Zoho CRM Brings In Sales Teams Focussed Conversational AI – Zia Voice  

Zoho CRM has unveiled Zia Voice, the first conversational AI for sales teams that adds speech and chat capabilities to Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered sales assistant. Zia can also predict deal closures and analyse email sentiment.

Along with Zia Voice, Zoho has also introduced Catalyst – a set of capabilities that allow larger and complex businesses to build their own mobile and web apps and additions to Zoho CRM, on existing Zoho infrastructure, to serve their own businesses uniquely.

In addition, new features in Zoho CRM like translations and portals add to deepening their enterprise focus.

“We are delivering the first conversational AI for CRM, with Zia Voice,” said Mani Vembu, COO, Zoho Corp. “Zia’s enhanced AI capabilities will now help salespeople sell smarter, with contextual assistance and access customer information through a powerful voice and chat interface.”

A Quick Look At The Features Of Conversational AI, Zia Voice

Interactive voice and chat-bot: From answering questions on everyday CRM information like new leads created, average deal revenue or even monthly forecasts to practical traffic status, Zia converses with salespeople via simple chat and voice messages.

Lead and deal prediction: Zia analyses interaction patterns and the progress of a lead or deal in the pipeline, and suggests the probability of its closure.

Email sentiment analysis: Zia makes sense out of the scores of emails that a salesperson might receive every day. Every email is analysed to discover the relevant positive or negative sentiment.

Alerts for the best time to contact: Zia gives salespeople real-time updates about when they are most likely to reach their prospects. This increases their chance of connecting with leads and reduces the time spent on unanswered calls.

“The advancements in AI mean that SaaS vendors can now power their applications with ‘Invisible Interfaces’ and make them easier. We see these advancements in AI and voice recognition leading the way into the next transformation of business applications,” said Sheryl Kingstone of 451 Research.

451 Research’s recent research shows that 45% of the surveyed digital leaders are looking forward to using voice interface in the next 24 months.

Catalyst: The Hyper-customisation Platform For Zoho CRM

Catalyst, the other product that Zoho launched, works on Deluge, Zoho’s own programming language. There are 40,000 Deluge developers, of which around 10% are from India, who use it to create applications on Zoho’s platform.

Vembu said, “As Zoho’s ecosystem expands further with Catalyst, there will be an increase in demand for Deluge developers, creating job opportunities. Our goal is to have 1,00,000 developers in India on Zoho’s platform over the next three years.”

Some of the features that Catalyst offers are Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK), Mobile Device Manager (MDM), Serverless computing and Widgets.

Zoho has been developing apps in nearly every major business category including sales, marketing, customer support, finance, human resources and an array of productivity and collaboration tools.

In 2017, Zoho introduced Zoho One, an integrated suite of applications for the entire business. It also brought out Zoho Social to tap the digital agencies.

Last month, in January, Zoho launched its website optimisation app Zoho PageSense and cloud integration platform, Zoho Flow.

With the addition of PageSense and Zoho Flow, a total of 40 applications now form part of the suite, which has expanded from 35 applications offered during its launch in July 2017.

In November 2017, the Saas behemoth had also launched a special edition of its social media marketing tool Zoho Social, targeted at digital agencies, thus adding to its ever-expanding suite of products used by more than 30 Mn users around the world. The launch was preceded by the launch of its agile project management software Zoho Sprints. Prior to that, it launched enterprise messaging service Cliq.

With the latest addition of Zia Voice to its product portfolio, the SaaS company looks determined to forge its way to target a billion paying users in the near future.