Today Zoho announced a makeover for its venerable (my, how time flies) CRM SaaS service, including new features and a new UI. The company also stated that its software is used by 5.5 million users and has 25,000 CRM customers. The features are all available immediately and the existing pricing remains the same.
First is the UI makeover. You can see the setup screen below, it is more organized and more visually appealing. (A comparison between old and new can be found here.)What I liked is that Zoho will offer you a choice of UI for a limited time to aid in your own transition, if you liked the old furniture arrangement.
Second are two new social integration features that are all the rage in SaaS products. First is its own social streaming app called Pulse, as you can see it is similar to a variety of streaming features that can be found elsewhere. You can follow fellow employees, post to their stream and so forth.
The second social feature is an integration with LinkedIn and this is two way: your updates in Zoho get posted on LinkedIn, and vice-versa. You can link someone in your Zoho contacts or leads databases to their LinkedIn profile. You click on the little LinkedIn box underneath their photo to get into this part of the program. Both Pulse and the LinkedIn integration are free for all users of Zoho.
The last two features are only available to enterprise-grade Zoho users. First is a new Creator app that is integrated into the CRM service. With it, you can develop custom CRM modules using a variety of forms and templates, as you see below.
If that isn’t enough, Zoho is also assembling a series of Workflow APIs called Webhooks to automate particular processes externally. Again, this is just available to enterprise users. So you could update your Quickbooks accounting system every time you indicate you close a deal in the ZohoCRM module.
