Unifying Teams for a Stronger CX: Exploring Zoho's CRM for Everyone

Customer experience (CX) is no longer a one-department game. Yet, traditional CRM, often siloed for sales teams, can hinder collaboration and visibility across an organization. This disconnect can lead to missed details, frustrated customers, and ultimately, a weakened CX strategy.

But a new approach is emerging. Zoho's "CRM for Everyone" concept takes aim at these limitations, fostering a more collaborative environment. This interview with Prashanth "PVK" Krishnaswami, Global Head of Strategy and Thought Leadership - CX at Zoho, dives into the features and potential benefits of CRM for Everyone, exploring how it can reshape the way businesses manage customer interactions.

Zoho's "CRM for Everyone" is a unique concept. Can you elaborate on the vision behind it and how it breaks down traditional limitations on CRM access? How does this approach benefit businesses of all sizes?

Traditionally, the CRM has been built by IT teams for the sales team. This automatically restricts its scope, prevents access for non-sales functions, obstructs a clear view of the full customer journey, and impedes the evolution of CX.

Today, CX is collaborative and parallel. The sales team is the primary custodian of the customer, but there are many other teams involved in the journey. They all work with the sales team on shared responsibilities and deliverables. Since the rest are all locked out of the CRM, they are forced to use a mix of tools like email, chat, video, spreadsheets, and bespoke applications to manage all of the coordination involved in delivering great CX. This means details get missed, accountability is broken, transparency is limited, and there is plenty of friction for everyone involved in the customer journey.

CRM for Everyone opens up the CRM securely to non-sales teams and allows all these internal teams to come together on a single platform to coordinate and manage all of the activities involved in the customer journey. 

Businesses often face specific customer experience (CX) challenges during these periods. How can "CRM for Everyone" help businesses overcome these challenges and potentially even thrive?

CX is a prominent factor for achieving brand loyalty and customer delight, it can make or break relationships with customers. CRM for Everyone democratizes the CRM software to bring all the teams adjacent to sales onto a common platform. It gives each team a dedicated space within the CRM so they can bring in their own contextual data while also drawing from the rich customer context that already resides within the CRM.

These teams are able to follow their own respective processes and offer transparency to stakeholders. Everyone can contribute to the customer experience and can be held accountable for their contributions. This automatically creates efficiency for the organisation, harmony for the teams involved, and value for the end customer. 

Can you provide specific examples of how this approach has helped businesses during downturns?

If you look at a B2B customer experience, the salesperson shepherds the overall experience but has to work with the solutions team to put together a technical proposal for the prospect as well as build a credible demonstration of the offering.

The salesperson has to work with the finance team to put together a pricing quote. They have to work with a legal team to prepare a contract for the prospect. If there is a distributor involved in the mix, there are a few additional steps to be followed. All of these activities are critical to closing the deal and generating revenue. 

After a deal is closed, an onboarding team needs to be brought in to perform deployment and initial training. There's also the case of ongoing maintenance and technical support. Throughout the customer journey, there is plenty of collaboration between sales and adjacent teams in this case. By bringing them all into the CRM, all of these processes can be managed within the CRM itself. The finance team knows exactly what configuration the customer has asked for and can price it correctly. The legal team knows the exact commitments that have been given to the customer.

The onboarding team knows the expectations of them during deployment. Much of the insights from this journey can also be reused for another similar prospect. None of this would be possible if they all used communications tools like email, chat, and spreadsheets to manage these processes. 

A core aspect of "CRM for Everyone" is increased visibility for all stakeholders in the customer journey. How does this enhanced visibility benefit customer operations?

Sales is essentially a collaborative function and CX journeys have a lot more touchpoints than it may seem. A team or individual might be the official custodian of the relationship, but they are always supported by other functions and team members. The additional visibility ensures that every team knows what has been promised to the customer, what the customer's expectations are, and what exactly is expected of themselves.

Bringing these teams onto a common platform also means everything is available in a single place for reference in the future. This information can then be refined and reused for other prospects and customers in the future. 

As the organisation grows, teams with more specialised skills will need to be established. In such cases, these new teams can be integrated into established processes without any disruption. There is a long tail of benefits, but these are the major ones.

Can you elaborate on specific features within "CRM for Everyone" that contribute to this improved visibility?

Two noteworthy capabilities under CRM for Everyone are Team Modules and Requester Profiles. Team Modules help teams bring in the data teams need to do their work well, set the appropriate access permissions, apply their processes, and manage all of their customer operations activities from a single place.

Each team can have multiple Team Modules, and they're all neatly grouped within a dedicated space for each team. Team Modules allow teams to get the best of both worlds: the rich customer context that already lies within the CRM as well as the team's contextual data set. 

Requester is a new type of user profile within Zoho CRM that allows members from other teams to request specific services and deliverables from any team. They can easily track the status of their requests and proactively engage with teammates to improve turnaround time and quality of the deliverables. In addition to clarity and visibility, this helps establish end-to-end accountability across teams and activities.

Collaboration is key to a successful CX strategy. Can you share concrete examples of how businesses using "CRM for Everyone" have improved collaboration and reduced turnaround times?

Let's consider the B2B experience I've explained above. The salesperson has to work with a solution professional to generate a solution proposal and a personalised demo for a prospect. The salesperson would send an email requesting for those deliverables. The solutions team will have a bunch of questions and clarifications.

Most of them might need the prospect's inputs. One of these stakeholders might miss some message in the middle or not notice a part of it. Imagine doing this several times every day across many prospective deals. You'll start to notice a lot of "I was waiting for your team" or "I already sent that to you" or "Was I supposed to send that to the prospect?" and other similar expressions. This can all affect the turnaround time and the quality of the deliverables. If all of this coordination happened on a CRM, the next steps to be followed would be clear to everyone.

There would also be visibility on which stage of the process a particular deal is stuck at. Teams can discuss this at their daily stand-up meetings and make solid progress every day. The leadership can also determine which teams are bottlenecked the most and staff them appropriately. They can see which deals were lost due to poor response time, and address those contextually. There are many possibilities on how this can be put to use effectively. 

Zoho's vision of "CRM for Everyone" aligns with the growing importance of CX as a competitive differentiator. How does your vision connect to this trend? Can you elaborate on the role CX plays in driving long-term brand loyalty?

Even around 15 years ago, CX was largely sequential. The customer would get passed around from one team to another until they were settled and comfortable with the offering. Those days are long gone. Today, CX is already collaborative. There may be only 1-2 custodians of the customer, but multiple teams have to come together to do almost anything for the customer. Since there hasn't been an elegant way to do that, teams have been using a complex mix of tools to manage all of this coordination, none of which has been purpose-built for this use case.

By moving these use cases from a generic work management layer into the contextual business system of record, Zoho is able to evolve the CRM into a system of experiences. As brands adopt CRM for Everyone, they will be able to raise the quality of their CX across the board and deliver that quality more consistently across every touchpoint. They will also be able to manage the two most important CX outcomes: growth and retention.

Many businesses have misconceptions about CX. What are some of the most common ones, and how does "CRM for Everyone" help dispel these myths and encourage a more customer-centric approach?

There are plenty of myths to do with CX but it's worth looking at two of them in the context of CRM for Everyone. The first myth is that CX is about sales or service. CX is about anything a customer experiences or undergoes. This is not limited to any single function. This is the foundational belief that CRM for Everyone is built on. The second myth is that a separate software is necessary to manage CX throughout the customer journey. In reality, the CRM is a perfectly good place to do this, and a business doesn't really need another software just for this. In fact, buying a separate software for this adds unnecessary complexity to the company, from tactical to strategic levels.