasing productivity through customization

Zoho CRM enables the DotPe team to create numerous custom modules, configure a variety of custom functions, and design extensive workflows. This flexibility makes the development of new processes, teams, or business lines remarkably swift.

DotPe's entire operational framework is built upon custom modules, with over 90 custom modules and more than 180 custom functions configured in Zoho CRM. This customization enables the seamless relay of records across teams, as it streamlines the merchant onboarding process and marks principal records as completed. This setup, developed within one to two months, has significantly enhanced visibility and efficiency by enabling teams to track task progress through Zoho.

The team has also developed their own custom API integrations with a field force automation application to monitor the sales team's efficiency, as well as with Zoho Sign to obtain digital signatures from clients.

Enabling seamless customer support with Zoho Desk

The company has transitioned from another support tool to Zoho Desk due to its seamless integration with social media channels and its ability to collate all datasets within the Zoho ecosystem.

Zoho Desk's integrations have been transformative for DotPe, who have written custom functions by themselves to integrate with various channels—including WhatsApp. Leveraging this capability, the team has successfully integrated WhatsApp into their workflow and use it to trigger feedback and score their communications with merchants. This custom integration has proven to be highly effective in streamlining communication processes.

Whenever a ticket is created in Desk, it's assigned to a specific support person based on pre-configured assignment logic. The assigned support executive logs their activities on the ticket and marks it as completed according to the situation, which might involve internal teams or other dependencies.

The ticket layouts and workflows are also highly customized, and include workflows that ensure tickets are directed to the appropriate departments and individuals. Additionally, DotPe has created departments within Zoho Desk to streamline this process.

Benefits

With Zoho CRM Plus in place, DotPe's leadership team has gained complete transparency into the company's operations. The ability of the products in Zoho's ecosystem to connect not only with each other but with third-party apps through API integrations has been a huge benefit for the team.