Neil Weston, Clareti Ltd.

Dear All

A welcome to those of you reading the Clareti News Blog for the first time.

This item is about Zoho – things that have been added or changed, new integrations and some things you may not have known about.

1. Changes

  • Server location

It was announced recently that Zoho will soon be hosting all European accounts on a new server centre (not center) based in The Netherlands. Details haven’t been fully announced yet but this may mean improvements in speed (?) and also those of you who are cautious about your data being stored on a computer in the US of A can now relax.

  • Ring Central

The promised integration of Zoho CRM with the popular RingCentral VOIP system is now in beta. I’m trying to get signed up to try it out but RingCentral are dragging their feet a bit. This will be a big change to the way your phone system works but you are likely to save a considerable amount of money if you are on a more traditional phone system AND will be able to dial directly from Zoho and conduct a mouth-watering array of tasks that will save you time in dealing with customers or potential customers.

  • Approvals

The Enterprise edition now has a sophisticated approvals function. If you are fed up with John the sales guy continually adding mega opportunities then use the approvals process to only allow approved opportunities into your sales funnel.

2. Enhancements

  • Phone number validation

Some auto editing or spurious characters from newly imputed phone numbers now happens. The types of mistakes that are auto-corrected are many but to give a quick example +44   (0)1476 345555: is now edited to +44 (0)1476 345555.

  • Additional conditions for date/date-time fields criteria

This is a really good enhancement. When you set criteria for date/date-time fields across Zoho CRM, you will now have “Current/Last/Next – month” & “Current/Last/Next week” options added to the list of conditions. This way it gets easier for you to set date related criteria.

  • Potential mandatory fields in lead conversion

Fields that are marked as mandatory in the Potentials modules will now be shown in the leads conversion page. You will not be able to save the Potential unless you enter a value for the mandatory fields. Also, some field values will get pre-populated according to the mapping configured in the Leads Conversion Mapping section. You can edit the values if you wish to change them.

  • Custom field limit increased for Enterprise users

The number of custom fields available has doubled for the Enterprise edition of CRM from 150 to 300. Most field types have been increased but I have complained about the small amount of Lookup fields that are available. Apparently this is really hard to increase.

 

3. Features that you may not have found yet

  • Territories

In the Enterprise edition you can now create ‘territories’ which can either reflect actually geographical territories or indeed product ranges or even different brands.

  • Columns

In Zoho Campaigns if you want to add pictures side-by-side then use the column format, delete the pre-populated text and add a picture in each column. Looks cool when it arrives.

  • Surveys

Zoho have their own version of Survey Monkey that can be fully integrated into your CRM system allowing access to everyone’s responses and CAN be used as a form to collect information from clients that gets automatically populated into their record in Zoho CRM.

  • Google adwords

There is a deep level of integration possible between Google Adwords and Zoho so if you use this (money draining) form of advertising then you can build knowledge around the success or otherwise through recording where leads came from and whether any business resulted from them.

With thanks to you all for being Zoho users (or potential users!)