Zoho Updates CX Platform with Zia and New Analytics Tool

Zoho today announced the latest version of its customer experience platform, Zoho CRM Plus, which is powered by the company’s Zia intelligent assistant and includes the vendor’s new analytics offering, Zoho Analytics.

The updated customer experience platform harnesses Zia’s capabilities across marketing, sales, and customer service. “Zia offers a lot of intelligence to sales and marketing…now we are bringing Zia capabilities to customer support as well,” says Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho.

Zia makes customer sentiments automatically available to service agents as they receive incoming tickets and also suggests responses based on prior knowledge. Sales teams are provided with real-time insights, including the best time to call a prospect or the probability of closing a deal when they follow a certain stream of actions. And Zia analyzes marketing and sales activities and predicts the chances of deal closures, simultaneously monitoring those chances against actual business health and predicting anomalies.

Furthermore, the Ask Zia capability allows teams to access past, present, and future insight with a voice command or text message. These voice capabilities are also now available as an SDK, enabling companies to provide the functionality to their customers.

The new Zoho Analytics also permeates marketing, sales, and customer service. “Now we have unified analytics across the board, which means that users can analyze data across sales, marketing, and customer support,” Vegesna says.

The analytics offering includes Ask Zia functionality: When a user asks Zia a question, it converts that question into an SQL query in the back end and provides an answer in the form of a visual report. It provides multiple reports as possible answers, allowing users to choose the most relevant one.

To aid with forecasting, Zoho Analytics includes predictive analytics with new forecasting capabilities, enabling users to predict future trends based on past data. Its new connectors, designed to enrich third-party integrations, include Facebook Pages, Twitter handles, and Twitter competitive analytics for social media agencies; Bing Ads and Facebook Ads analytics for marketing agencies; and Zoho People Analytics for HR leaders. Finally, Zoho Analytics’ new visualization options include geo-map charts for visualizing location data, as well as dark-themed dashboards, flexible dashboard layouts, heat maps, and dial gauges.

The company also announced updates to Zoho Desk, its customer service help desk application, and Zoho Social, its social media marketing platform. Zoho Desk now includes Zia functionality, as well as service process automation under the name of Blueprint, mobile apps for supervisors and managers under the name Radar, and a platform for contextual integrations via Zoho Marketplace.

As for Zoho Social, it now provides analytics around social media metrics such as reach, impression, and engagement, as well as improved publishing schedule control with the CustomQ feature. Additionally, Facebook Lead Form Integration with CRM field-mapping allows users to map and sync lead information from Facebook Lead Ads with records in Zoho CRM. Users can also manage their Google My Business listings and reviews from the interface.