Process management capabilities in Zoho CRM — Comparison

Process management capabilities in Zoho CRM — Comparison

Process management solutions in Zoho CRM are primarily categorized under business process management and customer experience management. 

While business process management typically deals with streamlining internal process flows for operations and compliance, customer experience management deals with optimizing the customer journey across business touch points in order to maximize customer experience. It deals with ensuring that the customer is acknowledged, guided and hand held along every step of the way in their buying journey. From these two perspectives, we have specific solutions in Zoho CRM under business process management and customer experience management.



Let's look at how all the process management solutions work in the context of Zylker Travels, a travel management company that uses Zoho CRM.

BPM Solutions in Zoho CRM 

Blueprint  

When to use: When you have a need to promote compliance across teams in your organization. If you need to streamline internal processes effectively in order to guide your teams, validate data entered in the CRM, collaborate among stakeholders/departments, automate routine action and ultimately ensure compliance, then Blueprint is your solution. 

Scenario: 
Zylker Travels could have different processes for effective travel management and customer relationship building. For instance, they could have a travel enquiry management process based on the Enquiries module. They could have a Trip Management process for the Trips module. They could also have a customer ticket handling process for the Cases module and so on. This is because Blueprint directly addresses the concept of BPM and is designed for internal teams to adhere to processes and ensure compliance.

From that angle, here is a blueprint for Zylker's trip management in action.


Backend process flow: 
 

Approval Process and Review Process 

When to use: If you want to set up a simple internal process for the manual validation of data entered into CRM, you may use approval or review process. Both approval and review processes automate the submission of data for the purview of the management based on specific criteria. Let's say you have a process guideline that says a discount of under 12% can be offered directly by the sales person but anything beyond this number should be approved by senior managers based on their discretion. In this case, whenever a deal reflects a more than 12% in the discount field, it should be automatically submitted for senior management's review/approval. For this scenario, approval and review processes can be configured. 
  1. For quick validation of data entered for specific fields, you may use review process. Any of the selected users can review data and approve the fields. 
  2. For an elaborate scrutinization of records by multiple members of the management and to enable a sequential or parallel system of review, you may choose approval process. 
In both cases, the submission of records is automated for manual approval of the selected users. 

Approval process example: Whenever a trip with a discount of more than 12% is submitted, the trip gets submitted automatically for manual approval. Until it gets validated by a panel of approvers in a sequential or parallel manner and exits the approval process, it cannot be modified or deleted and will not participate in any other CRM functions. The approver can access the record from My Jobs module for approval or rejection. 

 
 
Review process example: Whenever an enquiry is added with Employee referral as the lead source, the name of the employee and a few other enquiry parameters are required to be reviewed by the sales manager. This review is important to consider referral discounts, upselling and cross-selling and other possibilities in the business. 
Learn more>> 


Customer Experience Capabilities in Zoho CRM 

Journey Builder 

Zylker Travels wishes to ensure that their customers are given a great experience across enquiry and trip booking and beyond. 

So here is a simple journey designed for them. Whenever an enquiry is created either via webform or other means in CRM, they automatically get a series of emails. If a customer successfully opens the introductory email and subsequently responds with a selection on their Preferred Destination survey, then they are automatically converted to a contact so that a sales person can handhold them further, and a trip record is created automatically under the Trips module. 


This journey could be extended further to proceed to handle escalations filed by the customer and further retention efforts such as feedback survey triggers and loyalty programs— however for the sake of this example, let's see how this simple flow works when in action. 


Here is the backend Journey Builder flow to ensure this seamless orchestration of engagement actions. 


In continuation with the above flow, if the customer raises an issue with the trip, the Journey Builder is designed to alert the Customer service teams as well as trigger a supportive email to the customer.

Now, there could be a separate Blueprint in place to ensure sub-processes that seem to be a part of this overall journey.
  1. Say when a trip is automatically created, then the sales person has to navigate the trip management process for the customer based on the steps and mandates involved. The Journey Builder is not going to dictate such steps — it merely ensures that when the customer interest has been captured, the right conversion happens, which will get them the right kind of help at the right point. 
  2. Then there could be an elaborate Blueprint for case resolution. How the customer service rep handles the escalation could be defined in that Blueprint—the steps, attachments, and emails and the whole jazz— but the Journey Builder here again ensures that the right kind of experience is delivered to the customer.
So, a Journey Builder could span across touch points in the customer lifecycle and attempt to deliver what they need at the right time and also ensure that no customer is left alone or detached from the business at any given point.

Path Finder  

Path Finder is an out-of-the-box solution for you to plot your business touch points and figure out how your customer traverse between those touch points. Do they visit your website and then drop an email and then wait for a call? Do they spend a lot of time on your website and drop away after that? In that case, that is a good point to plant a live chat widget and reach out to your visitors. 


In the context of a Zylker's travel company, let's say they have their presence on a lot of travel booking and review sites such as MakeMyTrip, Agoda, and so on. How are the customers traversing between these sites and the main website? Are a lot of bookings made directly from the third-party websites? Or are a lot of drops happening on third party sites— that is after visiting reviews, are they not proceeding towards purchase? In that case you may want to plant a chat or a Help widget to help them move forward in their journey. 


So Path Finder helps you plot your business touch points and discover valuable insights about how your customers and prospects communicate with your business across these touch points and how they call connect in the form of a "path". This could help you unearth meaningful truths and equip you with the knowledge required to make informed decisions. 


This could also potentially help you improve your customer journey. For example, you could understand that missed chats is an important touch points for which you may not have configured any engagement plans in your Journey Builder. With the Path Finder insights as solid source of truth, you can go ahead and configure chat responses and other plans in your customer journey. This way you stop operating based on assumptions and have detailed insights to back you up on your decisions. 

Cadence Studio  

Cadence Studio is Zoho CRM's out-of-the-box solution for streamlining customer follow-up conversations. To put things in perspective, Cadence studio could be seen as a subset of the Journey Builder. If your requirement is only to streamline follow-up responses, then Cadence Studio is the right solution for you. If, apart from follow-ups, if you want an end-to-end journey mapping to be made and ensure customer experience is maximized, then as you know, Journey Builder is the right solution.

Here is a simple follow-up sales cadence to make sure that a combination of email, task, or call actions are created for each customer based on their response to a previous communication attempt. You can enroll your customers into a cadence with an objective—such as receiving a response to an email or a call. Once that response has arrived, it means the objective of your cadence is met, and that will drop the customer out of the cadence, which here is called un-enrolment. Until this objective is reached, you can continue to orchestrate a series of follow-up attempts as seen fit.  



 When to use which process management solution in CRM

If your requirement is
Then use
To promote compliance across teams
Blueprint
To streamline personalized engagement actions across business touchpoints to your customers.
Journey Builder
To plot the business touchpoints and to trace a customer's journey between them
Path Finder
To streamline the scrutiny of data and be able to approve or reject records as part of a business process.
Approval/Review process
For a customized dedicated console or widget deployed at convenient locations in the CRM in order to carry out on-demand actions.
Kiosk Studio


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