Zoho Corporation has expanded its customer experience (CX) platform with deeper AI and workflow orchestration capabilities, powered by its proprietary AI engine, Zia. The enhancements aim to eliminate barriers to CRM adoption across business functions and make customer data more accessible and actionable for all departments.
“Multiple people in an organization need access to customer information, yet historically, CRMs have been relegated to only sales teams,” said Mani Vembu, CEO, Zoho. “As we democratize CRM with the launch of CRM for Everyone, we also need to build in capabilities that make it easy for anyone to build and extend CRM with simple prompts, without having to be an expert in the system. This is where Zia’s advanced capabilities come in. Now, anyone can create capabilities, workflows, or reports in CRM with a simple prompt. They can also make their CRM look the way they want with Zia’s image to design capabilities.”
CRM for Everyone is now generally available to businesses worldwide and includes two new features: Connected Records and Connected Workflows. These additions complement Zia’s expanded capabilities and position the platform as an accessible, AI-powered tool across entire organizations.
Advanced AI Capabilities with Zia
Zoho’s Zia engine now supports:
- Report Creation with Ask Zia: Users can prompt Zia to generate reports, which it builds according to their permissions. Zia allows real-time visualization of the report creation process, and users can interrupt and modify tasks before resuming.
- Custom Module Creation: A no-code experience for customizing CRM modules, field types, and permission settings using natural language commands.
- Workflow Creation with Ask Zia: Zia creates workflows in response to plain text prompts, enabling users to set up automated processes without technical expertise.
- Image to Canvas: Users can transform an image into a visual design element within the CRM, providing a more personalized and interactive interface.
Improving Coordination Across Teams
With Connected Records and Connected Workflows, Zoho aims to improve cross-departmental coordination and ensure consistent customer experiences. Connected Records automatically link activities across team modules, maintaining context throughout the customer journey. Connected Workflows serve as an orchestration engine that automates coordination among departments including sales, marketing, onboarding, account management, finance, and legal.
“A lot of enterprises look at their CX progress and wonder why they have trouble coordinating multiple processes across isolated departments,” said Keith Dawson, Director of Research, Customer Experience, ISG Software Research. “The promise of generative AI was that it would be able to prune away many of the old barriers to progress. Happily, AI capabilities like Zoho’s are delivering on that promise.”
Availability and Pricing
CRM for Everyone is now available, and unless otherwise noted, AI capabilities are included in license costs. Team user licenses for non-sales CRM users start at $9 per user per month on all paid Zoho CRM editions.
Zoho’s AI Approach
Zoho emphasizes customer privacy and value in its AI design. Its contextual, assistive, and agentic AI models are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho aims to deliver effective AI solutions without increasing the financial burden on users.
With over 55 apps spanning nearly every business category, Zoho remains one of the most prolific global technology companies. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India, the privately held company employs more than 15,000 people.
Images: Zoho