The CRM Zen Show Episode 412 – Unexpected Agent In The Kiosk Area

Zoho News

Zoho CRM: Zia Agents in Kiosk Studio

Zoho put it well in the release post: AI agents are probabilistic, but business workflows require determinism. The fix is letting you drop a Zia agent as a defined step inside a Kiosk flow. The agent does its work, returns a response, and a human validates it before the process continues. Tyler’s example of calculating a potential discount on a deal captures the use case perfectly: structured, bounded, with a person still in the loop. Expect a tip video on this one.

Zoho CRM: Revamped Import Experience

The headline numbers are impressive: Enterprise limits jump from 30,000 to 100,000 records, and Excel and CSV limits are now unified. But the bigger deal for most people is that you can finally import directly into inventory modules and their line items, sub forms, and multi-lookup fields. That eliminates the loading module workarounds Zenatta has been using for years. Tag importing now supports append rather than replace-only, and notes can be imported with a caveat to use the migration tool if accurate system-created timestamps matter.

Zoho CRM: Criteria-Based Follow-Ups in Cadences

Cadences can now branch based on record field criteria, not just communication response signals. That means you can exit or continue a sequence based on a status change that happened outside the original outreach, like a prospect calling in and converting directly. New negative email signals, including “not opened,” “not replied,” and “opened but not replied,” round out the branching options.

Zoho CRM: May 2026 Community Digest Part 2

The May Part 2 digest covers Projects in CRM Team Spaces for the CRM for Everyone edition, the ability to switch between LLMs in Zia on the fly, and a reminder that the old CRM UI is going away on July 15th. Native dark mode in the new UI is a welcome addition.

Zoho Forms: Form Encryption

Enable encryption at the org level, then toggle it on per individual form. Submissions are locked behind a six-character access code with a 30-minute session window, so even users with general form access can’t browse raw entry data without the code. Trade-offs include no field data in notifications or email merges, and integrations and webhooks are blocked by default unless explicitly allowed.

Zoho Sign: Mail Merge Templates

Sign now supports Writer-based mail merge templates, so you can do inline variable merges on proposals and contracts rather than being stuck with fixed-width box overlays on a PDF. If you’re already working from CRM, the CRM mail merge flow is still the cleaner path, but for anyone working outside CRM this fills a gap the product has had for a while.

Zoho Lens: Introducing Zia Answer Bot

Zia Answer Bot is now available inside Zoho Lens, giving technicians a way to query their company’s knowledge base from within a live session without leaving the screen. It’s the technician using it, not the customer. For the kind of complex machinery and technical documentation scenarios where Lens makes sense, having an AI shortcut to troubleshooting content mid-call is a real time saver.

Zoho Writer: Desktop 4.0 Release

The desktop app now supports ODT, TXT, and Markdown formats alongside DOCX, brings the updated GUI from the web app to the desktop, and adds offline Zia spell check so documents can be proofed without an internet connection.

Zoho Workplace: May 2026 Product Updates

The May roundup spans Mail, WorkDrive, Show, Sheet, and more, with highlights including multi-attachment drag-and-drop directly to WorkDrive from the mail client and the continued rollout of Writer’s refreshed classic word processor UI across the suite.

Zoho PDF Editor: Expanded PDF Management APIs

Zoho PDF Editor has added more page-level REST API operations including insert, split, extract, replace, and rotate pages, plus storage-direct output options that push results straight into Zoho WorkDrive rather than returning a download-only link.

Zoho Billing: Secure Public Links for Invoices and Quotes

Zoho Billing now lets you share invoices and quotes via secure public links, giving customers a direct way to view and pay transactions without logging into a portal.

Zoho Show: 20 Year Anniversary

Zoho Show is marking 20 years with a community retrospective looking back at the product’s history and how it has evolved since launch.

Code Share of the Week

Format a JSON string in Deluge for human readability on export

Greg built this one, with a Claude assist, after getting tired of copying raw JSON payloads into an external formatter while debugging. The script takes a JSON object, converts it to a string, then walks through every character and inserts line breaks and indentation based on bracket, colon, and comma positions. Three config variables at the top handle the newline character, indent character, and step size, so it adapts to wherever you’re sending output: email, Cliq, a webhook payload, whatever. The main use case is cleaner debug emails during testing, where you might fire the same payload a dozen times with minor changes and don’t want to keep re-pasting into a JSON formatter. Note that Cliq has a 5,000-character message limit, so for large payloads, sending to your inbox is the cleaner move.

This Week’s Blog

Zoho CRM Workflow Rules: What a Workflow Is and How It Works

A foundational explainer on what a workflow rule actually is in Zoho CRM, clarifying the terminology gap between Zoho’s definition (one discrete if-then automated step) and how the word “workflow” is used almost everywhere else (the entire multi-step process). Includes an FAQ section at the bottom.

Tips and Tricks

Layouts Tutorial for Zoho CRM

Covers when to use separate layouts vs. layout rules, and how to make sure leads and deals convert to the right layout when you have multiples set up.

Mail Merge Tutorial for Zoho CRM

Updated walkthrough of setting up a merge template, sending from a deal, and pushing it through Zoho Sign for customer signature.

Question of the Week

Iterate through sub-form rows in a HTML snippet – Zoho Creator

Milind asked how to loop through sub-form entries passed as page parameters to an HTML snippet in Zoho Creator. Greg’s answer: decode the incoming parameter string, parse it into a list based on the delimiter, then use a for-each loop inside the snippet. The key thing to get right is wrapping all Deluge logic in carrot-percent tags so the engine knows what’s code and what’s HTML, otherwise it tries to render your Deluge as markup and you end up with query string text sitting in the middle of the page.

This Week’s Quizzes

• Monday Quiz: How does SlyteUI’s rendering method differ from traditional iframe-based tools?
• Wednesday Quiz: How has the process for creating items with variants been updated?