What's New in Zoho - June 2025

00:00Hi everyone, I hope you're all well today. Thank you for joining me again on a Friday afternoon. I'm just going to see how many people we've got here. So a little bit different to the last webinar I did. The last webinar we went through kind of focusing on CRM and the redesign. Today's a little bit more of a grab bag. We're going to go through some of the highlights of the month, new features across Zoho, most of which will be in the CRM. It's where I spend most of my time. It's where most my clients spend their time but we've got some other apps to run through as well which should be quite nice. I will say this month has been a little bit cut in half because we did that whole separate webinar on the big CRM updates around the redesign. I'm not going to re-cover those again here so if you missed that last webinar and want to see about that redesign if you go to our website you can actually just sign up and get that webinar whenever you want but I definitely recommend that because we went through a lot of stuff in that webinar there.

00:56Just before we get going, can everybody hear me and see me and see my screen without a problem? I'm assuming so because nobody said otherwise, which is always good news. Yes, some thumbs up. That is good news. OK, well, let's make a start. We'll run through it. Like last time, we're going to do a mixture of I've got some stuff in a brief presentation. And more importantly, though, I'm going to try and show you as much of this as I can in action. So running through the plan for today then we are going to start with CRM. We're going to look at some new options around cross-module data filtering and data visibility. A lot of stuff Zoho has been doing the last couple of months and this month in particular is around removing the silos of individual modules within the CRM and I'm going to show you what I mean by that in just a moment.

01:44There's then also a couple of new and improved filtering options and then I've got a sneak peek of a couple of things Zoho have announced, but they're not quite available just yet. As one of those things, the way Zoho releases updates, it's quite often very staggered, and it's not always particularly clear as and when who's going to get those updates. I notice this across my client base all the time. I might see a client's got one thing one week, and another client might not get it for a month later. So one of the hard things about going through Zoho updates is actually when do you cover them?

02:15Do you cover them when Zoho tells you they're there or do you cover them once you've got them? So these sneak peeks are just a couple of things I know are coming, but they're not quite live in my test system just yet. But I thought they were important enough to cover. A couple of bits in Zoho Desk, particularly around how we're going to manage working across multiple departments. We've then got a load of updates to Zoho WorkDrive. A lot of the stuff they're doing in WorkDrive at the moment are to make it more enterprise friendly, more useful for larger organisations.

02:45There's a lot of stuff happening around data privacy, retention settings, all of that kind of stuff. What I will say, and we'll get into this more in a little while, if you're using Zoho One or any of the Zoho packages that include WorkDrive and you're not making use of it, I'd really, really think it's worth looking at. You get a huge amount of included data. I know with one client in particular I'm working with, they've actually filled up their OneDrive, went to Microsoft to obviously get more OneDrive storage. It's going to cost a huge amount.

03:14actually realized they had more than double that storage in Zoho for free just based on what they're already paying for. So it's definitely worth knowing that that is there. The final bit then is a couple of smaller updates and then any questions or anything else that we want to run through. Just before we go any further I'm going to play with the polls in Zoho webinar because I've not used them before. So my first thing I'm going to start a poll on is how's the stream quality. I wanted to ask this last time in the last webinar but I know it's something clients quite often ask me is what's the quality of the streams like and it's always difficult to know because generally I'm on this end and not the other end so it'd be interesting to know how it is.

03:56A little bit of background for those that are in the webinar. The way I actually manage this is the Zoho webinar does a recording itself. That recording is okay quality, it's not amazing. So separately, I actually record an offline local recording, which is in 4K and is much higher resolution. The sound quality is better. And that's what I actually share after the fact. So we've actually got two recordings, that automatic one and that higher quality one. You don't have to do that high quality one. It's just I like to I'm a little bit of a snob about it.

04:28I guess I like it to be as high quality as possible. I quite often joke with clients and my wife in particular that my secret dream is to be a YouTuber. So this is my start into it. Anyway, back to it. So a quick introduction from me if you don't know me. So I'm Jake. I'm a Zoho consultant and I run my own company, Limitless IT Consultancy. I have been a Zoho consultant for about seven years now. I started off in a developer role, worked my way up in another organisation to become project manager and eventually started my own company. I've also got a handful of Zoho certifications. I've got CRM administrator, Zoho creator developer, I've got a desk certification in there.

05:09But more importantly, we support all sorts of different Zoho users. And I think that's really the thing that gives me a little bit of credibility here. We're supporting clients from as small a team as four users up to around 100 users. And we see the range and how different teams work differently with Zoho. Quite often you'll find what works great for a team of four users won't work at all for a team of 100 users and vice versa. so it's really important to know who you're designing for. Anyway let's move on. So first thing let's talk about the data the cross module data filtering. So I'm going to slide across here and I'm going to go into the CRM. Now I'm going to be doing all of this in the new UI of the CRM although pretty much everything we're going to cover today works in the old UI as well.

06:00it's just worth knowing I'm going to do it this way around. So first off let me give you a little bit of background for what the problem was initially. So let's say we've got some contacts in the system here and I want to see which of these contacts have an open deal. Now up until very recently this was actually surprisingly difficult because within the contact record there's no field to say that this contact has an open deal. And in fact, the way that we'd quite often solve this for clients in the past is we'd have an automation. We'd add a field to the contact and that field was automatically updated via a custom automation.

06:40Does the contact have a deal or not? But what we've now got and this release came out a little while ago, but I want to cover it because it links to everything else we're talking about today. On our sidebar here, we've now got these system defined filters, which we've always had. We've got some website activity and filter by fields. but really importantly and hidden at the bottom which is why I wanted to cover it because although it's been out for a little while now a lot of clients I've noticed just don't know about this feature there's now this option to filter by related modules what this allows us to do is very very quickly take our contacts list or any other module and filter by all the related information so I'll show you how this looks so if I want to filter by anybody with an open deal I can filter by related modules deals so it's going to show me contacts with any deal if I just do that that's going to show me all contacts with a deal in any status but I can also add a field and I can go in here and I can type in stage so this is a field on the deal so stage is a field within the deal and I'm going to do is open and then I'm going to apply my filter straight away there I've now got that down to nine records so I'm able to filter that contact list directly based on information in other parts of the CRM. This is one of those things as I talk about it it just feels like it's one of those things that feels like it should have been there forever but it wasn't so it's such a big change now that we've got it. Of course I can save that filter so I'm going to give it a name open deals 2 because I can see I've already done this once before and you can now see very quickly if I want to go into my contacts and see all my open deals. I can click on my save filter and there they are. That's all of my contacts with open deals. Now the reason you might do this for deals for example is what I then might do is I might select those nine people and I might then send them all a mass email. That's one of the use cases you might use here. Of course it might just be that you want to do reporting. It might be that you have a sales team and you want them to be proactively calling people. All good reasons to want to filter your data. Now the other thing you can do about this is it's not just with deals you can also flip it as well so I can also say without any deals and if I apply that filter that's going to give me a list of contacts with no deals in the system whatsoever. Now what's nice with these filters is I can also stack them so right now I'm looking at any contacts without any deals if I go into here I want to see also show me any contacts that don't have any meetings and effectively what I can do here is very quickly come up with a list of here are my contacts that don't have any activity against them and I can stack as I say those filters as much as I want and I can combine them with other filters as well so if I want to say okay only show me contacts with the account of Zoho that don't have any deals and they don't have any meetings apply and there we go one of the other times I've used this recently is actually for a client they do a lot of they do a lot of CPD so if you're in the construction world you do this sort of continuous development type thing and a lot of companies do it's like marketing they'll put on these CPDs so that they're able to get suppliers to come in or customers to come in they teach them about the product because they get CPD points but more importantly it knows about you then they then know about your product so they're more likely to buy from you so it's a great little marketing system. Now they do that via using meetings in the CRM. So the way they've started using this is they've started creating filters with any meetings that are not booked in the next six months. So they can very quickly say, okay, here's a list of contacts that have open deals, but they don't have any meetings booked for the next six months. And all of a sudden that gives them a proactive list to be able to email, to be able to phone. And it's all within the CRM. You've always going to do this kind of stuff in a report, but having it directly in the CRM obviously just makes it way more convenient.

10:39Obviously, you can do this across all the other modules as well. Contacts is just where I've done an example here. But you can see in Leeds, I've got the same thing. Now, one of the caveats here, and this is one of the areas I think Zoho need to improve, is if I go into here, obviously, I've got my contacts here. So if I open my contacts, you can see this contact is linked to an account, as you'd expect. Now, if I go into my filter list, what you'll notice is when I want to filter by module, there isn't an option for an account in here. Now, the reason being is this filtered by related modules only gives you the options of things that are in the related lists. It doesn't give you options for related modules that are like just fields of the blue text. If I open up that contact again, you'll see what I mean. Let me open that up. So if I look at my contact, you can see I've are down here as a related list, my activities, my meetings, my emails, all of those things there are in related list form. But my account is a single lookup, is a link between that contact and an account. And right now, those single lookup fields aren't supported, which means if I want to go into my contacts and say, give me all of the contacts where the account has an account type of X. I can't yet do that. Now Zoho have said this is coming and I think this is going to be a really big thing is once that's there because to me although I understand technically why there's a split between these two different things I think most users you think of them as the same thing and that's how it should be. So I'm really pleased that Zoho are working on that. They haven't yet given a date for it but hopefully it won't be too long. The other thing that Zoho has been doing and this is the new thing that's ready this month, is currently you can only create and you can only filter across modules using the sidebar filter menu. Now within this sidebar filter menu you can create saved filters as we've got here but they can't be shared with other users they're purely for your individual user so if I've saved these and another user logs into this system they won't see my saved filters. Thankfully though Zoho are updating the custom views system so that you're able to also filter by related modules within custom views and custom views critically can be shared with other users so that's going to be the big thing around that big update. Now that's already started rolling out and in fact I've seen this in some of client systems already so So unfortunately not in my test system just yet, hence why I'm not showing it here.

13:16But it is rolling out to some systems already. So that's going to be a really big update. And what it means is instead of then each individual having to create their own, say, filters, you as a manager or me as a Zoho consultant can go in, set up the custom views that people need, and I can share them with those individuals so they don't have to set it up themselves. Particularly as you're a larger organisation, this is just more and more important to make sure everyone's working from the same place. so moving on to the next part of this now this is where Zoho has been in a lot of work over the last two years I would say and I've not spoken about it very much so Zoho has this whole system called Zoho Canvas and if you've not come across Canvas before it's effectively a design your own CRM tool a little bit like Squarespace or Wix for a website where you can design your own website that's what canvas is for the CRM. I'm going to show you what this looks like. So I'm going to create a record detail page. I'm going to select the module that I'm going to do this for. I'm going to say do it for leads. I'm going to hit create. What this does is first of all I can select a template for how I want my leads module to look. And you can see these templates look totally different from built-in CRM. And if I want to I can start from scratch as well and I can do something completely custom. Now one thing it will be is fair to say is I'm not a designer and this is where you get into the kind of realms of a cross between a system configurator and a designer role I guess. I'm going to choose this template as a starting point and I'm going to hit select.

14:56Now what you'll see is I'm now on my sidebar I can now drag and drop and I can change the style of this page. So if I want to change the colours I can click in and I can change the colour. If I want to add a button I can go into elements and I can add a button and I just drag it onto the screen. Almost exactly like when you're building your own website. Now what I really like about canvas is it just gives you so much flexibility that out of the box you don't get from Zoho. If I show you this here so I've just saved this canvas. If I now go into my lead you'll see by default this is how my lead looks just like any other CRM but if I switch to the canvas which I'm going to do down here and hit test you'll see straight away I've got a totally different design now obviously you can see here there's some layout issues you can see the top here has been a little bit cut off this is where canvas does take a little bit more technical work because obviously if you're going to build your own design you just need to make sure it fits nicely what I do like about canvas though is it means you can put the information that's important to you where you want it. Quite often one of the things I hear from in particular sales teams is they're looking at a lead and they've got to scroll down to get all the key information they want.

16:11The nice thing about the canvas is we can put it front and centre. Now I'm swapping back and forth between the canvas here. We can set the canvas as default once it's set up as well so you don't have to do that jumping in and out so you can make it a lot smoother than this. But you can see here we've got our meetings here, we've got our notes right here, we've got some basic details of the customer here, we can switch between these tabs and very quickly see what else has been happening. So things that you, things that are most relevant to that individual you can put to the top of the screen.

16:43The other nice thing about canvas is you can also create multiple canvases for each module and you can have different teams use different canvases. So it might be that as a salesperson I care about the notes. I care about what open deals we've got. I care about X, Y and Z the most. But if I'm a marketing person, actually, maybe I care more about where did this lead come from? Was it a paid advertising thing? What paid ad was it? What form did they use on the website? Different information so I can surface it to the relevant team. Now, Canvas itself isn't new, but there is a couple of new things in Canvas I want to focus on. So the first thing that came out just towards the end of last month is this new element called Flexbox. Now if you're a web developer you will be aware of Flexbox. It is actually a web developer term but what Flexbox allows you to do is it allows you to place elements within it so it reflows more naturally. Right now you can see that this canvas it just stretches to a bigger screen and in fact when I'm using a bigger screen it does just stretch out bigger and bigger. The Flexbox allows you to dynamically move elements based on the size of the screen so things automatically flow. So that's going to be a big big improvement for a lot of people particularly if you're in an office you've got lots of different size monitors. I've worked with a client previously where they got canvas set up the person who set it up had a giant monitor set it all up it looked brilliant everyone in the office had a smaller monitor and everything was overlapping and just didn't quite work. That flex box feature is going to make things much much easier but back to talking about data working across modules what we can now do which we couldn't do before is I can now go into here and I can now pull information through from other modules so if I go into here and let me just switch into a the one for leads for a minute and for the contacts a minute sorry obviously for the for you to be able to pull information from other modules you need to be able to have modules linked and obviously leads is a little bit more standalone but I can show you here because I've got an example of contacts and what this allows you to do is I can create a section within my canvas for contacts that displays fields stored on the account so again we're talking about removing those kind of silos of data within the different modules and I'll show you how this looks now. So if I go into here on the sidebar, if I scroll down, you'll see I've got these related module fields. So I can go into account and that's how I want to pull through the account owner.

19:21I can pull that in and I can drag that into my layout. I might also want to pull through, say, the credit limit and I can pop that in there as well. So any of these fields that I've got in other modules, I can now move into my contacts module. So again, it's just going to make it easier when navigating the CRM, less jumping around between different places. If I save that, I spent a bit more time on this one, so this one looks a little bit better. If I now go into my contact, we'll open one of these contacts up. You can see I'm in the standard view now. I'm going to scroll down to the bottom and just switch to my canvas view. And you can see straight away that looks a lot nicer. I've got my key information about my contact right here. I've got my key account information here. I've got cadences which is some email marketing stuff here. My campaigns and my invited meetings and along the top I've got quick tabs to be able to see all of the more important things. So I've got my notes, my timeline, my emails, everything in here that I want very quickly really accessible and I can just jump between them. But the fact I've got that account information is just really really key. Now the nice thing about this is this doesn't just apply to the contacts module again. This also applies to any module where you've got lookups between data. So where I'm picturing I'm going to be using this most for clients is actually within deals. Quite often what I see within deals, if I open an example deal here, in fact you can see we've got it here, is within the deal we've got the contact name and email address. And the reason clients quite often do this is because their salesperson is looking at the deal and they want to quickly be able to, They want to quickly send a message to that person or they want to quickly be able to phone that person.

21:04And they don't want to have to click into the contact name or they don't want to be able to quickly click into the account name, find a number. They just want it right there. And that's fine. But it means we're duplicating data and naturally we're duplicating data. Even if you've got workflows trying to keep everything in sync, you're going to end up with mismatches. So this removes the need to do that copying fields to multiple places. I've got one client in mind in particular, they might even be on this call, I suspect they are, that is probably my biggest bugbear for doing this because their deals module is full of fields from other modules.

21:40And I totally understand the reason why. It's because when you're working through lots of deals, you're doing a lot of things, you don't want to be clicking all the time. But it means we have this data duplication. This is going to solve that and it's going to mean there's no risk of things getting out of sync. It's all just going to be handled by the system and it's just a view into that other module. So this is one of those ones. Again, it's not a huge update on its own, but it's going to make a big difference, I think, to lots of clients. And as I say, if you've not looked at Canvas, I really recommend investigating it because actually I think Canvas can really change the CRM, particularly if you're struggling with the layout of Zoho.

22:16I know a lot of people find the CRM to be quite busy, sometimes quite cluttered and it's hard to find what you're looking for. this might be the thing that might change it for you. In fact, I'm going to start the next poll. You can see I was getting into playing with this earlier around what do you guys want me to do the next webinar on? I'm enjoying doing these webinars and actually it's quite fun actually digging into these new features because sometimes I don't look at them until I'm working with a client. It's giving me the option to really dig into them.

22:45So what would you guys like me to focus on on the next webinar? Would you like it to be focused on, say, the marketing stuff, canvas and how you design your own CRM. Would you like it to be a more sort of mixed bag of all sorts of different updates? Let me know what people think and then we'll dig into that. So I just wanted to show you a couple of other examples. These are actually from Zoho of how they've used that canvas. So you can see here they're looking at a deal. You can see they've got an overview here of the account, an overview here of the contact. And in fact, they've even added tabs here for all of the account and all of the contact fields, all within the deal. So again, it's just minimizing, minimizing clicking. Here's another one. So this is in a slightly different view here. This is actually looking at the list view. So if I come out of here and I'm looking at my list of contacts, you can use Canvas within that view as well. And you can see in this case, what they've done is they've done it within deals. And again, it's bringing that contact information forward. It's bringing that account information forward. So again, just surfacing information. So just before we move on, I can see we've got a question from Amy. So that's answer that. So can we start with a template that's closer to what we already have in CRM?

23:56I just want to change the color of the modules to start with. Really good question. So there are some templates in Canvas that are a little bit closer. Let me just bring it up and then we will carry on. So if I open up the detail view again, I'll do it for leads. There are a couple that's a little bit closer. I believe near the bottom there's one that's a little bit closer. Here's the one. So this is probably the one that's closest to just CRM slash maybe it even looks a little bit like Zoho Begin, I guess. They've still got the sidebar here, so it is still a change.

24:32But there are some templates in here that you can start with. They're a little bit closer to the normal design. You can see there's quite a few templates in here as well to have a scroll through. In fact, this one here is pretty close to the built in design, as you can see. What's also nice about the template is if you build it for one module, you can clone it and you just change what the elements are based on the module. But you haven't got to build it from scratch for every module and you can save organization templates as well, which is quite handy.

25:00If you're a Zyho consultant or if you're working across multiple Zyho systems, you can even export those canvases and import them elsewhere so you can reuse them and things like that. Perfect. So now a quick one on filtering. So moving across into the CRM again, we're going to go into our filters and we've got some brand new filters around date. So if I wanted to go by created time, I've now got the option to filter by previous and next. So if I just want to look at what was created in the previous seven days, I can do that. Hit ply and there we go. In this case, we don't have anything. Let's have a look in 30 days.

25:41There we go. Nothing in 30 days either. the idea here is just to make that filtering easier now you could kind of do this beforehand so there used to be and there still is in fact an aging days and a due in days filter but it used to cause a lot of confusion in fact it confused me as well so Zoho has now simplified that so you've got that previous and next the key thing with previous and next is it excludes today so if you do previous seven days it's not going to include today if you do next seven days it's not going to include today. This can obviously be combined in any of your workflows or anything like that to make life a little bit easier. Told you that was a quick one. Now on to some sneak peeks. Now these are ones that I'm pretty excited for actually. So we're going to start with looking at some system renaming. So the first thing we've got is if we go into leads or any module for that matter, There are a load of fields in the system that we can't rename.

26:38In fact, if I go into, let's go into contacts, and I'm going to go into edit the fields. So some of them we can rename, but you'll see there's a load that if I click on them, I cannot rename. And the reason for that is because it's a system field. Now, sometimes this is really problematic. The one that always bugs me is the fact that what Zoho wants you to use as job title is just called title. I just want it to be called job title because it'd be so much easier. now up until now there were two options to solve this one you would replace system fields with custom fields that you could call whatever you want but that would sometimes cause issues and the address is one that come up quite a lot because the people have probably seen quite often Zoho uses the term province which in the UK at least isn't a term that we really use so people would replace their billing province field that's built in with a custom field the problem is then once they set up Zoho Books or something like that and they want to sync all of their data that custom field then doesn't sync with Zoho Books because it's a custom field at least out of the box.

27:40The other workaround for this is there was a translations feature and still is a translations feature in Zoho that effectively allows you to give Zoho a custom list of translations to say in our country we're going to call the field this. The problem is that that worked for the most part if the company was based in one country because you would just do translations for that country but if it was a multinational company it sort of fell apart and if you started editing things quite a lot you could sometimes cause issues with those translations. I found them to be pretty reliable but I know there are complications with it. Zoho have finally committed to the later this year they're releasing an update and you will be able to rename system field so we can call things exactly what we want. We can get rid of the term province, we can get rid of the term like zip code which we don't use in the UK. We can name title to job title and just have it clean up and it's just going to make life so much easier. I think that as the first update I think I've got like thumbs up as I've been doing it so I can tell it's a little one but when I've seen this I was very pleased to see it because it's just it's one of those things that just makes life better.

28:45Next thing and this one I think is also really exciting. Zoho is working on a Zia or a Zia chatbot so everyone's probably seen that Zoho has been doing more and more with their own AI Ziya I think switch between the two but they haven't had a chatbot up until this stage there's been different places you could use AI and there's also been places where you can integrate open AI and chat GPT but they're now working on their own chatbot now this has been releasing at least Zoho say in some US based systems that are paying for Zoho as a standalone I've not seen it across client systems just yet so I'm not saying it's not there I've just not seen it yet but the chat bot now allows you to do quite a few different things so you can ask questions and it can give you a summary of your records of your notes it can create custom workflows and it can even create reports for you automatically now this is going to be a really interesting one because I've personally had a has a mixed experience and that's probably being generous with Zoho's built-in AI functionality I've not yet found it to be quite as strong as what other people are doing so I'm going to be really interested to see what happens with this and how reliable it actually is but they're making some really big promises I mean the one that stood out for me is this here so this is I don't know how well this comes across in the recording this is a gif showing the chatbot making a report so you can see at the top of the screen the contact of the user has asked to create a report of deals by stage and then the chatbot actually kind of does it for you in the UI you can see the chatbot moving through the system and actually doing it and at any point you can stop the chatbot or you can take control of what it's doing and take over the steps from there. I think it's going to be really really fascinating I've not really seen anywhere else in Zoho or even other apps that are doing this kind of thing where you can watch the AI do it and then take control at any point My hope is that this is going to be as good as promised because one of the things that's long been a frustration I think for all Zoho users is the fact that you've got loads of this data in the system and sometimes you have sort of you know crosses your mind oh I want to look at this on a report and that can be surprisingly complicated to build sometimes so if the chatbot can do that and you can literally just ask it give me this report that's going to be really really interesting now I will say the example they've used here is a pretty basic report so I'm going to be interested to see how well it performs when I ask it to do something slightly more complicated but this is one of those things I think it's going to be really exciting to see what Zoho we're going to do next with AI and the more stuff they're doing across the system if you've not looked actually one thing I will point out to everyone whilst we're here within the settings in CRM there is now a whole section for XIA and there's a load of different options in here. So Zoho's now got some built-in data enrichment. It's not yet as good as third-party data enrichment tools like Zoom Info, Cognizum, Apollo, those kinds of things but it has got some basic stuff built in now. It's got some prediction stuff, it's got recommendations. There's loads of stuff in here now and it's getting more and more interesting the stuff you can do with this. It might be one of those things I want to do a separate webinar on in the future because I think some of this stuff is becoming, if we're not going to be making use of it, I feel like we're going to be disadvantaged to everyone that is. So I think the more of it we can build into our own workflows, the better, but definitely one for another webinar because there's so much we could do in there. So moving on for a little break from the CRM and also a quick drink we'll talk about Zoho Desk. Okay so moving into Zoho Desk. So I'm going to give a bit of an introduction to the apps as we use them because I know CRM pretty much everybody will be using but the other apps not everyone will. So a little bit of background on Zoho Desk. Zoho Desk is effectively an email support ticketing system or at least that's how it started. It now does a lot of integrations with live chat stuff so you can integrate it with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and things like that. You can also log phone calls and things like that.

33:10It's all around handling customer support and customer communication. Outside of the Zoho world it's probably closest to something like Zendesk and it's used in that kind of way. Now Zoho Desk has a lot of functionality and in fact in the last year and a half Zoho have added a huge amount to Desk. Desk is probably the single big app with the most updates over the last year. They've added so much functionality to it but one of the key things they've added very recently is you can now do cross department child and parent tickets and how this looks I'll kind of talk you through the thinking here. Within Zoho Desk I can have multiple departments and these departments can be split up kind of however you like but I normally think of it in the same way as departments within a business. So you might have the finance department, the customer support department, you might have a separate department for cancellations, you might have technical support. You can imagine the different ways you might break down your organisation to fit within Zoho Desk.

34:13Now the idea is each department has its own list of support tickets, its own list of queries and its own list of things that need to be resolved. So I can click into these and I can see the different departments. Now in my case because I'm an admin I can see all the departments but if you were a standard user you would only see the departments that you had been added to. Now let's imagine we get an email from a customer maybe they're a bit unhappy they want to cancel. They email into customer support. Now what we could do is email directly into Zoho Desk and that's how most clients use it. I'm going to manually create the ticket just for demonstration purposes here but you'll get an idea for how this works. So I'm going to put in my email address so I'm going to select that I'm going to put subject unhappy with app. I can add a description in here and I can see my status and everything else and I can hit submit and that creates my ticket.

35:11Now, how I actually handle that ticket would be down to each individual organization and how you'll set up what your processes are. But within our Zoho desk, we've got some simple stages here. So we've got open, on hold, escalated and closed. Most customers I work with, we would actually have far more statuses than that that manage the individual processes. Now, it might be that we have some back and forth with this customer and we can email them directly within Zoho desk. Unfortunately, I've not configured it here just because it's a test system, but I could email them.

35:41you know try and tell them don't worry we're going to solve the problem they come back to us they still want to cancel. So me as customer support I can't actually cancel this for the customer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into parent and child and I'm going to create a child ticket but what I'm going to do is I'm going to create that in the cancellations department and give them the email of the customer. Some of this I think should be autofilled it's quite new so some of this stuff I think still needs a bit of work like I don't really think I should have to put in the customer's email again. I'm going to put in a description in here and I'm going to hit save. Now what that means is once I've done that I can now see from my parent ticket which might be put on hold. I can now see that I'm waiting on a child ticket which is open and with the cancellations department. If I now switch into the cancellations department you can now see they've got a brand new ticket here in the top of their queue and they can click in they can see any information I've added in my case I didn't add any so it's a bit empty in here but I can also go in and see okay it's related to this parent ticket and I can click through into that parent ticket at this point as the cancellations department I might again continue having conversation with that customer and again I could do that as email within desk I could do it as a phone call it could even be via some sort of live chat. Once I'm happy I'm then going to use another brand new feature of Zoho Desk and I'm going to use the, oh when I find it, what am I looking for?

37:14Bear with me. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and close this off and that's going to close my child ticket. Now when I go back into the parent I can now see that the child ticket has been closed and at this point I can also close the parent ticket it might be that I reply to the customer first but in this case I'm just gonna reply and close the ticket. Now all of that we did pretty manually what I really like about Zoho Desk is how many different automations we can build into this so one of the ways you might do this is we could add a custom button so within our menu up here we can actually add custom buttons so we could add a custom button to say we want to submit a cancellation request and that button could then create the child ticket, link it to the parent and copy any information we need onto that child ticket automatically. So it just gives us a way of breaking up our information, making sure the right departments, the right teams have the data they need to be able to do their job and then having that all come back together. One client I work with in particular is a huge user of Zoho Desk and in fact when they first rolled out parent and child tickets a while ago they used it all the time but the biggest limitation for them was the fact that they couldn't have tickets across departments. The way they used it just to give a little bit of context for how this might be helpful when they closed one an opportunity or a deal it created a series of it created a Zoho desk ticket with a series of child tickets all around on board in that particular customer.

38:49Some cases you may use Zoho projects for this kind of thing for this customer Zoho desk worked better because there was so much of it was email based so we wanted to keep it all together. Now those child tickets would include all sorts of things including setting up like finance details making sure they were credit checked all of that kind of stuff. Now it wasn't always the sales team that was going to be responsible for that but because of this limitation into desk up until now the sales team had all of those child tickets and effectively they would then chase the finance team or chase the operations team to get things done. What this now means is when that opportunity or that deal is now closed one we can create the parent ticket in sales with the child tickets that sales need to do but more importantly we can create the child tickets in the other departments for the steps those other departments need to do and it's all connected back to that one overall ticket. The other way you might use parent and child tickets like another client of mine they work they do like technical support so they support different software packages sometimes software packages have bugs that impact multiple people not does Zoho would ever have that so what they would do is they would create a parent ticket for the overall outage or the overall bug and they would link all of the individual client support emails to that overall ticket and it just gave them a way then to be able to manage that this is an issue that's impacting all of these people when that issue is resolved I then want to update all of these individual people.

40:16So quite a nice little process there. So moving on to Zoho work drive. Oh I've just seen we've got a question on desk so let's just pause for a minute. This is from Emma. Hi Jake do the tickets raised slash email sent also link into the CRM? Good question. So if you've got Zoho desk set up they will actually show up in a slightly different place in CRM. Let's see if I've got an example here. I haven't connected desk here. So the way it would look is you'd have your emails tab like you do currently and you would then separately have a Zoho desk tab and your desk tickets would sit in that separate section.

40:59Now I actually quite like it that way because it means your emails don't end up cluttered with support queries and things like that but it does split those things out which is quite nice and of course you can always click into desk to see more details and obviously in desk I can click onto the actual customer and I can see all of their tickets all of that kind of thing but so it does surface in the CRM is the answer to your question but it doesn't fit within the standard email section it's separated out a little bit like if you're sending campaigns from CRM which I know you are your campaigns sit within the campaign section and then the emails will sit within the email section so it's that same kind of thing where it's split out. Okay on to Zoho WorkDrive. So Zoho WorkDrive if you have not used it before is effectively Zoho's version of SharePoint or OneDrive or any other kind of file management service. Now what's particularly good with WorkDrive is if you're using Zoho One you get a huge amount of storage included so for each Zoho One organization you get five terabytes of storage off the bat and then you get an additional half a terabyte for every employee beyond the first 10. So very quickly you have a lot of storage within Zoho WorkDrive so here's an example here if you've got 30 employees in Zoho that gives you 15 terabytes of storage which is unless you're doing stuff that's really, really, you know, large file sizes is probably enough to last you more than a lifetime.

42:35As I said earlier, one client I'm working with at the moment, they have very, very large files. They're dealing with a lot of the time because of that. They're very quickly using up their OneDrive storage or their SharePoint storage. So this has actually become a much, much more cost effective way to be able to manage that is moving into WorkDrive. If you've not used WorkDrive before, if you're worried, there's a lot of things in WorkDrive that are very similar to any other platform. So like with SharePoint or like Dropbox, if you're used to Dropbox, you can install an app on your PC and your files will sync and not just be in a folder like you're used to.

43:09You can share links to external people. So if you're collaborating, you can share folders with people. All of that kind of standard stuff that you would expect is all in WorkDrive already. And actually one of the updates Zoho's working on, this isn't yet live, but they announced it the first half of this year, is within the CRM currently there's this attachment section. And this is kind of standalone from everything else. And you can upload attachments to records in the CRM. One of the things Zoho's doing is WorkDrive will be connected directly to the CRM and actually replace attachments. So again, you will be using WorkDrive in a way, whether you like it or not through that integration with CRM. So it's definitely a really useful tool and it's worth knowing it's there. Now what I wanted to cover today was a couple of the features they've been adding to help improve how this can be rolled out to larger organizations and particularly organizations that are more data conscious. I mean we should all be data conscious but obviously different organizations go to different levels with that. So the first thing I wanted to show you was within the admin console of WorkDrive. We're getting a little bit system admin-y right now, but I promise we won't take too long on here. So the first thing we've got is down in our data loss prevention, we can now set up data classifications. We can give files a classification and that will impact what people can do with it. So I've set up an example here. I've set up a confidential label and what that confidential classification does is it means people cannot download a copy of a file. So if I go into my CRM here and I've got a file I'm going to go in I'm going to add a classification label I'm going to mark this as confidential. If I now click on this file you will see I cannot now delete I cannot now download this I can't copy it I can't print it.

45:04So for managing those more sensitive documents, this is now going to become much easier. Now, you haven't got to necessarily do this on an individual file record either. We can set workflows and automations that can apply this to whole folders, to whole types of files. But you can also do, and this is one of the other updates from Zoho, there's also sensitive information types where Zoho will check for documents with sensitive information and can automatically categorize it. so the way this might look is if we create a policy we're going to base this in the UK because that's where I am right now there we go hang on if I select the right record United Kingdom we're going to create a region policy and we're going to say identifies UK PPI documents and information so what this is doing is it's going to be looking for anything that is within a UK class as UK personally identifiable information so it's looking for driving license numbers, electoral numbers, national health numbers, passport numbers, all sorts of things like that. And then we can then assign a classification. So then automatically any document that's uploaded that matches one of those patterns would automatically be assigned that criteria so it couldn't be downloaded. So there's a lot of things you can do here.

46:28The other thing that Zoho have been doing a lot of recently is around data retention. So this again is something that if you're administering other file systems, you'll be used to this kind of thing. So right now, if you delete a file within WorkDrive, you can set up a retention so we make sure that file is set as captured for a longer period. So right now it's by default never, but I can set a 30 day retention history so that I can automatically make sure I'm keeping that data for 30 days and then it can be permanently deleted. So again, we've got a lot more options here around what our possibilities are.

47:07If you do have very, very large files, you can also now set up custom retention rules. So if I go into, say I've got a large file here, I can also go in to manage that file and I can edit the retention rules and the version rules for that particular file as well. So you can see I can do that here. Now, what I really like about the retention stuff and the version history is the fact you don't really need to think about it. So if you save a file and then you upload it, come back a couple days later, save a new version, Zoho is automatically capturing each version and you can at any point revert back.

47:42So if I want to revert back to this one, I can revert back or in fact, I can even download it as its own version. I can save it as keep it forever to say I always want to keep that version. And it just gives you more control again over that data. Now, the final thing I want to touch on on WorkDrive, because again, I think potentially there's a whole webinar and what's possible in WorkDrive. But I wanted to talk about the other new thing in here, which is workflows. So workflows are a way now of setting up processes to manage documents. So what this might look like if I go into settings is we've got a couple of examples of workflows here.

48:19So this is a review and approval workflow. If I open it up, you'll see I've got the different fields required for this workflow. But more importantly, I've got this is the workflow design. So when a file starts in the workflow, I'm going to have a button to be able to send it for review. that is then going to move the file to a review requested status if you've ever used blueprints in a CRM this kind of thing is going to be really really familiar to you once that review is completed I can then approve the request and it's all approved but it might be that I want to suggest a change in which case I can go to change suggested and I can go through that process again Let me show you how this works. So let's go in to our files here and let's just upload.

49:08In fact, let's use this one here. Let's just remove that confidential tag. See, I can do this because I'm an admin. A standard user wouldn't be able to do that. And let's just rename this just for the benefit of being able to remember which one it is. So let's just call this demo. Perfect. So I'm going to right click and I'm going to put in start a workflow and I'm going to say it needs review and approval. I can put in the reviewer's details and automatically they can get an email when I do this. I'm also going to put an approval. I can put in any notes. I'm just going to put my email address.

49:41I can put in some dates if I want to and I can send for review. What that will do is one, it's going to send the reviewer an email to let them know they need to review this document. But also it's going to add them into this workflow section so I can see, OK, this demo document is waiting on me. is waiting on my action is currently in review requested. I can view the document and you can see here a timeline of what's happened with that document. At this point I may well suggest changes. So I'm gonna go back and say, do this and this, hit submit.

50:17What that will then do is that will then move it out of my view. Now in my case, I am both the reviewer and the approver. So it's made a little bit weird. Obviously, if you had a bigger organization than just me, you'll be able to have this set up with a multi-stage workflow. So I can see that that's now in there. So I can view activity and I'm going to resubmit for review because I've made the changes. I can add some notes. And now finally, as the reviewer again, I can go in and I can complete review. I can say I'm happy with it. And we've then gone through the process with that file.

50:52Now, where I see this being useful, because I think on its own, it could be quite limiting, but where I see it being useful is managing of contracts. So if there is contracts that you're being sent or you need to be sent out and you want to make sure it's going for a certain process, this would be a great way of managing that. Could be marketing material. So it might be that someone's created some artwork for marketing and he needs to get approval from marketing manager. This is a great way to manage that process of it going through the right person.

51:18They're getting alerts. And of course, all that history is tracked within Zaha WorkDrive as well. So it just gives you a little bit of flexibility. The other thing about this I really like is we entered our files into the workflow manually that time, but actually you can do it dynamically. So we can set a rule to say any file that's uploaded by Jake goes into this process or any file that's uploaded into the marketing folder goes through this workflow. So it gives you a real flexibility and it just gives you visibility of what's going on and it beats having the this is the stage one folder this is the stage two folder instead we've got a proper process in the system for it so final thing then is let's move on to sort of the lightning round and some questions so the first thing on my lightning round today is Zoho analytics so if you're an analytics user and you're using Zoho One up until pretty recently you've been stuck with only being able to sync data Zoho Analytics every three hours which means if you're trying to do sales reports that three hour window is probably too big for them to be as useful as you want them to be. Thankfully Zoho has finally listened and you can now go into edit setup within your Zoho Analytics and you can set the sync down to a single hour hit save and it will now sync your data on an hourly basis this applies pretty much across all of the Zoho apps from what I've seen and it applies to most of the third party syncs there are still limitations third party wise because it'll depend on the third parties open us with Zoho but for the Zoho apps this is a huge win for me and the fact that you can now have reports that are updated every hour is brilliant so a quick little one for us there There are a couple of other smaller things within analytics as well.

53:08They've rebuilt and redesigned how the conditional formatting works and a couple of other things as well. But because we're a bit pushed to time, I'll skip over those now. Maybe we'll come back to those in the next webinar. They've also done some more stuff around machine learning. So their auto ML and their what if analysis has had some upgrades. Again, that's probably a conversation for another day because that's getting into quite a deep topic there. Final couple of ones is Zoho Forms now has a new layout. So if you're using Zoho Forms on your website, previously you've pretty much had to have all of your fields stacked on top of each other, which sometimes can make quite a long form.

53:46So if I've got names, so name is first name and last name, that's next to each other. So that's nice. But then if I start adding other fields, they're all on top of each other. And very quickly, this can become a long list. Thankfully, we finally now have columns. So I can now put those next to each other just to make things look a little bit nicer. I can even do three columns if I want and you can put things next to each other. And it just makes it a little bit less of a long scrolling list. And when I access that, you can see it just looks a little bit cleaner.

54:17And I like that it keeps all the lines right as well. So they all line up properly. So a small, but I think quite welcome update there. And the final one isn't even on my list because literally I've seen this just before I was getting ready today because this was only announced four hours ago. Zoho Commerce is getting a redesign. So if you're not using Zoho Commerce, it is Zoho's online store builder. So kind of their equivalent to something like WooCommerce, but it's not quite as open as WooCommerce. But it integrates with Zoho Inventory, integrates with Zoho Books. It can work really nicely for specific types of businesses.

54:54it doesn't work for everybody but they've just given it a nice redesign here from what I can tell for the most part it is more around looks but there is a couple of things in here around abandoned carts wish lists and the loyalty program as well I haven't had a chance to try this one out for myself yet as I said this was only announced today but I wanted to call it out because a redesign of anything is always a bit exciting it just means Zoho's giving the app some more attention and hopefully it means there's even more to come as well. And then the final thing is within reports in CRM you can now do record currency when you're looking at revenue. So previously if you had multi-currency enabled it would display everything in your home currency and it would do an on-the-fly conversion. Now it can display it in the local currency which if you're dealing with large numbers and exchange rates are constantly changing just gives you a little bit more certainty over what your numbers are. That's everything for today. It's a little bit rapid fire. Does anybody have any questions or any thoughts before we wrap up? Oh, thanks, Rob. Thank you from you, which is great. Let's have a look at our poll, actually, because I've not had a chance to look at that whilst I've been talking. So it looks like the winner for the next one is reporting and analytics, which I think would be really exciting.

56:15Any clients will tell you that's my favourite thing to talk about is reporting and analytics. Quite possibly bang on about it too much, according to some of them, because it's always what I want to focus on is making sure we have good reporting. So I'll definitely be up for doing that as a webinar very soon. Right after this webinar, when I end this, you'll be redirected to a new sign up page for the same kind of webinar for the end of July. I think I'm going to keep trying this for the next couple of months to see how we get on with these monthly updates.

56:44If anything, it's great for me because it gives me an opportunity to run through everything that's new. But yeah, if you want to join again at the end of next month to go through all the updates that are coming in July, please do. And I will let everyone know on that reporting and analytics webinar because I'm definitely keen to do that. I'm actually off on holiday to Egypt after this, so it's not going to be today. Sometime when I'm back from holiday, I will send everyone a nice email about doing reporting and analytics in Zyco CRM. I think that's everything then. No more questions. Perfect. Okay, well, thank you very much, everybody. Have a nice weekend, and I'll speak to you all on the next webinar.

57:20Goodbye.