At Hero, we’re all in on the Zoho platform and especially since the launch of the Zoho One bundle, our customers have been finding ways to use multiple apps within the suite of apps. No longer just using Zoho CRM for their sales teams, they are building their entire sales, marketing and operations with Zoho as the hub.
One of our big focuses at Hero is the development of integration between systems. We do this frequently between Zoho apps – sometimes using native integrations, and other times writing scripts and workflows to connect things in new ways. We also do this between Zoho and external or “third party” apps, so that customers who are using tools outside of the Zoho platform can continue to use them while getting the benefits of an integrated system.
Integration allows you to do things that would otherwise be too time consuming or error prone to justify doing them, but can come with significant results. It can also enable otherwise inconceivable options and build things that are bigger than the applications themselves.
For example, it allows you to take phone numbers and validate them before having your sales team call leads. Integration lets you get metrics back from multiple systems to get a complete picture of your customers and glean insights about customer retention from analytics you can now run. Integration lets you send out a proposal and then have a contract signed, a retainer invoice sent, and a new job dispatched to scheduling all without any delays or manual steps.
Let’s consider a practical scenario: one of our customers is a dealer that is part of a corporation that requires them to use a proprietary order management system. This system has a list of their customers and it is responsible for processing every order that is put in, containing data about the products that are ordered and the AR information for each account. However, the system is limited in its extensibility and doesn’t provide much in the way of a CRM or the ability to automate.
With an integration we built, we are able to pull in the data from their order system on a daily basis. Having this order data within Zoho CRM means that we can now do things like:
- See customer order history, knowing what products they have purchased in the past and with what frequency
- Understand what categories someone has bought from and know what potential cross sells to offer
- Have AR history and send automated reminders to follow up on overdue accounts
- Easily see the dates of last orders and order amounts
- Get notifications of customers who have bought in the past but have stopped or decreased their business
We at Hero would love to have a conversation with you about the systems you use and explore if there are opportunities to take advantage of what integration has to offer.
Len Kamerman
CEO & Zoho Architect