Zoho Brings Location, Productivity Features to Zoho CRM

Cloud office applications suite company Zoho is ramping up its Zoho CRM product through a major update that adds a Document Library, MailMagnet feature, and location awareness to the contact database.

Zoho Docs, an online document manager, has been integrated with Zoho CRM to form the Document Library. Using the Document Library, a salesperson could, hypothetically, create a shared folder around "goals" and select users to access it with role-based security restrictions. Within the CRM contact record, a user can select and add a document or file to a particular contact.

Another new feature is MailMagnet, which is designed as a sales-friendly email add-on. "MailMagnet scans all of your emails, looks up [customers and prospects], and matches them against the CRM database of accounts and contacts," says Raju Vegesna, evangelist for Zoho. "That way, [a sales rep] can avoid all of the unnecessary emails and focus on the leads he has to close." Using MailMagnet, a sales rep can view and respond to email, as well as create tasks and add notes right within the system panel.

The third feature Zoho added is location awareness, which is compatible with Zoho CRM's iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile applications. Within the Leads and Contacts module in the mobile app, customers and prospects can be pulled up on a map, along with their contact information, based on the geographic area the salesperson is currently in.

Zoho, which brought email and social media marketing campaigns into the Zoho CRM picture with the launch of Zoho Campaigns late this summer, continues to evolve its product roadmap. "I think CRM is going to evolve beyond the pure CRM we are used to," Vegesna remarks. "One of the requests we got from customers was project management integration into their CRM system…[which] makes sense. I can create a project and check out what percentage of a project has been completed in the context of a customer."

Document Library is now available for all paid Zoho CRM users. For existing Zoho CRM users with mail add-on enabled, MailMagnet is immediately available for free. All Zoho CRM Mobile Edition users have access to the location awareness feature.