Expands its AI capabilities with interactive voice and chat, deal prediction, and email sentiment. Enterprises can now build, distribute, and manage internal apps for global teams.
Zoho unveiled Zia Voice, the first conversational AI for sales teams that adds speech and chat capabilities to Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered sales assistant. Zia can now also predict deal closures and analyze email sentiment.
The company also introduced Catalyst—a set of capabilities that allow larger and complex businesses to build their own mobile and web apps and additions to Zoho CRM, on existing Zoho infrastructure, to serve their own businesses uniquely. In addition, new features in Zoho CRM like Translations and Portals add to deepening their enterprise focus.
“We are delivering the first conversational AI for CRM, with Zia Voice” said Mani Vembu, COO, Zoho Corp. “Zia’s enhanced AI capabilities will now help salespeople sell smarter, with contextual assistance and access customer information through a powerful voice and chat interface.” Zia can now talk to sales teams, and help them do a lot more.
Interactive voice and chat-bot: From answering questions on everyday CRM information like new leads created, average deal revenue, or even monthly forecasts to practical traffic status, Zia converses with salespeople via simple chat and voice messages.
Lead and Deal Prediction: Zia analyses interaction patterns and the progress of a lead or deal in the pipeline, and suggests the probability of its closure. This helps salespeople spend their time on deals that are more likely to close.
Email sentiment analysis: Zia makes sense out of the scores of emails that a salesperson might receive every day. Every email is analyzed to discover the relevant positive or negative sentiment. This helps salespeople identify critical emails and address them first.
Alerts for the best time to contact: Zia gives salespeople real-time updates about when they are most likely to reach their prospects. This increases their chance of connecting with leads and reduces the time spent on unanswered calls.
“Customer relationship platforms are transitioning into the next phase. The advancements in AI mean that SaaS vendors can now power their applications with Invisible Interfaces and make them easier, more natural to use – and available without having to look at a screen”, said Sheryl Kingstone of 451 Research. “We see these advancements in AI and voice recognition leading the way into the next transformation of business applications. Our recent research shows that 45% of the surveyed digital leaders are looking forward to use voice interface in the next 24 months.”
Catalyst: The hyper-customization platform for Zoho CRM
Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK): Zoho CRM’s mobile SDK helps companies design and build custom mobile apps based on their own work roles or needs, helping them shape their own experience, their way.
Mobile Device Manager (MDM): Companies can distribute their custom apps built through Mobile and Web SDK internally through the MDM network, no matter if they run on iOS or Android.
Serverless computing: Enterprises can now use Zoho’s infrastructure to run code without having to worry about physical hardware or servers. Zoho CRM users can also integrate their account with third party services using serverless components and save up on managing web servers.
Widgets: Businesses can build custom UI components to provide contextual information from external sources and work in real time with Zoho CRM’s data.
Feature highlights of enterprise-ready Zoho CRM
Portals: Helps customers, vendors, and partners play an important role in the sales process. Customers can have access to their sales, past purchases, cases, and invoices in one place.
Blueprint advancements: Blueprint now has SLA and checklist capabilities that can help managers optimize their sales processes.
Translations: Zoho CRM users can now view their CRM data in a language that’s most comfortable to them, keeping the local flavor of every business intact.
Job opportunities for Indian developers
Catalyst works on Deluge, Zoho’s own programming language. There are 40,000 Deluge developers, of which around 10% are from India, who use it to create applications on Zoho’s platform.
“The developers eloquent in Delgue are becoming a valuable resource for our rich global partner network. In fact our partners have started hiring developers in India,” said Vembu. “As Zoho’s ecosystem expands further with Catalyst, there will be an increase in demand for Deluge developers, creating job opportunities. Our goal is to have 1,00,000 developers in India on Zoho’s platform over the next three years.”
