The CRM Zen Show Episode 242 – It’s aZird It’s aZlane, It’s aZaaZThe CRM Zen Show Episode 242 –

Zoho News

• WorkDrive 4.0 Is Here!
  • One new feature worth mentioning that we’ve tested and is very good is WorkDrive Snap. If you need to make screen-share videos similar to Loom, Snap is an excellent alternative.
• Zoho Marketplace Celebrates 1 Million Installs
  • Shoutout to Zoho and all of the other creators for constantly adding new solutions to the marketplace.
• And Yet Again… More CRM Early Access
  • Workflow Rule Creation Based On Notes
    • Now you don’t need to use Flow to create this Workflow rule.
  • Send SMS Notifications Through CRM
    • Still in early development, but here is Zoho’s own SMS solution.
  • Voice-based forecast analysis in Zoho CRM
    • This combines your customer sentiment with your forecasting. 
• Zoho Books March 2023 Updates
  • You can now enable Tax Deduction at Source for clients and vendors and allow users to Tax Override in Sales Transaction. 
• Enhanced Analytics Powered By Zia Being Rolled Out
  • For those of you who like to utilize Zia, be sure to check out these enhancements being rolled out soon.
• New Zia Call Transcription and Intelligence in Zoho CRM
  • This will set up a custom field in the module for the call transcriptions.  
• New Email Configuration for CRM
  • This will solve a big pain point for many users on not losing emails when someone leaves the company.
• Groups UI Revamped In CRM
  • Being able to use these more intelligently is a nice QOL improvement.
• Bigin Mobile App Now Supports Connected Records
  • And to wrap it up with Zoho’s other CRM, Bigin keeps on pumping out updates with another great feature for mobile users.
    

Implementation of the Week

• Zoho Desk + Zoho Analytics Integration for Tracking Billing against Paid Support Agreements
  • In this implementation, our goal was to provide needed data to our client’s support team to know if their customer has enough hours to continue support, or if there needs to be a discussion about billing.
  • To accomplish this, we first built Analytics reports rolling up the total number of recurring support hours purchased by each client, as well as the number of hours billed during the current month so far.
  • Then, we set up functions triggering both on Ticket Creation and Timesheet Create/Edit. 
  • These functions check the Analytics data to compare the monthly billings (including the Timesheet that triggered the function) to the prepaid monthly hours.
  • Based on the comparison of the numbers, we can write back to the Ticket to identify if the Customer is covered, approaching their max, or overdrawn on the account.
  • These identifiers reset each month when the new billing cycle starts.

Code Share of the Week

• Convert GPS Degrees/Minutes/Seconds to Degree Decimals 
  • GPS Coordinates can be displayed one of two ways:
    • Degrees/Minutes/Seconds (DMS)
      • Example: 52°46’27.2″N 1°17’09.7″W
    • Degree Decimals (DD)
      • 52.774231, -1.286038
  • More often, you will need the Degree Decimals if you are sending GPS coordinates via API or if you want to calculate the distance between two GPS points. Here is a snippet that will convert the DMS format to the DD format.

New On Zenatta

• Zenatta Blogs
  • Project Management Styles
    • The best project management style is the one that works best for you.  Here is a general overview of most of the project management styles out there.

Tips and Tricks

• The New CPQ Functionality In Zoho CRM
  • Zoho recently released Configured Price Quote, and in this tutorial, we run through this piece of new functionality inside the CRM.