The Challenge

IntellectAbility adopted Zoho One about four years ago and initially focused on sales and marketing. As they grew, they layered in service delivery, ecommerce (WooCommerce), and training registrations—but their Zoho environment hadn’t been architected to handle the full lifecycle from webform to invoice to reporting.

They had worked with multiple independent Zoho consultants, each solving small pieces in isolation. This led to fragmented logic, inconsistent lead assignment, and brittle automations—especially around webform submissions, contract signing, WooCommerce orders, and training registration flows. They needed a partner who could understand the whole ecosystem and create solutions that their internal team could support long-term.

Why It Mattered

For IntellectAbility, every interaction—whether a downloadable resource, bookstore purchase, or training registration—needs to tie back to the same customer story. If webforms don’t consistently create or update the right records, contracts don’t close deals correctly, or ecommerce orders don’t sync to Books, teams have to patch things manually. That increases risk, slows down operations, and limits visibility into who’s buying what, when, and why.

They wanted a Zoho environment where marketing, sales, finance, and operations all share clean, reliable data—without needing a developer for every small change.

The Zenatta Solution

Zenatta focused on stabilizing and extending IntellectAbility’s Zoho stack, starting with CRM workflows, then expanding into Forms, Flow, Books, Analytics, Sign, Campaigns, Desk, and WooCommerce integrations.

• Standardized Webform & Lead Handling (CRM + Forms + Flow):
  • Refactored a large, legacy “form submission upsert” function that creates or updates Leads/Contacts from webform data, fixing logical errors and adding null checks so it runs reliably even on edge cases.
  • Introduced a new version of the function and retro-ran it on historic submissions to correct previously incomplete records.
  • Built a Note-based pattern: when a note titled “Form Submission Message” is created on a Lead or Contact, its content is stored in a dedicated field and merged into “New Webform Submission” email alerts sent to the record owner.
  • Improved lead assignment rules and internal owner alerts for form submissions, including fallback logic that routes alerts to a shared reception inbox when the owner is a generic/System Admin user.
• Deal, Contract & Zoho Sign Automation:
  • Updated a CRM function so that when a Zoho Sign document is completed, the signed document is automatically attached to the related Deal and used to reliably drive stage updates (e.g., Closed Won) when criteria are met.
  • Created guidance and templates so that Sign workflows use the Deal Name for document naming and ensure the document flows cleanly into downstream processes.
  • Debugged multiple scenarios where Sign events did not update Deals, improving the logic used to uniquely identify the correct Deal from the Sign request.
• WooCommerce → CRM & Books Integration (Flow + Books + CRM):
  • Consolidated a complex WooCommerce-to-Books integration into a single, well-structured Zoho Flow function that:
    • Parses WooCommerce order data.
    • Finds or creates the correct Lead/Contact and Account in CRM.
    • Syncs customer data into Zoho Books.
    • Creates invoices and payments, including transaction fee handling.
  • Added robust duplicate handling: when both a Lead and Contact exist with the same email, the flow sends targeted notifications and creates “Duplicate record” Tasks for the correct owner to reconcile—without blocking invoice creation.
  • Enhanced error handling so that even when lead conversion fails due to an existing contact, invoice and payment creation still proceed using the contact record.
  • Flagged “Bookstore Purchase” invoices with a dedicated checkbox and updated Analytics reports to provide clear views of bookstore sales.
• Training Registration Automation (VPCTTR Flow):
  • Refactored the VPCTTR (2 in 1) Zoho Flow that processes training registration forms once payment is completed.
  • Improved handling for both single-attendee and multi-attendee registrations.
  • Implemented logic that:
    • Checks for existing customers in Books and updates their address in both Books and CRM, or creates new customers when needed.
    • Creates or updates billing contacts (Finance/Billing) and attendee contacts (User/Gen. Employee) with correct phone and title mappings.
    • Ensures the customer is ready, then generates the invoice in Books and applies payment automatically.
  • Thoroughly tested the new flow and staged it for client-side activation and verification.
• Campaigns, Opt-In, and Engagement Management:
  • Created and refined custom views in Zoho Campaigns to identify active and engaged contacts, including exports of recent engagement (e.g., 120 days) for marketing strategy.
  • Built a new Zoho Form (ZForms) for communications opt-in and connected it via Zoho Flow to automatically remove email opt-outs in CRM when a contact re-subscribes.
  • Provided Loom-based guidance on integrating Zoho Survey responses into a dedicated “Survey Responses” module in CRM.
• CRM Ownership, Notifications & Email Integration:
  • Updated lead assignment rules and owner-notification workflows to ensure every newly created Lead or Contact from a form gets correctly routed and notified.
  • Built workflows that notify contact or lead owners with smart fallback behavior when System Admin is the owner.
  • Implemented a function to mass-update Contact owners based on their related Account, keeping ownership aligned as Accounts evolve.
  • Troubleshot multi-domain IMAP behavior and documented how Desk and CRM users can see the right inboxes when viewing Leads/Contacts.
• Analytics & Reporting Enhancements:
  • Improved the “New Customer Pivot” Analytics report with a more precise query that identifies the correct first invoice using both invoice date and invoice ID, ensuring accurate revenue attribution.
  • Added a flexible relative date filter (this month, last 3 months, previous year, etc.) to make the report usable for multiple time windows.
  • Updated bookstore and product cross-system reports (CRM vs. Books) so the team can quickly spot missing products and track bookstore-specific sales.

Results

While IntellectAbility has not yet formalized KPI-based metrics for these projects, the operational improvements are already visible across teams.

• More reliable webform-to-CRM processing with clear lead routing and owner alerts.
• Deals, contracts, and signed documents now stay in sync, reducing manual cleanup.
• WooCommerce orders flow cleanly into CRM and Books—even in complex duplicate scenarios.
• Training registrations and payments are handled through structured, testable Zoho Flow automations.
• Improved Analytics reporting for new customers and bookstore sales, enabling better decision-making.
• A growing internal confidence to maintain and extend Zoho without starting from scratch each time.

“Not only has Zenatta been able to quickly understand the challenges we’re trying to overcome, but they also offer workable solutions that can be supported by our internal team for the long term.”

– Brandon Lancaster, CTO, IntellectAbility