Zoho Rolls Out Major Update to Zoho CRM; Launches New User Interface; Adds Social Features and Integrations

Zoho today launched a major update to Zoho CRM, the company’s affordable on-demand customer relationship management software. The Zoho CRM update includes a completely redesigned user interface and four new features: “Pulse” module, LinkedIn integration, Zoho Creator integration, and WebHooks — improving the social aspects and extensibility of Zoho CRM. A video tour is available at http://ow.ly/7ZHcF.

“Most of the business applications we see today in the market don’t focus on usability and user experience,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “We want to change that. We want to make business applications as user friendly as consumer apps. Zoho CRM is the first app redesigned with an enhanced focus on user productivity and improving the user experience of the application. We plan to extend this to other Zoho applications. We are also excited about extending our CRM application with new social features and integrations, as well as extending our user population. Zoho CRM just gained its 25,000th customer. We are extremely excited about the momentum, and we hope to see more users take advantage of our offering.”

New Zoho CRM UI: Optimized for User Productivity

Zoho CRM is updated with a completely redesigned user interface, built from the ground-up with user productivity as the primary focus. We want our users to focus less inside the CRM application and more on selling. We studied how our users were interacting with our application and made several improvements to various screens and workflows within the application.

We provided early access to our customer base and have received very good feedback from them. Starting today, the newly designed CRM will be the default interface. The older version will also be available for a few weeks.

In addition to the new user interface, Zoho CRM gains many new features.

New “Pulse” Module: Stay on Top of Your Sales Activity

Just like you can follow people on Twitter, you can now follow a particular deal, contact or account in Zoho CRM. Pulse allows you to follow what’s really important to you. For example, a CEO might be interested in a deal that could have an impact on his quarterly results. By following that deal, he will now be updated on all activity related to that deal.

Users can customize what updates they would like to see and can view activity based on who made the changes and where the changes were made.

LinkedIn Integration

Zoho CRM now allows users to link a contact’s profile with their LinkedIn profile. So users can not only very easily get their position, company, city and more; they can also be up to date with their business and professional activity. Users can even associate their profile picture in the Zoho CRM contact or send direct LinkedIn messages to the user without leaving the CRM application.

A LinkedIn icon is available below the photo in the Leads and Contacts module that provides the information pulled in from LinkedIn. If a LinkedIn profile of the user doesn’t exist, users have the option to search for the user’s profile.

Zoho Creator Integration

With our Zoho Creator integration, users can now build custom apps that appear inside the CRM application and access data from the CRM system. For example, users can build a custom travel app that appears within the CRM. This custom app can be built to pull in information from various modules within the CRM. The beauty of building the app with Zoho Creator is that there’s no coding required, just drag-and-drop a few fields, and you have an app built and integrated with CRM.

The app that is built using Creator can be co-developed by multiple users and can also be shared with other Zoho CRM users.

WebHooks

WebHooks simplify integration with other systems. For example, if you want to update your accounting system every time you close a deal in CRM, you can configure a WebHook to notify the external system about the change (through GET/POST requests). WebHooks can be configured alongside a Workflow to send instant web notifications when a specific event occurs.

Google Calendar Sync

For those using Zoho CRM with Google Apps, Zoho CRM now supports bi-directional synchronization with Google Calendar.

Pricing and Availability

The update, with brand new user interface and LinkedIn integration, will be available to all Zoho users, free and paid. The Pulse module and Google Calendar Sync will be available for paid users. Zoho Creator integration and WebHooks features will be available to Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition users.

All these features will be available starting today.

For more information on Zoho, please visit www.zoho.com and watch “What is Zoho?” To get breaking Zoho news, visit and subscribe to the RSS feed at http://blogs.zoho.com, and follow the company on Twitter at @zoho and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/zoho.

Resources

Zoho news releases: http://www.zoho.com/in-the-news.html

Zoho product videos: http://www.zoho.com/product_videos.html

Zoho general videos:http://www.zoho.com/videos.html

Zoho blogs: http://blogs.zoho.com

Zoho on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/zoho

Zoho Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/zoho

About Zoho

Zoho is a comprehensive suite of award-winning online productivity, collaboration and business applications for businesses of all sizes. Over five million users rely on Zoho for their Business, Productivity & Collaboration needs and actively connect via Forums, Blogs, Facebook and Twitter. To date, Zoho has launched 27 different applications which include several online office applications such as Writer, Sheet, Show and Mail along with a host of business applications ranging from CRM to Projects, Invoice and Meeting. These applications are offered directly via Zoho.com or through hundreds of partners in the Zoho Alliance Partner Program. For more information about Zoho, please visit www.zoho.com.

Zoho is a division of Zoho Corp., a privately-held and profitable company, which also provides IT Management Software (ManageEngine with 50,000 customers) and a Network Management Suite (WebNMS with 25,000 Tier 1 carrier deployments). With headquarters in Pleasanton, CA and offices in Austin, New Jersey, Chennai, London, Tokyo and Beijing, Zoho Corp. serves the technology needs of millions of customers worldwide. For more information about Zoho Corp., please visit www.zohocorp.com.

All brand names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Tags: Zoho, CRM, customer relationship management, online applications, online productivity, online collaboration, business applications, UI, user experience, LinkedIn, Zoho Creator, Google Calendar, WebHooks, email, spreadsheets, presentations, documents, integration