Zoho Implementation Archives - Page 3 of 4

List of Best Ways to Optimize Web Forms

Abhishek Sharma / form fields, optimizing forms, seamless user experience, web form / Zoho Implementation

A webform is essentially an exceptional way to allow the visitor to get in touch with you and send information such as an important order request, query, etc. On some websites, information that gets submitted with web forms is transferred directly to the company email. Web forms are constructed in programming languages and successful implementation of the code is important for the success of any form.

They can include any form fields such as text areas, text boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, file upload, buttons, and hidden fields. These forms basically work as a communication bridge that allows a user to communicate with a company and vice versa. You must know your target audience and market to frame important questions on a web form. Either you can research them all independently or you can get in touch with an expert for evaluating the target market and creating sensible questions as needed.

Importance of Web Forms

Web forms are an exceptional way to get valuable customer information that can be used for a wide range of purposes. You can keep your customers updated about the new offers, discounts, and a variety of other things if you have their contact information.

If you have a running landing page, we are sure you must have had conversations about using that landing page for converting the incoming traffic into leads. The process of attracting people to your business is called lead generation. To do this, you can begin a marketing campaign, advertise, conduct seminars, and online webinars, or participate in an event or trade show. All of these methods help in getting the audience getting attracted to your offering.

With web forms, you can move a step ahead and get their information. Given below is a list of best ways to optimize web forms along with an explanation on how to implement these ways using Zoho CRM.

1. Connect the Web Form With CRM

The usual course of action that most organizations follow is waiting until getting a good number of leads and then transferring them to a CRM system. However, the truth is that getting a bunch of leads all at once can be difficult to manage.

If you collect these leads one at a time, it can become relatively simple to assign them to the sales representatives, add tasks, schedule tasks, and follow up when the time is right. You can use and optimize web forms that are well connected to your CRM and get the data directly into the CRM database.

In addition, you can also relax without any doubt on the precision of data that gets captured into a web form and is linked to your sales representatives. Basically, the information recorded into your web form will be transferred to the CRM automatically and the sales cycle will eventually turn into a streamlined process.

2. Add Links and Clues to Fill Fields

Filling out a web form is not necessarily a task that most people enjoy. Most often, you will find that people are reluctant to share information, particularly when email address, contact details, and any other information are involved. To make this better, you can add a link to the privacy policy guidelines that your company follows and also assure them that the information is secure all the time.

Any further hints on the information including the date and time format, phone numbers with or without the code of an area can be useful for maintaining the CRM with clean and precise data. This will also ensure that all the data gets collected in the same format and also somehow helps the visitors to fill up the relevant details.

3. Take Important Information Only

It can turn out to be a big loss if you attract a lot of traffic on the web page but do not end up having a web form that is attractive enough to get the user to fill that form. Of course, you cannot deny that it is always tempting to collect as much information as you can but you cannot afford to present a lengthy web form with too many fields because it is certain that this will backfire.

A seamless user experience matters immensely and you should aim to give the user no reason to turn away from your website. Hence, you must focus on keeping the web form rather simple with only those fields that are required as that is a wise way to go about the process.

Create a form with only the important fields so that it takes less than two minutes to fill. You can probably add an extra field that you think may look good but check if it is really worth it. Ask for only whatever is necessary for the sales representatives to contact the leads and follow up with them.

4. Passing Hidden Values For Forms

Many times, there is a need to link some details to the new leads without revealing these details to the visitors. This detail could be the campaign that generated the lead or it could be a source of the lead. It could also be a hidden value that you want along with the detail of the lead.

You can add a hidden value that comes in with the lead for such requirements. For instance, if you wish to host a specific page then the best way to go about this is by getting a clear picture of the source of lead generation and passing the hidden values automatically.

5. No Spam or Automatic Form Submission

You would never want your site to get attacked by the bots that can sign up countless times within one minute. In addition, you would also want to avoid receiving any kind of junk requests that qualify in the category of spam.

One of the best, most used, and reliable solutions for this is Captcha. It is used a lot and is very useful as well. You can try and include captchas that can differentiate between human beings and computers. This will help in eliminating the automatic web form submission process to a great extent. It is also going to reduce spam and give you many quality leads to work on.

6. Keeping the Visitor Engaged

Convincing the visitors to fill the forms is not the only goal. You can go way further to keep the valuable users engaged for good. Attract the attention of users by giving them additional information. You can also redirect the users to a page that focuses on underlining updates, offers, and important information.

You can provide an overview of the product in the form of a video or an interactive UI. You can also list the testimonials from existing customers or just redirect them to a page that expresses gratitude.

7. Personalized Emails

Personalization is extremely important in these times. As long as you do not find a way to make the customers feel that they matter, you will not be able to stand out in the market. If the customers feel that something is customized according to just for them then they are bound to feel special and interested.

The practice of sending emails to acknowledge the requests sent by the leads is one of the best practices that you can get used to for nurturing leads. However, making this automatic is not fun anymore. You can add a personal touch to your emails and set the right note for customer relationships and sales. Make sure that you let your customers know that you are trying to help them.

8. Assigning Records to Sales Representatives

The leads might fill up a web form to find out more about a product or while downloading a white paper or an e-book. No matter what case it is, the main question is how long it takes for the sales representatives to follow up on leads and get back.

There are different methods that can be used for connecting to the leads or prospects but keep in mind that the timing must be right. In case the process takes longer then you must revisit the lead management and follow-up process. The focus should be on making the most out of the opportunity and not making the leads wait for a long time.

You can create a simple workflow for assigning and routing the leads to the sales representatives for quick follow-ups. When you really put this into practice, you will see a massive change in the way the sales process starts working out and does well for the business.

9. Filter Records

It is very important to make sure that the leads that get added to the CRM system are all genuine. They must not be from bots or junk leads. Captcha is actually for avoiding spam but the sales team should also be mindful of the junk leads that can enter the CRM.

When the web forms and CRM systems are connected to each other, possibilities are that the uninterested leads get added as well. You would definitely not want the sales professionals to waste their time on any junk leads. For this reason, it is important to keep a check on records that get added automatically and approve them before they are ready for follow-up by the sales team.

Conclusion

All of the tips that are mentioned above can be extremely useful to optimize the web forms and use them for your benefit. Web forms will make sure that each lead that gets added to the Zoho CRM is used to its complete extent.

If you need any more support in the optimization of your web forms or in making the best use of leads that get registered in the CRM, get in touch with our expert Zoho consultants. They come with a wide experience that can guide and lead you towards a much better sales process.

List of Best Ways to Optimize Web Forms Read More »

Zoho Implementationform fields, optimizing forms, seamless user experience, web form

All You Need to Know About Zoho Contracts

Abhishek Sharma / clm platform, clm system, contract lifecycle management, contract management software, zoho consultant / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

The contracts are legal documents that govern almost every penny that either comes in or leaves a business. If the businesses are equipped with the right contract management software for managing them then they can transform contracts from static documents into strategic assets. In a business landscape that changes so quickly with the evolution of technology, regulatory measures are coming up often.

Moreover, the global supply chains are only becoming complex and the marketing and sales models are becoming increasingly diverse. This is a state that has led to a need for digital contracts that can be easily accessed and amended. There is an increasing demand for a powerful CLM platform that allows you to manage and get the most out of your contracts.

A powerful contract lifecycle management software lets you automate and streamline contract processes and unlock the real potential within them. With a CLM such as Zoho Contracts, legal teams can save considerable time which can be invested in high-value tasks.

In this blog, we will have a detailed look at Zoho Contracts and the functions that this software offers.

What are Zoho Contracts?

Zoho Contracts is a simple solution for all the contract challenges. It helps in efficiently streamlining the Contract Lifecycle Management process with a feature-rich platform while achieving compliance at scale with reduced costs.

The implementation of CLM platforms like Zoho Contracts enables you to reduce contract cycle times, mitigate business risks, and improve contract governance. It is a complete contract solution that eliminates the need for multiple applications.

All business owners can stay on top of their business contracts no matter where they go. Zoho Contracts applications create a personalized mobile dashboard that offers insights into key contract metrics. The application also comes with features that are needed when you are away from your desk.

Other than offering efficiency in legal operations, the Zoho Contracts software facilitates better business outcomes. It addresses the below-mentioned aspects of legal operations.

Streamlining Contract Lifecycle

There are five stages included in the contract lifecycle that Zoho Contracts takes care of and they are mentioned below:

Authoring: Zoho Contracts comes with an extensive library of predefined contract templates and an ability to create custom templates in Zoho Contracts which makes contract authoring a breeze. The contract type templates along with the clause library in Zoho Contracts bring a systematic approach to contract authoring. It helps in saving a lot of time at the authoring stage while ensuring that there is language consistency across all contracts. The document editor comes with advanced document assembly capabilities, collaborative editing features, fillable field features, contextual commenting, etc.
Approvals: All contracts are legally binding documents so the content included in them must be clear, concise, and accurate. The approval process of contracts can improve compliance and reduce risks by making sure that stakeholders are aware of the scope of a contract before it is executed. Zoho Contracts can be used by admins to set up approval workflows both sequential and parallel and associate them with contract types. The approvers can add contextual comments in the documents and approve or reject them as well.
Negotiations: As opposed to the traditional approach in which you send contracts back and forth as email attachments, Zoho Contracts helps you with controlled access to counterparty contacts with password-protected links. The counterparty contacts can collaborate with each other in real-time, suggest relevant changes that should be made to the document, make contextual comments, and set the visibility. This negotiation history tracking and comparing changes feature comes in as highly useful when there are various negotiation rounds.
Execution: Zoho Contracts is a CLM system that comes pre-integrated with an e-signature software called Zoho Sign which makes this important step in the contract lifecycle extremely quick and effortless. The turnaround time for emailing, printing, signing, and faxing cycles can be eliminated or reduced considerably. You can sign and secure the legally binding electronic signatures within a few minutes. A signing order can also be specified that pans all across the signer group, organization signers, counterparty signers, other representatives, etc.
Post-execution Management: The use of Zoho Contracts also supports the post-execution stages along with amendments, extensions, terminations, and renewals. The software comes embedded with a predefined letter template that is customizable for each of these stages. The conventional templates only offer a skeletal structure of the document in which all members can contextually edit the content and make it complete. On the other hand, Zoho Contracts enables a user to amend a contract by making changes in the contract as the amendment letter that gets generated automatically captures the current changes along with the entire contract history. This extreme reduction of any manual intervention in document generation makes the lifecycle management of post-execution contracts extremely simple and straightforward.

Creating Risk Proof Contracts

Zoho Contracts is excellent contract management software that can help in gaining access to predefined templates for commonly used contracts such as NDAs and MSAs. Templates can act as a guide rail for the contract authors. You can change the details as much as you need while authoring a contract. You can also create your own template.

Instant contract creation is also enabled with the use of Zoho Contracts as you can simply add the contract and counterparty information in a form for generating contracts with all the right details in place. The contracts can be created based on the templates which empower all members to create contracts while also ensuring that there is language consistency across all contracts.

Zoho Contract comes with a built-in document editor with all features in a powerful word processor called Zoho Writer. The cloud offering allows you to author contracts from wherever you may be. Lastly, the advanced clause picker enables contract authors to search for and insert a clause in a contract easily. All the clauses in predefined templates including the ones you add are available in the clause library.

Contract Data Can Be Turned Into Business Insights

The feature of Dashboard lets you gain a high-level overview of your business at a glance while quickly making informed decisions. You can see the KPIs regarding your business health and growth at your fingertips.

Other than the Dashboard feature, the Reports feature also helps in gaining actionable insights across all aspects of the contract management system. You can check on things such as milestones, clauses, obligation, counterparty, performance, and other general contract attributes.

Enhancing Governance

Zoho Contracts is advanced contract management software that enables admins to make well-informed decisions by arriving at actionable business insights gleaned from a wide range of contract data. It comes with more than 30 standard reports across different aspects of contract management. And the personalized dashboard offers a high-level overview of business contracts at a glance.

Moreover, Zoho Contracts also allows activity tracking on three different levels including the contract level, user level, and stage level (approval, negotiation, signature). All kinds of activities performed by users on these levels are tracked chronologically. The stage level tracking presents the contract owner with information on whether the people involved in this stage have received the email notification, viewed the document, and performed the intended action along with time stamps.

The admins can structure the entire contract lifecycle process by configuring the clause library, contract letter templates, contract type templates, and approval workflows for contract types. The activity, access, and audit logs offer better visibility over organization-wide activities.

Reducing Business Risks

Adding suitable clauses such as limitations of liability and indemnity can eliminate all risks at an individual contract level and only a holistic contract management process designed with risk mitigation in mind can make a business truly risk ready. The use of Zoho Contracts comes with a peer review and approval workflow capability that offers better transparency over contract items to almost all the stakeholders involved. You can set up a clause library with legally approved languages and contract-type templates that act as a guide rail for contract authors. The governance settings give better control to the admins for the contract process while also improving compliance.

A critical risk factor for a business is to not fulfill contractual obligations. Any failure to comply with obligations can result in adverse regulatory and financial consequences and also leave the organization with damaged business relationships. A CLM system such as Zoho Contracts ensures that all obligations related to a contract can be tracked and managed from the contract obligations section. The contract owner can assign obligations to respective business owners and set reminders for them. Admins can also stay on top of these obligations with the help of obligation-based reports.

Promoting Cross-Functional Integrations

Contracts are considered dynamic documents that touch all parts of a business. The ever-increasing importance of the role of contracts necessitates cross-functional visibility and collaboration over them. The Zoho CRM integration allows sales professionals to initiate contracts from related sections of a deal record in CRM and track the contract’s status from CRM.

Most business development professionals report that any inefficiencies in the contracting process lead to slow revenue recognition. The main cause of this is sales and legal teams working in silos rather than together. The deals that were won and have been closed are often marked as complete after the sales agreement is signed which means that any inefficiency in the contract lifecycle management process of an organization impacts the revenue growth.

Any lack of transparency or difficulty in communication between the sales and legal teams result in long contract cycle times and it can even result in lost deals sometimes. With the Zoho CRM integration, you can establish a sort of transparency between the sales and contract processes while considerably improving the cycle times.

The integration can make the critical functional aspects of Zoho Contracts that are relevant for salespeople within the Zoho CRM. The sales cycle management offered by Zoho CRM and the contract lifecycle management offered by Zoho Contracts works together as the best contracting process for the sales team.

Much Better Control and Compliance

Zoho Contracts is highly functional contract lifecycle management software that keeps all stakeholders aware of potential risks and opportunities in a contract before it becomes active by adding them as approvers. You can design your own approval workflows both sequential and parallel. The approvers can also collaborate through the comment section.

There is a central repository where all the contracts can be stored. There are search and filter options as well that enable much better visibility and accessibility. One can stay on top of all user activities in the CRM platform of Zoho Contracts. It is easy to view the history of all progress, changes, and suggestions made in one place.

With version control, all versions of a contract can be seen in chronological order. It is also possible to compare versions and restore any of the older versions simultaneously. There is another feature of Calendar View that offers a month view calendar display of all the contract schedules and reminders.

You can never miss any obligation or an opportunity for a renewal with the help of reminder alerts. Lastly, with User Roles and Permissions, you can assign roles for users in the organization. There are different access permissions for each role which enable better control over the contract lifecycle management software.

Conclusion

Zoho Contracts can empower organizations and individuals with better control over the contracts because of its impressive automated workflows. It has a wide portfolio of products and seamless integrations that make the workflow very easy to manage.

You can quickly set up Zoho Contracts with only a little support from a certified and experienced Zoho consultant. The professional will be able to introduce you to all features while also importing your key contracts. Get in touch with Encaptechno to stay on top of the contracts all through their lifecycle.

All You Need to Know About Zoho Contracts Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationclm platform, clm system, contract lifecycle management, contract management software, zoho consultant

How Is Zoho a Good Option for Business Organizations in 2022?

Abhishek Sharma / online crm system, streamline business processes, zoho consultant, zoho implementation, zoho integration / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Ever since Zoho was launched in 2005, it has been focused on enabling businesses to expand effortlessly. This means that if a business wants to grow then Zoho implementation can be very helpful. It offers an ease of use that makes Zoho one of the topmost CRM choices available. All thanks to Zoho, one can still have effective customer relationships even though there is no real person to do a specific job.

Zoho is user-friendly and comes with all that is needed to keep the customers satisfied. It is a decent CRM solution for many types of businesses. The pricing that Zoho is available at is quite competitive and is considered to be at par with Salesforce and Microsoft CRM. The fact that Zoho comes with so many features makes it a great tool for businesses to grow.

Zoho is available in several tiers of plans and ranges from the free option to the Enterprise solution which is a great option for virtually any company. Its applications and features make it worth using for any kind of business. In this blog, we intend to see the different features of Zoho and how it is a good option for business organizations in 2022. Let’s begin.

Overview of Zoho CRM

One can effectively say that Zoho CRM is like an all-in-one solution. It is an online CRM system that does not need you to look through different departments or anything of that sort which makes it an excellent option for businesses of all sizes. Zoho CRM is a tool that all employees can use effectively and this is one thing that is very important.

The Zoho CRM implementation makes sure that employees do not need training for taking advantage of many features right away. It is a CRM solution that can effectively bend to your needs. You can customize the dashboard for different teams or projects and create multiple pipelines for matching the customer journeys. In addition, Zoho CRM allows you to create reports in a couple of clicks with deep insights on just about anything that you can think of.

Moreover, Zoho CRM includes features such as real-time sales signals and customer notifications, blueprint business management for online and offline processes, mass emails, prospect scoring capabilities, advanced customizations, AI assistant, inventory management, etc. The best part is that Zoho is affordable. The cheapest plan that Zoho offers starts at $14 per user per month and there is no skimping on features. If you need customization and features then Zoho’s upper-tier CRM plans come at $23, $40, and $52 per user per month.

What’s more, Zoho also provides a free plan with three users. It comes with many important features such as lead management, task management, document sharing, workflow rules, and a mobile application as well. To help small businesses, Zoho has recently started Bigin – a CRM that enables small businesses to manage their customer relationships easier than ever. When small businesses are prepared to move ahead of spreadsheets and legacy sales tools, Bigin is a great tool to begin.

What’s new in Zoho CRM in 2022?

Other than the many features that customers are already aware of, Zoho is coming up with other powerful features in 2022 that can empower business organizations. These features will be centered on delivering an exceptionally high standard in customer experience. Let’s have a look at them below.

1. Unified Platform for End-to-End Remote Working

One of the biggest problems that professionals have seen while working remotely is context switching. This is a problem that makes the professionals leave tasks incomplete and move on because of an interruption and it creates a negative impact on productivity. There can be many reasons for the disruptions and so many of them are inevitable when working from different locations.

For example, if the web developer is supposed to finish an important task in the fixed timeline and there is an immediate team meeting called then the developer will end up attending the meeting which will leave the task incomplete. This and many other interruptions can be avoided when there is a team collaboration tool in use.

With the Zoho implementation, you can set your status at “Engaged at Work” when you are working on completing an important task while informing your teammates that you will be unavailable. This way, remote work status in Zoho Cliq can help in focusing on work without causing any interruptions.

Zoho Cliq is a team collaboration tool that can be used by professionals for working and collaborating effectively. It comes with remote work features that help in working through the various disturbances along with being integrated with other apps or tools that you use. This helps in avoiding contextual switching at work and being all the more productive.

2. Client-end Scripting

The client scripts help the developers to use JavaScript codes for extending the capabilities of the Zoho CRM system in a way that addresses niche business needs. Since the scripts are executed on the client-side, a team can address many requirements.

This can be primarily done with low latency scripts that perform actions such as field validation, computations, UI actions, auto-population, field validation, enrichments along with trigger widgets, functions, and flyouts.

3. Omnichannel Communication

The present hybrid work environment presents a vital place for the sales representatives to maximize benefits across channels of communication when engaging with prospects.

For building the robust omni-channel communication platform that is already a part of the Zoho CRM system, many enhancements have been introduced across email and telephony systems so that sales can become more effective.

4. Personalized Emails

The personalization of emails has proven to be an important step in building long-term trust with customers. Hence, Zoho is presenting new ways to add a personal flair to emails so that the business identity can be established strongly in the minds of customers.

Zoho will enable businesses to customize all aspects of emails from font styles and sizes to the email signatures for individual email addresses and email aliases. This will help the businesses to foster a much better reputation in the minds of clients.

5. Smart Working With Automated Workflows

Artificial intelligence will hold an important place in future workspaces. While curbing the challenges posed by the pandemic, many organizations realized the importance of AI because it helps in the automation of everyday tasks with the use of bots.

AI also reduces workload and improves productivity by focusing on important work rather than manual data entry on a loop. The workflow automation does not just reduce human error in the workflow but it also saves a lot of time. In fact, automation of the workload can give the professionals the benefit of streamlining business processes.

For instance, one of the important tasks for any organization is to engage the customers and address their questions. This is an important task as happy customers form the foundation of any business. The customer service can address issues and an internal communication tool can help in discussing work items with fellow customer success executives.

Zoho CRM helps in navigating between the customer community while being updated on the new customer posts. You can also engage a bot that instantly notifies new queries and complaints within Zoho. This is an exceptional way in which routine tasks can be automated efficiently.

In addition, Zoho will also be coming up with exciting new updates to Zia which is Zoho CRM’s AI sales assistant. These updates will be bringing new levels of insights and understanding of customers and they will help in building meaningful and personalized customer relationships.

6. Defining Email Sharing Policy

Based on the roles of CRM users and the kind of email communications that you are engaging in, you might want emails to be available to every user in a CRM. The emails should be confidential and they should only be available to a small group of decision-makers.

With the Zoho CRM, you can effectively define your email sharing policy at the organizational level for each role while updating the policy for users in bulk. You can also set email sharing permissions for new employees or update them when users move to assume different roles in the CRM system.

7. Streamline Sales Calls

The native integration comes with an ability for managers to monitor, guide, and support the representatives to improve at making sales calls. The Zoho CRM integration enables sales professionals to keep an eye on how the representatives are performing in their active calls while managing the calls that are there in the queue waiting.

Sales managers can also coach new sales representatives as they progress through a call by jumping in directly to take the lead when the situation calls for it. This will lead to streamline the business process of sales effectively.

8. Understanding Workflow Failures

Workflows play the role of building blocks of automating the sales processes. Anytime when they fail to trigger or do not operate in the manner that they are supposed to, the direct impact can be on the sales performance which can negatively impact customer experience.

Zoho integrations make it simple to get in-depth information about when and where the workflow fails and all the records that get affected. The team can use important data for fixing the underlying problems and get the workflows up and running once again.

9. User Experience

The user experience has been a forgotten aspect when it comes to CRM solutions. While pursuing robust functionality, strong market presence, and competitive prices, businesses can often overlook the experience offered by CRM solutions to the daily users.

A good user experience has the ability to offer a better customer experience because it helps the sales team to be more productive and effective when working with the CRM solution. This is why Zoho has come up with Canvas that lets businesses provide a hyper-personalized CRM experience to users. Moving ahead, Zoho will also be bringing more intuitive features for building on a strong UX foundation.

10. Accessing Multiple CRM Accounts

It will be possible to associate a user with multiple CRM accounts to allow business owners, upper management, and decision-makers for managing multiple businesses with ease.

The users will be able to switch between accounts easily and quickly which will make it easier to access key business data that helps in understanding growth and deriving insights. This feature of accessing multiple CRM accounts can be used to prepare agendas, reports, and ideas for future planning with a single set of login credentials.

Conclusion

The online CRM system that you use should keep growing to keep pace with the constantly growing work environment and technological advancements. Take the step of choosing and employing the best available CRM system for your business so that your organization can function well.

Zoho CRM comes with a free trial which can help you in experiencing all the features that it has to offer. If you want to make the most out of Zoho and all the amazing features that can offer your business, get in touch with an experienced Zoho Consultant of Encaptechno. You can look forward to consistent support and valuable suggestions that will prove valuable for your business.

How Is Zoho a Good Option for Business Organizations in 2022? Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationonline crm system, streamline business processes, zoho consultant, zoho implementation, zoho integration

Maximize Your Potential as a Sales Representative With Zoho CRM

Abhishek Sharma / customer satisfaction, sales cycle process, sales pipeline, zoho consulting partner, zoho crm / CRM Services, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Most of the sales representatives are not so fond of using a CRM solution. The reason behind this is that the sales representatives enter the data manually and spend multiple hours making reports. They also claim that CRM is not so user-friendly.

The use of CRM can offer multiple features to the teams that can also be quite beneficial to the sales cycle process. The main question is how can you implement and manage the CRM system so that your sales representatives can love it and adopt it seamlessly. However, the question is how is that possible?

In this blog, we will look at the ways in which you can maximize your potential as a sales representative with the Zoho CRM.

1. Use Related Lists

Zoho CRM includes multiple modules that include important information about a customer’s journey. This information can be consolidated in Activities, Quotes, Invoices, Deals, etc. Now, most of the sales representatives go back and forth between these modules regularly while simultaneously working with the prospects.

This process can be made easier by introducing Related Lists. With the use of these lists, the sales representatives can view all the records associated with a parent record. This means that all the tasks, deals, products, events, invoices, etc. get displayed in the contact information of Zoho CRM.

This way, there will be no need to navigate to different modules for viewing the related data. What’s more, all the lists will have an option to form a new record within the module and link it with the parent record. For example, if you are viewing a record in a module and you wish to strike a deal with them then you can click on the + New Deal button in the related lists section for deals to create a record in the Deals module while automatically associating it with the record in Accounts module.

There are also many places where information about a customer can be easily found. For example, text files, mobile notes, etc. The use of Zoho CRM can provide you an option to integrate social media, emails, and notes as well. As a result, all the important information about a lead or a customer will be in one place.

2. Streamline and Clean

Make sure that you do not show the modules that are not being used. It is important to understand that Zoho CRM has many features that are focused on helping various businesses. There are times when some modules may not be useful for the sales representatives or in the sales cycle process.

When you set up Profiles and Roles for your users, you do not just define a structure for a company but you also remove all the unwanted modules while making sure that all the sales representatives have information that is needed without having to search for it. By using the Roles, you can form the hierarchy of an organization and the Profile will help you determine the level of access a user can potentially have.

If you set up a Profile then you can reduce the amount of unnecessary information seen by a sales representative. Make sure that you stick to gathering relevant information only because most of the CRM applications will have many fields for storing data. However, often many fields are left completely untouched.

Seeing empty fields can make things look like the sales representative does not have the right information but this is not always the case. You can use layouts to remove any unwanted fields and make the Zoho CRM look way more concise and complete. Also, remember that the conditional layout rules are a feature in Zoho CRM where the fields show up after the criteria are fulfilled successfully.

3. Leverage CRM Mobile App

A CRM mobile application can be used to get an edge in the process of customer acquisition. For example, let’s say a sales representative goes for a corporate business conclave to network more. Now this person may return with a bunch of leads.

Rather than manually creating all these leads, the sales representative can quickly add all of them using a mobile CRM app. This is an excellent step in the sales pipeline that can help in adding important information to the CRM app.

Zoho has many applications of its own that can help you instantly record the attendee’s information in the CRM database. This can save the time of your sales representatives and they can also follow up right from the CRM mobile application only. Using the application also helps in setting up a workflow for sending an automated email to the lead.

4. Social Media Integration

A sales representative has the potential to make a stronger pitch to a prospect and advance a lead to the next stage in case they have clarity about the personality and inclinations of the potential customer. To get this information, social media is one of the best ways in the present time.

The sales representatives can pursue the profiles of all the leads and also get a sense of the requirements of these leads. With the Zoho CRM social media integration, a sales representative has no problem in finding a customer’s social media profile.

There is no need to open up new tabs and search for things manually. Moreover, the responses that are received from a company’s sales representative can make customers feel that the company always takes care and addresses the requirements of the customers.

5. Automate Work

The sales representatives can also configure the workflow rules for making the Zoho CRM function in the way that is needed. A sales workflow includes acquiring new leads, sending emails, converting leads into deals, negotiating, and closing the deal.

This process can be used to reduce any mundane or repetitive work for the sales representatives. For example, in case the deal advances to the next step in the sales process, a follow-up task can be created for the deal owner stating that they must add a note in this record and summarize the main takeaways of the conversation with the sales prospect.

The workflows can be easily set up for sending an email, creating tasks, updating the fields, etc. In addition, you can also easily schedule an action to take place at a later time. For example, for creating a task, you can remind the sales representative to send a follow-up email after the field in the deal record.

6. Using Zoho CRM Template and Macros

Using the CRM is a lot about making the system work for you. You can send many emails in different time zones, update the inventory, and do much more by using the Zoho CRM template and macros.

These are some of the repetitive tasks most businesses have to endure anyway and this is where a Zoho CRM template and macros come in. You will also find that your workloads get greatly reduced. The process of creating a template can save a lot of effort that would otherwise go in manually constructing an email.

You can set up a Macro that lets you send emails at specific periods without having to send them yourself. For instance, you can set up a Macro for sending an email when the deal is closed or when an activity is completed successfully.

7. Use Zoho’s Gamification Features

The Zoho CRM’s gamification features can be helpful in bringing out the competitive spirit of your sales representatives. These features are a fun way of adding a motivating spirit to the sales pipeline and meet the sales quota.

Zoho CRM offers Gamescope for setting up challenges and also rewards your team with trophies and badges. You can choose your team to convert the most leads they can win in a single day. The sales representative who manages to convert a fixed number can win a trophy.

Other than completing the everyday sales tasks, the gamification features of Zoho CRM also have a long-term value. They can be used to calculate the bonuses for the sales representatives based on their performance in all the games they participated in last year. This also boosts their morale so that they never get tired from their work.

8. Use Zoho Feeds

If a business has to realize its complete potential then it has to be run forward by a cohesive team that can coordinate its work with a final aim to increase the revenue. This also involves the ones who are high up on the ladder too.

A serious problem that comes in most companies is a lack of constant communication between different levels or even among peers in the organization. There must be a culture of open communication in the company so that anyone from the company finds it easy to get in touch with anyone in the team. This improves coordination and ease of work as well.

There can be an increased collaboration and easy communication with the implementation of an effective policy. This can empower the collective effort made by the team members and also affect the sales process constructively. The use of Zoho Feeds is an excellent way to increase collaboration.

All the sales representatives have access to the Feeds section and any post made by a user can be visible to almost everyone in the organization. The users can post, comment, and add attachments as well. In case you do not want all the employees to see your post then you can make the post visible to the selected users only.

In addition, another effective method is to create Groups with specific users. In case you wish to make a post in the group, only the users in the group will be able to view it. These are some of the functions that can make the open communication policy in the company much more effective.

9. Customize the Homepage

The Zoho CRM Homepage has the ability to give you a comprehensive overview of the sales aspect of your work. The Zoho CRM also lets you customize your homepage effectively.

It is possible to have dashboards such as Pipeline By Stage, Events, Tasks, Calls, Leads By Source, etc. Any normal homepage will not contain these dashboards but using the Zoho CRM, you can customize the homepage as per your requirements so that the sales cycle process becomes easy.

Conclusion

Zoho CRM has been made in a way that can help to maximize the potential of a sales cycle process. It has so many features that can be used to make the process of sales extremely productive and fruitful. Implement Zoho CRM today and see it for yourself.

In case you need any further support with the implementation and use of Zoho CRM for the sales cycle process then please feel free to get in touch with us.

Maximize Your Potential as a Sales Representative With Zoho CRM Read More »

CRM Services, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationcustomer satisfaction, sales cycle process, sales pipeline, zoho consulting partner, zoho crm

Focus on Converting Leads With Advanced Filters of Zoho CRM

Abhishek Sharma / lead management life cycle, online crm system, zoho crm customization, zoho crm services, zoho partner / CRM Services, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

The Advanced filters in the online Zoho CRM system, are one of the greatest ways to understand the ways in which CRM works while discovering important insights in no time. It is a powerful search tool that allows you to extract valuable sales information which could otherwise take much longer to find out.

What’s key to understand here is that by the use of a regular filter, the search is based on field values. For example, all leads who are from “Los Angeles”. Now, this is very straightforward and simple.

However, with the advanced filters, it becomes easy to run advanced searches based on the activities associated with records such as leads that have no open activity associated with them. You can base your search on many advanced factors and get results.

To understand the advanced filters of Zoho CRM better, let’s consider an example.

Example: Let’s say that you work in a company called “Pioneer” and your CRM system has been able to get a decent number of leads over the last six months. Even though you have followed up with most of these leads, there is a possibility of a deal that is hidden somewhere amidst these leads and did not respond the first time. Now if only you can pull up this idle lead quickly and follow up again, you will be satisfied.

In another situation, let’s say that you have some leads that are waiting to be closed by the end of the month, but you suspect that the tasks associated with the deals are still pending. Only if you will be able to pull these deals in just one click, it would make sense.

In yet another situation, let’s say that you offer a live chat service to the customers from your website. Imagine that there was a way in which you could pull up the complete list of customers whose chat requests you missed in the past week.

All the three situations that are mentioned above require details that could take a long time to be drilled down using the reports. However, using the Zoho CRM customization and advanced filters, it can become easy to get this information instantly.

This is possible because other than the record details such as First Name or the Phone Number, advanced filters include a wider range of criteria for you to base the search on such as email activity, website activity, activity status, notes, scoring rules, etc. Using an intelligent combination of these factors, you can easily pull out the important records as discussed in the scenarios above.

Filter Records Using Advanced Filters

For filtering the records using advanced filters, the following steps must be taken.

Go to the module that you want
Choose the required module list view.
In the Filter (Records) By, select the desired combinations. You can also choose any number of search combinations as required.
Click on Apply Filter and the records that meet the criteria will be shown.
You can choose the records and assign suitable follow-up activities or run macros on them as well. You can also save the filter for future use.

After you have saved the filters, you will be able to see the overall number of records in every filter that will be updated in real-time. You will be able to see the number of records in every filter that will be updated in real-time. For example, you can save a filter in the Leads module called “Idle leads”.

Right when the number of records matching the filter’s criteria differs, the updated count can be displayed beside the name of the filter. This can help in quickly getting a snapshot of the volume of records under each saved filter and prioritize your actions accordingly.

Using Advanced Filters Effectively

Below are some of the common sales scenarios in which you can effectively make use of the benefits of advanced filters in the online Zoho CRM system. It must be remembered that these are just examples. There are some scenarios you can come up with depending on the combination of the search criteria.

1. Explore All Unused Leads

You can work on a new set of leads almost every week. With time, you lose track of the leads that needed a second or third follow-up.

Among the idle leads, there may be a great deal waiting for you but only if you follow up on it. The advanced filters can search records for you within a few seconds only.

2. Discover All Records For Conversions

You can also be aware of all chances of converting a lead and winning a deal with the Conversion Prediction by using Zia. Although this will make it simple for you to prioritize the leads and deal with high chances of conversion, you can also explore the ones you thought had less or no chances of conversions, but are trending now.

Using the advanced filters, it is possible to pull leads and deals that are trending recently with better chances of conversion than ever before while ensuring that there is no opportunity missed.

3. Track Sales Activities

You want to keep a track of all the sales activities as well as that of the subordinates. Using advanced filters, you can narrow the deals to which there is no activity associated with the next month but the closing date is still within the present month. You can also add the potential amount as a different criterion which can further narrow down the search.

To go a step ahead in this Zoho customization, you can also mention the potential amount. If you get a list of records for deals that are worth more than a certain amount to be closed this month but for which that are overdue activities then you must pay attention. Other than the overdue tasks, you can also filter the information about deals.

You can filter the information by deals closing this month but no activity, notes, and emails associated with them, and deals that have been lost which may want to reopen, and a follow-up. The advanced filters make it easy for sales managers to hunt down cases and act on them.

4. Filter Contacts Based on Deal Stages

Let’s imagine that you are looking to send emails and other relevant documents to those contacts that are in the value proposition stage. You can manually search for each contact that is in the stage that is consuming time.

Using the advanced filters in the Contacts module, you can choose the contacts easily. The contacts that match the criteria will be displayed in this way. You can also choose all these contacts and send a mass email, take bulk action as needed, and update records.

Tracking Records Based on Campaign Responses

Anytime you filter records based on the responses to the recent campaigns, you will be able to approach the potential customers in a much better way with a refined message based on their response.

Let’s say that all the recipients that were targeted in the recent campaign have opened the email and clicked on links in the email. You can also be sure that they are in need of your offering and are also interested in understanding what you want to offer. With the final push, you will be able to effectively convince them and help in making a good decision.

All contacts who have either just opened your email or clicked on the link that are listed are your prime prospects to be convinced and converted into your business. You can use the below-mentioned filters:

1. Time Tracking Filters

The advanced filters Zoho customization includes a set of time tracking filters whose purpose is to easily let you filter the records that have been worked on or not worked on in the specified time period.

For instance, you can effectively filter the leads that have been untouched for the last 5 months. For doing this, you can use the time tracking filter called “Untouched Records” so that you can get a picture.

2. Act on Insights Discovered

The advanced filters do not just enable you to discover the quick insights but also follow up on the results obtained. For example, you have discovered the potential leads that go unnoticed that need your attention but now what?

When you filter the records, advanced filters let you act on them instantly. Quick actions can be taken on records such as Macros, Mass Update, Assign Owner, and so on. From this page, you can follow the records instantly.

Filter Records With Visitor Tracking Information

Having a website pays off only when you are able to track who is visiting that website and make your insights about how people use the website when they visit, and what actions they take. This is key information that helps in serving the visitors better and convert the visits to the customers.

The use of advanced filters in CRM helps in making inferences about leads and contacts who visit the website with the help of a visitor tracking parameter. You can filter the contacts and leads based on fields such as the time spent on the site, chats missed, browser used to track the site, and so on.

Some of the situations in which visitor tracking information could help in making important inferences include:

1. Following Up With Contacts

If you have a list of contacts who are at a stage of conversion and out of these contacts, you are closing deals this month then you can do a more detailed search by choosing a potential amount for these deals.

Some of the contacts may have messaged you on chat as well but you might as well have missed these messages. With the advanced filters, you can filter out these contacts easily.

2. Tracking Leads Based on Time

It is possible to track the leads based on the average time spent on the website. This is also an effective way of converting leads to deals.

When the leads spend time on the website, you can know that they are interested in getting converted. You can take the right steps needed to trace them.

3. Tracking Leads Based on Email Address

You have filtered the contacts based on the stages in the pipeline of sales. The sales managers can track the progress that their sales representatives have made by entering the email address of the sales representatives who have attended to specific leads.

If you want to search for leads associated with a name called Alan Grey then you have to enter the email address of the sales representative who was dealing with Alan Grey.

4. Browser Compatibility

When the leads are filtered based on which browser your leads have used, it becomes easy to enhance the design of that website for that browser.

For instance, you are looking for leads who have used Google Chrome to access the website. In case a large number of leads are found through the filter, you can enhance the browser compatibility.

Conclusion

The sales process can become remarkably smooth when you focus on converting leads with the advanced filters of the Zoho CRM. These filters are made to make the job of sales professionals much easier and effective.

In case you need any further support to understand the use of these advanced filters then get in touch with our experts at Encaptechno for assistance.

Focus on Converting Leads With Advanced Filters of Zoho CRM Read More »

CRM Services, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationlead management life cycle, online crm system, zoho crm customization, zoho crm services, zoho partner

What is Zoho DataPrep? | Self Service Data Preparation

Abhishek Sharma / ai powered data preparation, data cleansing software, what is data warehousing, zoho partner / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

The productivity provider SaaS provided Zoho entered the business intelligence platform field in July 2021. Zoho announced an AI-powered data preparation, business intelligence, and self-service platform application that combined the new Zoho DataPrep application with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics.

This was to win over business users with a combination of features that focused on ease of use, supporting the data preparation, and the ability to blend internal data with the outside data sources. Zoho DataPrep application is self-service data preparation and management tool that uses machine learning to help business users integrate, transform, enrich, transform, and catalog data for creating and managing data pipelines.

Zoho has also added an integrated enterprise portal builder called Zoho Sites and presentation software called Zoho Show to the platform. This is for helping business users put their ideas into context. Basically, Zoho aspires to reduce any friction by empowering business users to drive decisions with data and without learning any new tools.

In this blog, we will learn about Zoho DataPrep in complete detail. So let’s begin.

What is Zoho DataPrep?

Zoho DataPrep is data cleaning software that enables organizations to prepare high-quality data by automatically looking for errors, discovering data patterns, cleaning, transforming, and enriching data. This is without any need for coding. It also helps in setting up data pipelines for syncing prepared data to Zoho Analytics or to any data warehouses.

Using Zoho DataPrep you can connect, cleanse, transform, enrich, schedule, and export data with ease. In addition, you can also catalog and manage how the prepared data is consumed with fine-grained controls. It is also possible to import data into Zoho DataPrep from over 50+ data sources such as files, FTP, feeds, cloud storage, databases, and data warehouses while making it simple to bring the data together.

The functions of Zoho DataPrep are:

1. Cleansing and Improving Data Quality

Zoho DataPrep helps in automatically profiling data for viewing distribution, outliers, statistics, and data quality. You can clean and improve data quality by removing duplicates, fixing invalid data, and missing values.

2. Transforming Data

Using the AI-powered data preparations and intelligent suggestions, one can apply over 250 transforms and prepare the data. You can learn to take advantage of machine learning to enrich data with sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, language detection, and much more.

3. Data Lineage

You can track every change applied to the data using ruleset. It is also possible to modify, disable, and remove any changes at any point in time. You can reuse rulesets for applying the same set of changes in other datasets while removing automated data preparation.

4. Data Catalog

The Zoho DataPrep can be used to catalog and manage datasets by categories, data quality, custom tags, data readiness, and much more. You can perform a system-wide metadata search powered by Zia for improving discoverability.

5. End to end data Pipelines

The organizations continue to gather data each day and cleaning it is never a one-time task. It includes setting up pipelines by automating imports, preparing data using rule sets, and exporting to destinations. This status can be monitored and one can also get notified in case there are any changes to improve the data quality.

Basically, you should use Zoho DataPrep because it helps in doing the below-mentioned things.

Empowers business users with a self-service data preparation
Offers high-quality data for any business need
Helps in identifying the next step with augmented data preparation
Brings unstructured data into the fold
Helps in being expansive scale with the cloud
It is an extensible data preparation platform with powerful APIs.

Zoho DataPrep is multipurpose software by design. It can fit in wherever it is needed. It helps in:

1. Advanced Analytics

The high data quality helps the data analyst to get deeper insights from business intelligence and analytics tools. The use of Zoho DataPrep reduces the time and effort needed to prepare the data.

Basically, data analytics enables organizations to interpret and analyze the data and make data-driven decisions. The data analysts can clean and prepare inconsistent and invalid data before coming on to analysis and insights.

The data analysts and scientists spend around 80% time preparing data and the use of Zoho DataPrep helps in speeding up the process and improving the data preparation experience.

2. Data Warehousing

You can run automated data pipelines from various sources to Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure SQL, and other popular cloud data warehouses.

It is also possible to build resilient and end-to-end data pipelines while connecting multiple siloed data sources to the data warehouse of an organization. This can be done with easy to maintain and low-code platform.

3. Machine Learning

The overall efficiency of the machine learning model is dependent on the quality of the data used for training it. The use of Zoho DataPrep helps the data scientists with data cleaning at a full scale without any need for coding.

Zoho DataPrep can be used to perform data collection, cleaning and pre-processing, feature engineering, and data labeling with the Zoho DataPrep.

4. Business Processes/Migration

You can migrate data between business apps using the DataPrep. It can be used for cleaning and enriching the data in business applications such as CRM, help desk, and survey tools for weeding out any duplicates and validating records.

Hence, the Zoho DataPrep can be used for enhancing the data quality, improving data flows, inefficiencies, and removing any redundancies across an organization.

Now that we have had a look at Zoho DataPrep in complete detail, let us now have a look at the features of Zoho DataPrep in complete detail. This will help in understanding what Zoho DataPrep can do for us.

1. Connecting to Multiple Sources

You can eliminate data silos in an organization, connect to it and a variety of other sources including feeds, files, cloud storage, warehouses, databases, and business applications.

Import Files: It is possible to import files from anywhere in a wide range of formats including CSV, XLS, TSV, TXT, XML, XLSX, HTML, JSON from local storage, URLs, FTP servers, or from cloud drives such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box
Warehouses and Databases: It is also possible to import data from a wide range of warehouses and databases.
Tight Integration: Zoho DataPrep allows in connecting and cleansing data directly from Zoho Analytics using the built-in connectors.

2. Improving Data Quality

With Zoho DataPrep, you don’t ever have to miss out on important data with an intelligent solution.

Data Quality: Zoho DataPrep helps in viewing valid, invalid, and missing data from each column using the data quality bar. You can filter and cleanse data using intelligent suggestions while improving the data quality and removing duplicate and invalid data.
Smart Modelling: You can automatically find data types, create custom data types to find and fix invalid data, and get suggestions for joining the datasets.
Data Distribution: Zoho DataPrep helps in understanding your data better with the help of multiple widgets like value distribution histogram, outliers, text patterns, value statistics, and more.

3. Transform and Enrich Data

Using the interactive data preparation studio, the data can be transformed without any code.

Smart Selection: You can highlight the required part from the data and DataPrep helps in looking for selection patterns to offer accurate suggestions for extracting, counting, replacing, and splitting data.
Transforming: It is possible to format and change the data using more than 250 transformations without the need for any coding. The data can be reshaped using pivot, unpivot, and summary transforms.
Blend Data: The data can be blended from a wide range of sources using the join and append transforms.
AI-Powered Enrichment: The data can be enriched with AI-powered transforms such as keyword extraction, language detection, sentiment analysis, and much more.

4. Automating Workflows

The automation of mundane tasks is one of the quickest ways to reduce time in preparing data. With the use of Zoho DataPrep, it is possible to schedule the data preparation workflows and receive alerts as well.

End-to-end Data Pipelines: You can set up end-to-end data pipelines by connecting data from multiple sources, blending and cleaning data, and syncing to various destinations.

Monitoring Data Quality: The use of Zoho DataPrep helps in continuous monitoring of data quality while sending alerts anytime the quality drops.
Tracking and Reusing: The rulesets can be used to track any changes made to the data and reusing them across datasets.

5. Catalog Data

The built-in management capabilities help in classifying, cataloging, and governing data using the Zoho DataPrep.

Discover Data Easily: The data can be discovered easily using a system-wide search capability powered by Zia.
Mark as Ready: When the data is all prepared and set, it can be marked as ready for letting your team know that the data is available for sharing and exporting.
Data About Data: More metadata can be added to the datasets and workspaces using the tags and improving searchability and filtering. All the important details about the datasets and workspaces can be found in a single overview pane.

6. Safe Data Sharing

You can collaborate seamlessly with the teams and offer fine-grained permissions for ensuring that the users access the data intended for them.

Setting Access Permissions: You can set access permissions for sharing data, share workspaces with users and groups in an organization, and set role-based access controls to share data securely.
Data Audit: You can get a detailed report of changes made to your data. The datasets when shared and exported can be tracked and exported. In addition, you can also verify if the security measures are applied to protect personal data before sharing or exporting the datasets.

7. Security and Compliance

The Zoho DataPrep enables you to find personal data in your dataset, ensure privacy by masking or tokenizing sensitive data, and also enables to adhere to privacy policy and data protection regulations such as GDPR.

All the data associated with the Zoho DataPrep is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Zoho DataPrep In Sum

An important part of any business analytics tool starts with preparing the data for insights. Zoho’s DataPrep is an AI powered data preparation platform that takes out a lot of manual work for correcting formatting, updating fields, and determining missing values. This enables the clients to set up once and save time without being dependent on difficult processes and inaccurate spreadsheets.

The Zoho DataPrep platform is on its way to becoming AI-driven data analytics and self-service tool through data preparation and augmented analytics. It is a BI platform that will allow its customers to clean, unify, and analyze cross-departmental data and obtain an encyclopedic view of the company.

This is a solution that combines Zoho DataPrep which automates and simplifies challenges of importing data sources along with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics 5.0. The users launch queries for a deeper understanding of data by using the graphical tools or using Ask Zia which is Zoho’s conversational AI platform. The end goal is to make things simple for end-users so that they can construct and share analytics featuring pre-built visual dashboards for data integration and flexible deployment.

Conclusion

Zoho DataPrep is advanced self-service data preparation and pipeline service that helps organizations prepare and manage huge volumes of data. In case you wish to implement Zoho DataPrep then get in touch with a qualified and certified Zoho partner who can guide you at each step.

At Encaptechno, we have a team of Zoho consultants who have helped many companies reach their maximum potential with the use of Zoho. Get in touch with us to advance your business and become a leader in your industry.

What is Zoho DataPrep? | Self Service Data Preparation Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationai powered data preparation, data cleansing software, what is data warehousing, zoho partner

6 Reasons to Integrate QuickBooks with Zoho

Abhishek Sharma / accounting software, quickbooks integration with zoho, zoho crm integration, zoho partner / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Managing finances is one of the most important and complicated functionalities of a business. It is only with superior financial health that a business can grow. For many companies, hiring a finance specialist or an accountant can be a costly affair, but the good thing is that small business owners have an alternative available to them. They can either become well versed in managing their own finances or they can purchase affordable accounting software such as QuickBooks.

Quickbooks is popular as affordable accounting software that enables businesses to manage different aspects of accounting and finance. The integration of QuickBooks with Zoho CRM increases the functionality of account management much more.

As it is well known, Zoho CRM is a customer relationship management solution that helps business owners manage and delegate business activities such as customer support, team management, lead management, social media management, etc. It collects and manages all the information related to a customer from the stage of procurement of leads to the time when they are converted into customers.

Multiple functionalities are involved when a lead decides to purchase a product or a service. The Zoho CRM integration with QuickBooks helps the business owners manage and understand the financial aspects much more easily. The integration of Zoho CRM with QuickBooks helps in doing the following things:

Easing the data transfer between Zoho CRM and QuickBooks.
Exporting records and synchronizing vendor or customer details.
Keeping important data as a common record or fields between the two solutions.

QuickBooks helps the sales team generate and track invoices, track expenses and bills, generate detailed financial statements of your business to keep track of the income, profit, and expense, keep track of employee work hours and offers salary accordingly, and much more.

The thing is that Zoho CRM already has features for tracking inventory and QuickBooks makes it extremely simple to track the quantity and cost of inventory. QuickBooks helps its employees and businesses to manage taxes, scan receipts, and send them back to the customers through Zoho CRM.

After seeing an overview of why one should integrate QuickBooks with Zoho, let’s look at the reasons in detail.

1. Measuring Productivity

Time tracking can go a long way in measuring productivity of employees. With Timesheets, one can get a detailed understanding of the Project costs and budgets. When Timesheet gets integrated with QuickBooks, many things can be done.

The time logs from approved timesheets can be pushed as Time Activity or as Time Charge and the employees can be paid out on the basis of the approved timelogs using this integration. The time logs that are created for clients get pushed as Time Charge in the local currency.

Please note that the currency defined when the client was created on Zoho People should be the same as the local currency in QuickBooks because if this is not the case, the time logs can be pushed as Time Activity. The time logs created without being associated with any clients will be pushed as Time Activity for which the payment can be carried out in QuickBooks.

Basically, the bills that have been generated in the Zoho account can be pushed as Invoice into QuickBooks. The currency used in the bill can be the currency of the organization as created in QuickBooks. However, in case you would like to push the bill in some other currency then you can enable an option called Multicurrency in QuickBooks.

2. Inventory Management

The Zoho inventory is integrated with QuickBooks online for making the accounting and inventory management proceed seamlessly. This seamless integration can help the QuickBooks users easily access all of their sales and purchases in the Zoho inventory.

With this Zoho CRM integration, you can import your accounts into the Zoho Inventory from QuickBooks Online. In addition, you can also export your invoices, credit notes and bills along with their payments from Zoho Inventory to QuickBooks Online. The only thing is that you must have an active account with QuickBooks online.

Remember that you cannot connect multiple QuickBooks organizations to your Zoho Inventory organization and vice versa. The base currency of the organizations should be the same. In case you have enabled multi currency in Zoho Inventory then you have to enable the same in QuickBooks as well.

3. Transfer Important Data

The business owners are completely aware of the hassle that bookkeeping can bring with it. With the integration of Zoho CRM and QuickBooks, it is possible to create and update all the sales orders, customers and product list, invoices, etc. This integration can help in syncing data with the Zoho CRM so that you can gain complete visibility of customer updates with Zoho.

Zoho CRM also enables all aspects of the business to work in complete sync. You can depend on this accounting software for managing incoming and outgoing payments. For example, in case you are in a conversation with a client and they are enquiring about the latest sales that was processed then instead of going through the task of flipping through QuickBooks, you can stay within your Zoho account and have all the questions answered.

4. Importing Data

Zoho Books is an ideal accounting package for many businesses that seek an affordable and a user friendly alternative to other cloud accounting solutions. It offers a wide range of features that make getting paid easier than ever.

The QuickBooks integration with Zoho CRM can help you in using the best of both Zoho Books and QuickBooks. Zoho Books features an intuitive client portal that helps in accepting bulk payments from customers, expediting the estimate approval process and accepting valuable customer feedback.

In fact, Zoho Books also allows you to send and confirm sales orders before they get sent out along with an automatic reminder that can be set for invoices and bills so that it can be ensured that the client pays at the right time and you never fall behind when it comes to timely payments. Zoho Books can also offer seamless scalability for growing businesses integrating with Zoho’s line of business apps, payment gateways, POS appa, G Suite, and more.

5. Syncing Contacts

QuickBooks is an accounting application for small businesses and one man bands. It is a full scope of app integrations and features including billing, accounting, invoicing, and estimates which helps in keeping the books balanced and staying organized without ever losing valuable time.

On the other hand, the use of Zoho CRM empowers businesses of all shapes and sizes to automate many business workflows, get extensive reporting and analytics, and engage with customers through various channels such as social media, email, phone, and live chat. Zoho CRM is an important part of Zoho’s suite of applications and it integrates natively with other Zoho products.

You can create customized book sync for QuickBooks in less than five minutes. All you have to do is add collections, actions, and map the billing fields. You can either have all of your customers and suppliers sync two ways with QuickBooks or do it based on the custom attributes in your CRM or marketing platform. On the other hand, you can also go for a simple one to one integration or a workflow that spans across multiple apps within minutes without any technical help.

6. Saving Time and Energy

QuickBooks is one of the best solutions designed for small and medium sizes businesses. It is easy to set up and use because it replaces the need for spreadsheets. Zoho CRM QuickBooks helps in keeping track of all the money coming in and out of the business.

It is structured in a way that it makes the accounting process implemented automatically within the software. This further helps in saving time and energy for the financial team and helps the team to concentrate on other important tasks.

In essence, any business that opts for QuickBooks integration with Zoho CRM can benefit from the time saved by providing payment and invoice information for salespeople while reducing any need for double accounting entries. This is the best option that revolves around important factors of affordability, direct integration, user friendliness, and customer support. All these factors can strengthen the sales cycle and enhance customer experience.

Conclusion

The benefits of Zoho CRM with QuickBooks online cannot be stressed enough. The syncing of these two programs can help a company manage each of their accounting functions. This integration is also extremely user friendly and can help the users with a virtual orientation process.

With this integration, the team also does not need much time for making adjustments because most of the features can be easily activated with just a click of a button. All the updates are designed to streamline the relationship between a client and a customer.

In case you need any more support to make the QuickBook integration with Zoho possible then Encaptechno is at your service. Get in touch with us to get the process of integration going.

6 Reasons to Integrate QuickBooks with Zoho Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationaccounting software, quickbooks integration with zoho, zoho crm integration, zoho partner

How to Manage Your Financial Operations With Zoho Finance Plus?

Abhishek Sharma / finance platform for business, integrated financial suite, what is zoho finance plus, zoho finance plus suite, zoho partner / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

As Zoho claims time and again, it is undoubtedly “The Operating System for Business.” This is something that Zoho has continued to prove this time and again. With the implementation of Zoho, the companies have been able to evolve their interactions with their customers significantly. Out of the many software applications and suites of Zoho, there is yet another powerful suite called Zoho Finance Plus Suite.

Managing the back-office operations is never so easy. There are so many quotes to be sent, invoices that need follow-up, orders that have to be processed, and taxes that must be filed at the right time. In fact, back-office operations and accounting are some of the most serious and not so easy parts of business management.

Many entrepreneurs struggle in getting these things right often, but the integrated financial suite can help a lot. Finance applications come into the picture to help business owners ensure that their business runs efficiently and has also freed them from the various tasks that might otherwise get in the way.

What is Zoho Finance Plus?

Zoho Finance Plus offers an end-to-end integrated platform for back-office operations. Other than accounting, invoicing, and expense management that is generally needed by a business, the suite also helps businesses in managing subscription-driven and recurring revenue streams. It has the ability to equip organizations to fulfill multi-channel online sales orders with an effective inventory model.

In essence, Zoho Finance Plus is a finance platform for business that combines flexible, scalable, and secure applications that can serve the needs of a growing business.

Zoho Finance Plus – An Integrated Suite of Apps

You can think of Zoho Finance Plus to be a powerful suite that breaks down department silos, streamline other operations, offers distinct visibility into the order and fulfillment process, and also ensures almost no tax period.

As opposed to other back-office tools, Zoho Finance apps are tightly integrated with each other and built from the same platform. This basically means that you will have much less or almost nil data entry problems with increased accuracy and a quick decision-making process. Zoho Finance Plus is an integrated platform that does the following things:

Multiple Applications in Single Platform: Almost all of the Zoho Finance apps are built from the ground up so that they can work together seamlessly. The information gets entered in one application and eventually gets reflected in the rest which basically means that your data stays up to date at all times.
Enhanced Quote-to-Cash Process: When the salespeople generate quotes and orders in one application, they are instantly available in others for suitable teams so that the order is fulfilled promptly, the customer invoice is prepared quickly, and payments get collected efficiently.
Overcoming Traditional Accounting: The world that we live in is moving towards a subscription model quickly. In this scenario, the Zoho Finance Suite equips you with a solid recurring billing solution that eventually helps in bridging the gap with traditional accounting.
Quick Employee Reimbursements: Zoho Expense automates the reimbursements approval flow while making it simple for your employees to claim reimbursements. All of their expenses fall into the right accounts in an instant.
GST Compliant Solutions: The various finance apps that come in Zoho Finance Suite are optimized to handle the single taxation structure of GST that makes the tax filing process simple and convenient.
Easy Administration: In just a single administrative console, it gets very easy to manage multiple uses all across different departments. You can add and offer role-based access to the users to different applications from a centralized panel.

Apps Included in Zoho Finance Plus

Zoho Finance Plus is a GST-compliant unified platform that is extremely useful for all of your back-office needs. Right from invoicing to order management and even accounting, Zoho Finance Plus is an integrated finance suite that has all the bases covered when it comes to back-office operations. It has all the features that are needed to make sure that your business becomes and stays GST compliant.

Since Zoho Finance Plus has everything you need to manage operations and finances, it has the following apps:

1. Zoho Invoice

Being free GST invoicing software for small businesses, Zoho Invoice can be effectively used in streamlining a business process. It is custom-made for Indian businesses and is absolutely free. Some of the benefits of Zoho Invoice are:

Professional Invoices: The software application has many easy templates that are helpful in crafting professional invoices. You can choose a template that suits your brand in the best possible way, serves individual customers, or even the occasion.

The professional invoices help in getting paid on time.
You can handle customer returns and manage refunds effectively using credit notes.
You can create delivery challans to accompany your goods while they are in transit.
Make sure that your customers are on board with your price quotes before you begin billing them.
Send retainer invoices to your clients and collect payments in advance.

Getting Paid On Time: Other than crafting accurate invoices, enabling easy payments, and tracking or following up on the transactions, you can also contribute to quick payment collection. Make sure that you get paid on time, every time with the help of Zoho Invoice.

You can track time and also bill your customers effortlessly for the hours that you spend working on their projects.
You can also track reimbursable expenses and bill your customers right away.
Zoho Invoice enables you to track all your transactions and business performance in one place only.
You can provide a self-service portal to all your customers where they can view their invoices and also make payments easily.
You can track the invoice status, follow up on the late payments, and send payment reminders at the right time.
Enable your customers to pay round the clock through UPI, credit/debit cards, cash, bank transfers, or checks.

2. Zoho Books

Zoho Books is efficient online accounting software that helps in efficiently managing your finances, automating the business workflow, keeping your business GST compliant, and helping you work collectively all across departments.

End-to-end Accounting: From negotiating the deals to raising sales orders and invoicing, Zoho Books is efficient in handling mundane accounting tasks so that you can focus on your business.
GST Compliant: You can create GST invoices, know your tax liability, file your tax returns directly, and ensure that your business stays compliant with GST.
Integrated Platform: As your business keeps growing, you can add more of almost 40 plus apps by Zoho while managing and running each aspect of your business from wherever you are.

3. Zoho Inventory

Zoho Inventory is inventory management software designed for Indian businesses. You can manage orders, track inventory, handle GST billing, and oversee warehouses with this application. It is a perfect inventory management software to run all inventory operations.

Order Management: You can handle your sales, purchase activities, payments, invoices, and bills with order management. Zoho Inventory helps you in managing packages so that your shipments can be delivered on time.
Warehouse Management: This enables you to control your stocks in different warehouses or godowns centrally from Zoho Inventory. You can track item movements, transfer items within the warehouse, and generate specific reports.
Barcode Scanning: Zoho Inventory is easily compatible with different kinds of barcode scanners which makes it very easy to set up a barcode system and add SKUs, serial and batch numbers, and even items to sale and purchase orders.
Integrations: You can sell your products anywhere you want with ease while integrating your Zoho CRM and Zoho Books. In addition, you can also receive payments online with PayPal and Razorpay. There are many integration options that can support your business.
Inventory Tracking: This enables you to keep a track of spare parts, saleable items and even set expiry dates with relevant serial and batch tracking features.
Reports: You can know your inventory aging, sales details, inventory valuation, and vendor payments from a wide range of Reports that can be generated, downloaded, and shared easily.

4. Zoho Subscriptions

Zoho Subscription is a cloud-based recurring billing and subscription solution that is designed to handle each aspect of a subscription-based business. It is an online subscription billing software that is innovative and helps in addressing payment failures and chasing overdue from the customers.

Subscription Billing: Regardless of whether you are offering weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription-based advice, all of these things can easily be set up for auto-billing of your customers. Some of the important features that can be added for the initial setup include the free trials, frequency of billing cycles, tax, price, expiration after some amount of billing cycles, and many more.

Processing Payments: One should always know that more is better and this goes for allowing a customer to have different ways to pay for a subscription. With the use of online subscription billing software such as Zoho Subscriptions’, it is easy to collect payments. In fact, it can be done online and offline.
Impactful APIs: With the help of Zoho Subscription API – the root of automation, it becomes possible to create workflow rules that help in automating actions that particularly cater to the business needs. This majorly includes automated email alerts, custom functions, and buttons, and tracking the subscription changes with the help of Webhooks.
Manage Multiple Subscriptions: Zoho Subscriptions helps in adding and managing different pricing plans to the products and services. This further enables you to reach out to a diverse range of potential customers. In fact, you can also get a peek into all the pricing details from a screen while allowing more people to test your products and services on a trial period.
Customized Subscription Experience: By using the Zoho Subscriptions Management, you can choose the invoice templates that you want and make them reflect your brand simultaneously. By adding a company logo and including your terms and conditions, you can customize each element of your invoice.

5. Zoho Expense

You can streamline your travel and expense management from end to end with the help of Zoho Expense. It brings the following things to the table:

Comprehensive Travel and Expense Management: You can manage all stages of your business trips, before, during, and after. You can also make bookings for travel and accommodations, set up pre-travel approvals, enable employees to report expenses on the go, simplify approvals, and reimburse on time.
Complete Spend Control: This helps in ensuring complete policy compliance by setting up different policies for branches, cost centers, and departments. You can also control business expenditures with streamlined budgets while ensuring suitable approvals before purchases with custom approval flow.
Automation and Collaboration: You do not have to spend time manually executing reporting tasks. With Zoho Expense, there is comprehensive automation that enables you and your employees to not intervene in the expense reporting process. From receipt scanning to approval, you can automate everything while also saving time.

6. Zoho Checkout

With the use of Zoho Checkout, you can collect payments online very easily. It is designed to build a custom and a branded payment page within a matter of few minutes so that you can begin accepting payments right away.

Create: you can build a secure payment page without writing even a single line of code. Zoho handles the coding and hosting part to make things simple for you.

Customize: With Zoho checkout, you can make your payment page your own. You can also fine-tune the look and feel of the page so that your customers can get a seamless brand experience.
Collect: Whether it is a one-time or a recurring transaction, you can take the hassle out of collecting payments.

Conclusion

Zoho Finance Plus is an integrated suite of financial applications that make your business thrive. It helps in managing vital components such as accounting, invoicing, subscription management, expense reporting, order and warehouse management, etc.

Encaptechno is a Zoho Partner that can allow you to manage your business efficiently and run real-time analytics at each possible stage. You can now streamline your financial operations with the implementation of Zoho Finance Plus. Reach out to get everything you need with full-fledged IT support.

How to Manage Your Financial Operations With Zoho Finance Plus? Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationfinance platform for business, integrated financial suite, what is zoho finance plus, zoho finance plus suite, zoho partner

All You Need to Know About Zoho Creator 6.0

Abhishek Sharma / application development, customised app development, zoho creator consultant, zoho updates / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Zoho has introduced the Zoho Creator 6.0 as a unified platform that is capable of solving all the digital needs of creators. It has been made to help businesses accelerate their digital transformation and modernization efforts.

Packed with a strong and reliable arsenal of must-have low-code tools that a business might need to build agile solutions, Zoho Creator 6.0 enhances speed and innovation more easily than ever. Not just this, the Zoho updates enable the businesses to empower everyone in their workforce to collaborate and build software to help explore new business avenues, boost employee productivity, and transform the customer experience.

Customization Tools Offered By Zoho Creator 6.0

1. Multi-developer Environment

Zoho Creator offers a multi-developer environment that allows the developers to collaboratively work on projects. There are different environments for development and testing that help in improving the time to market as various teams work in parallel.

2. Serverless Cloud Function

The serverless functions of Zoho Creator allow you to execute logical blocks of code without implementing complicated server infrastructure. Along with the use of Deluge, Zoho Creator also supports Java and Node.js which increases the scope of application development for many people.

3. Artificial Intelligence

You can use artificial intelligence to build intelligent business applications with the use of Zoho Creator. The AI-driven smart import allows you to import data from anywhere, determine data relationships, and create data models on the behalf of users. The AI tasks such as predictive and sentiment analysis and keyword extraction are built-in and ready to be used on the basis of business requirements.

4. Unified Data Service

The unified data service in Zoho Creator helps in automating the API contract evaluation and authentication while also enabling business users to connect with almost any service in the world and making sure that there is a safe data transfer.

5. APIs

The APIs of Zoho Creator help in connecting with other Zoho Creator and third-party applications through the OAuth authentication. This helps in accessing data, simplifying difficult tasks, and extending the application functionality.

6. SDKs

The mobile software development kit in Zoho Creator can be used for customizing the user interface, adding unique capabilities, and improving the back-end logic of your applications. Zoho Creator offers SDK for both iOS and Android.

Low-code Application Development

The Zoho Creator 6.0 combines the robust power of application development, business intelligence and analytics, process automation, and smart integrations into one platform. It enables businesses to deliver end-to-end business solutions in an efficient manner. Moreover, it also provides a simplified development experience by extending low code capabilities to all stages of software development.

The features that C6 comes with are mentioned below.

1. Multi-Device App Creator

In the C6 version, Zoho offers an opportunity for businesses to empower everyone in an organization by building modern and data-rich applications whilst changing the manual and traditional processes. Zoho Creator comes with an intuitive visual builder and ready-made code blocks that enhance the speed of development and also help in bringing the application to life easily. The multi-device app creator enables application development in just five steps:

Quick Start: Zoho supports one-click migration from Excel, Access, Filemaker, Caspio, and more. It comes with advanced capabilities that directly pick relationships and formulae from the source.
Data Management: You can collect and manage built-in digital forms by seamlessly collecting input from users in an organized way and performing advanced data operations. The free app builder allows over 250 API calls/day and helps you put vital information from other apps too.
Intuitive Builder: The customized app development of Zoho Creator 6.0 enables drag and drop app building. You can model the application’s architecture and the logical structure of the database, create great applications, and also configure advanced workflows by just dragging and dropping code blocks in the UIs.
Automation: You can factor in the scenarios and get notified by adding conditional logic, exceptions, and business rule workflows with a simple drag and drop code block. You can also configure real-time alerts on the predefined conditions while getting up to 50 email notifications per day with the free plan.
Analytics: Zoho Creator 6.0 lets you manage performance and usage. With the prebuilt dashboarding and reporting capabilities, you can create and embed advanced visualizations in the application without integrating it with a third-party reporting application for the analytics needs.

2. Integrations Creator

The Zoho updates in C6 promises the user to gain access to around 600+ applications and services that are ready to connect and bring all the business apps together. You create contextual workflows, get emails, reports, records, and more to move across the applications automatically.

The integrations creator lets you do the following:

Bridge Applications: By using the Zoho Creator 6.0, you can bridge all your business applications in just one click. Integrations just as applications and functions in Zoho Creator follow the concept of reusability. Once you set it up properly, it is at your disposal all through the journey.
Automation: With the integration creator, you can automate the workflow with no information gaps while connecting in seconds. It allows you to integrate your business with every other application from the gallery, automate workflow and facilitate unhindered information flow.
Customization: The use of integrations creator enables you to customize without any limits. Right from off-the-shelf templates to the advanced logic using Deluge, you can deal with any business connectivity hurdles with seamlessness.
Collaboration: You can collaborate with your team, add team members to plan, strategize, and even execute the business workflows and operations.
Insights: You can collect insights and future proof your business with interactive dashboards and a centralized log. In addition, you can also analyze the business performance in real-time using metrics that help in evaluating and revamping the current processes.

3. Business Process Creator

The drag and drop blueprint builder in Zoho Creator makes it easy for anyone in an organization to map the processes and define different stages. You can take the support of a Zoho Creator consultant to understand how one should decide who is in charge of what, set conditions, and automate actions.

Zoho has added the business process creator feature to let the users achieve end-to-end process excellence with visual blueprints. The company understands that the processes form the foundation of some of the most successful businesses.

However, it can be difficult to stay on top of all the business processes and ensure that everything is working just as needed. This is where blueprints come in to help the users visualize and design all processes, and run them efficiently with great visibility. The blueprints help in the following ways:

Visually Mapping of Processes: You can create detailed and robust blueprints with the drag and drop blueprint builder and make the process simple for everyone to follow. At any given time, if someone comes in, you can easily guide them through their role.
Accountability: Zoho Creator 6.0 allows you to clearly define responsibilities including who should perform an action and when they should perform it to keep the right people accountable.
Gathering Information: You can prompt the employees to provide important information and access it at any time. They can attach important documents and add notes or any important data during the process.
Accelerate Approvals: You can configure multi level approvals for almost any process, set the required conditions, add approvers, and customize approval emails to enable your teams to get the important approvals while they are on the go.
Quick Communication: You can configure relevant notifications and send them as needed for keeping things moving. Let all your employees know what must be done and when it should be done without any delays.
Automation: After a stage is completed, you can set up actions for being executed immediately. The business process creator allows you to automate things such as sending email notifications, updating important data, pushing and pulling data from other applications you use, and even running custom scripts.

4. BI & Analytics Creator

This is a component of Zoho Creator that empowers the business teams to build a comprehensive business solution with meaningful insights on real-time information along with automating tasks on the go. What’s more, you can use Zia which is Zoho’s conversational AI assistant as it helps in getting an instant answer for all the questions while auto-generating visualizations and quick decision making.

With the BI & Analytics Creator, you can harness the power of business intelligence and analytics capabilities in Zoho Creator and transform huge amounts of data into actionable insights. It also helps in empowering the employees to view and understand data with easy visualizations along with making informed business decisions later. The BI & Analytics creator helps in the following ways:

Data Visualization: You can make the data analysis quick and easy with the intuitive drag and drop interface which helps in creating interactive reports and dashboards quickly. You can also add any number of charts, widgets, and tables for making the data easy to understand and point to any deviations or anomalies. You can use HTML for adding contextual information and images for enriching the dashboards.
Integration: With the Zoho updates of BI & Analytics creator, you can connect to any data source at a time. If you have a lot of disconnected data stuck in disparate systems, you can combine it under one roof and get comprehensive visibility into the business processes. You can upload the data from spreadsheets or online storage devices and even use APIs to extract data from MySQL servers or other databases.
Augmentation: You can make faster and better decisions using AI. Zia, the conversational AI assistant of Zoho, helps in getting instant answers for all the questions, auto-generate visualizations, and speeds up decision-making as well. As time goes ahead, Zia also learns data and business needs while helping you build key metrics with charts and reports.
Collaboration: Collaborative analytics enables you to take absolute control over all the data. You can use fine-grained access controls with specific options such as read-only, report authoring, export, read-write, and much more while sharing the reports and dashboards with your colleagues. You can also find which criteria are to be used for factors such as the role of a person and how they will use the data. The commenting feature can be used to begin conversations with peers on any reports or the dashboards.
Self-Service Portals: The reporting portals can be set up for customers and vendors. It is possible to create your own reporting portal or microsite, embed the reports, and also offer contextual insights to the vendors, business consultants, and customers. The portals can be personalized with company logos and other elements that match the brand identity and enhance the user experience with authentication.
Mobile BI: Mobile business intelligence gives a comprehensive view of the data even when you are on the go. You can allow your employees to access reports, share important information, and take action from their mobile phones. For easy access, they also favor the reports often and access them even when they are offline.

5. Robotic Process Automation

The robotic process automation feature in the Zoho updates of C6 allows businesses to automate even the most mundane and repetitive tasks such as moving files from one location to another without any human intervention. All you have to do is define a set of instructions and the bot will be carrying out the task at high speed.

Simple Deployment and Distribution Capabilities

1. Simple Deployment

Zoho Creator 6.0 allows the creators to launch their applications in an environment of their choice. This includes development, staging, and production with just one click deployment based on the readiness of an application. You can add suitable features and make changes without making disturbances in the actual application in the production. What’s more, there is no need to reinvent everything when it comes to mobile because all applications become automatically available on native iOS and Android apps.

2. Self-service Portals

You can create self-service portals for your customers, employees, business partners and help them find all the information in just one place. With the use of portals, the users can get context-specific access to all applications, find support, access resources, raise support requests, and access resources.

3. Easy App Distribution

You can use the built-in mobile distribution management available in Zoho Creator and distribute the apps to all the users including customers and partners. The apps can be distributed on devices that cover various operating systems. This admin-friendly interface makes it simple to configure corporate-owned devices and apps while automatically managing policies and configurations.

4. Multideployment

Irrespective of whether you choose to deploy the application on Zoho Cloud or any public cloud such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or on-premise, Zoho Creator 6.0 offers a consistent experience.

5. Centralization

You can allow your application to easily access the information needed while protecting the data with features such as role-based access controls, single sign-on, and password policies.

6. Security

Zoho Creator 6.0 also includes industry-standard security features such as data encryption, multi-factor authentication, and IP restriction for keeping the data safe in the cloud and on-premise as well.

Conclusion

Zoho Creator 6.0 comes with an update that lets you take control of the complete application life cycle from development to production. It allows holistic application development life cycle management along with helping the businesses to focus completely on the application life cycle including requirement planning, development, change and configuration management, maintenance, and governance.

You can see your application through different phases including development, staging, and production while also ensuring that you deliver quality software. The developers have the flexibility to communicate in real time, test the features specific to user roles, track suitable changes made to the codebase with version history, get notified about changes made to the app, and make sure that the app is safe before it gets rolled out.

If you wish to explore Zoho Creator 6.0 and make the most out of the benefits that it offers then get in touch with our experienced Zoho Creator consultants at Encaptechno. We will make your journey seamless, efficient, and productive.

All You Need to Know About Zoho Creator 6.0 Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationapplication development, customised app development, zoho creator consultant, zoho updates

How to Effectively Use Zoho Creator Customer Portal?

Abhishek Sharma / application development services, custom app development, customer portal, low code platform, Zoho Creator Certified Developer, zoho creator consultant / Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Zoho has become one of the most important platforms being used by businesses all across the world. It has multiple functionalities aimed at improving the business processes within organizations. One of these functionalities is the Zoho creator customer portal which is the best way for any business or an organization to permit its clients and customers to log in important details.

The Zoho users can easily use the Zoho creator portals as opposed to creating their own security authentications and mechanisms. In fact, users also have an option to log in to their dedicated portal, submit data, and access shared applications.

The process of data sharing with people through the Zoho Creator Customer Portal is a powerful feature of a low code platform like Zoho Creator. There are so many times when we want to present some of our data to our customers with a login system. Every time we do this, our customers can collaborate easily and keep everything secure.

In this blog, we will understand how to effectively use Zoho Creator Customer Portal for our benefit.

What is Zoho Creator Customer Portal?

A customer portal is one of the best ways for an organization to enable its customers to log into their dedicated internal system while accessing restricted data. Rather than building your own authentication and security mechanisms, you can use Zoho Creator portals so that your users can sign up with your portal rather than signing up with Zoho’s account.

With the customer portal, customers can log into a dedicated portal, access applications shared with them submit data, and most importantly, they can view and edit the records. Zoho Creator customer portal offers you an opportunity to present the application with a brand identity that is personal to your organization.

You can manage and configure various characteristics of the customer portal and the characteristics are as follows:

Customers: The customers are considered as the most important users of the customer portal. You can add customers independently or import the customers in bulk. Just after the customers are added, they will be sent an invitation requesting that they can register for the customer portal.
Permissions: The permissions can be issued by the admin to all users of the portal.
Email Notifications: The email notifications allow the admin of the customer portal to communicate easily with the users of the portal. It is possible to customize different types of emails that the customer portal is sending to the users.
Portal Pages: The portal pages are for displaying information to the user of the customer portal when they want to log in, sign up or even reset a password.
Custom Domain: The custom domain allows the admins to host customer portal on their own domain rather than the default Zoho Creator domain.
Portal Types: The portal types are different types of accesses that get granted to the customer portal. They can be public, private or restricted.
Title and Logo: The title and logo can be displayed when the customer portal is opened in a browser.

Enhanced Way to Communicate With Customers

In case you are a business that is looking to improve ways for interacting with the customers while also offering the user-friendliness of application then the customer portal offers many ways in which you can increase the business organization development and customer satisfaction. Other than this, you will also be improving your business measures without breaking your business bank because of the portal’s cost.

The thing to understand here is that in case you do not still have Zoho’s customer portal then you are probably missing out on many opportunities of enhancing your business with stronger customer relationships.

Use Cases For Better Understanding

In case you have a financial management firm that needs clients to complete paperwork online, an institution that offers its own online application, a shop that processes orders and sells products on the internet, then you must understand the process of developing, creating, and safeguarding sites.

You must also understand that the information should be safely stored. When the customers fill any kind of form on the internet, they want the information to be safe and simple. The onus lies upon you to keep the information of your customers safe.

Development of a site that provides all of these features may seem like a time-consuming task. Owning a business does not leave you with any time to create a portal like that. In addition, it is also possible that you may already have an application that enables your customers to submit such data. But the fact is that the technology changes quickly and ensuring that your application has the ability to reflect changing business needs is important.

The custom portal of a low code development platform such as Zoho Creator ensures that your application has all the features. It helps in implementing simple design and development features that have actually made the application development services of Zoho Creator so important. With the customer portal, you can share important data with your customers while also enabling them to submit data and edit various records. All this data gets stored in one place and is restricted from any unauthorized access.

Regardless of the kind of business you are in, the customer portal offers you an opportunity to create a portal that fits the needs of your organization. On the portal, you can easily create forms that customers can fill and save.

Vital Information is Secured

An organization that has not been able to turn to online applications for collecting and storing important data can rely on Zoho completely. The good thing is that Zoho acknowledges and understands the security concerns might be a primary issue for this thing.

Many times, customers are also hesitant to make an online change because they do not understand what will become of the data that is provided online. They also don’t know where the tax records and credit card information will end. For them, the internet may seem like an empty place, a place where all information may be lost.

This kind of fear is entirely understandable, but the fact is that in case you do not make a switch, you will be left behind competitors. The Zoho Creator customer portal makes it possible for a customer to see right where the data is being stored. The portal also uses better security measures so that the customers get restricted access to private data.

What matters is that you have a distinct ability to control the users who can access records that are stored in the portal. Based on the kind of permissions you offer, you can have control over who accesses forms and records, who can view and edit them, and which users can import data to the portal. All of these measures are put into place just so that unauthorized users can access information easily.

Customer Satisfaction in a Cost-effective Way

The customer portal makes data easy to collect and access for both you and your customers. Regardless of the number of customers you have, the customer portal will cover all of them.

It is of utmost importance to understand the difference between users and customers when it is about Zoho Creator’s Customer Portal. The users are the ones who are in the organization, the people who use the application for things like workflow management and form creation.

In contrast, the customers are external because they are the ones who will be taking the benefit of the customer portal for keeping records or purchases. Zoho does not even charge a fee per customer. When you get more customers, the business thrives automatically. The Zoho Creator Customer Portal can help you in managing the data as the number of customers keeps growing.

Setting-Up of Customer Portal

In order to set up a customer portal, take the following steps:

The first step is to click on the option of Customer Portal under the Users and Control section given on the Settings page.
In case you haven’t yet confirmed your primary email address for the Creator account, you will get a message that says, “Click Proceed to Account for confirming your email address.”
On the next page, click on the Configure Portal button.
When you do this, the portal URL page will appear. On this page, you can choose to host the customer portal on Zoho’s default domain or on a custom domain.
For hosting the customer portal on the default domain, select the Default URL option on the portal URL page. This will make the Portal Type appear again. On this page, the access type for the customer portal can be easily selected from the three options that are available including Public, Private, and Restricted.
The Portal Permission page is going to appear wherein the permission for the user can be selected from the two options called Customer and Custom.
The Custom option helps in creating a new customized permission set for the users accessing the customer portal. Right when the custom option gets selected, the Custom Permission tab appears. You can configure the name and permissions and click Add so that the portal page can be set up.
The option of Customer helps in creating a customer portal for the users. The portal will now be set up and the changes will appear on the Customer Portal page.
For hosting the customer portal on the custom domain, it is important to upgrade the account so that you can set up the customer portal on the custom domain.
You can now enter the domain URL and click on Next
When the portal page is created successfully, it is now important to verify the custom domain URL and the domain verification can be done by:

Click Verify Now below the domain URL. When you go to the Domain Verification tab, you can create a CNAME for your domain.

Create a TXT record for the domain. In case you have not created a CNAME for the site and if you have the needed permissions, you can easily upload files on your site.
Next, click Verify. After successful verification, the Domain Verification pane will get closed and you will see a pop-up with the message that says Domain verified successfully.

Conclusion

Zoho Creator is the best way to ensure that an application fits all your business needs completely. However, businesses need expert assistance while working with Zoho Creator and Zoho Creator Customer Portal. If you have that business then take comfort in the fact that you do not have to go through the process alone.

At Encaptecho, you will find a Zoho Creator Certified developer who can help you at each step in your journey of making the best use of the Zoho Creator Customer Portal. The developer will be familiar with all the best practices needed for seamlessly integrating your software’s data into the new application.

How to Effectively Use Zoho Creator Customer Portal? Read More »

Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationapplication development services, custom app development, customer portal, low code platform, Zoho Creator Certified Developer, zoho creator consultant

PRODUCTS

Zoho One

Zoho Book

Zoho Creator

Zoho CRM

Zoho Bigin

Zoho Workspace

SERVICES

Zoho Partner Services