New Zoho Chatbot Zia Geared for Small Business Teams

There’s a new AI chatbot geared specifically to small business sales teams. Zia Voice will do everything from analyzing email sentiment to answering questions on new leads, deal revenue, and monthly forecasts. The additions to Zoho’s AI-powered sales assistant provides a voice interface so sales people get the info they need without having to look at a screen.

Zoho’s additions make increased productivity possible.

Introducing Zoho Zia

“Information is always at users’ fingertips, thanks to Zia Voice and several newly added AI features in the system,”  said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist, Zoho.  “Users can summon Zia to pull whatever information they want from the CRM system on the go, right from the mobile app. Just ask Zia, like they would ask Siri or other voice assistant systems.”

Other features designed to help sales teams streamline their processes include real time updates on the best times to reach prospects. Zia also looks at interaction patterns and where a lead is in the sales pipeline suggesting the likelihood of a closure on any given deal.

“Zia analyzes various pieces of information automatically and suggests which prospects/deals to focus on. This way, businesses can prioritize on the right deals/prospects,” Vegesna says.

Statistics see this innovation coming at the right time.

“We see these advancements in AI and voice recognition leading the way into the next transformation of business applications,” says Sheryl Kingstone of 451 Research in a company release.  “Our recent research shows that 45% of the surveyed digital leaders are looking forward to use voice interface in the next 24 months.”

Zoho has also introduced Catalyst, a platform for Zoho CRM allowing small business to build custom mobile apps using serverless components so they can save on web server costs. Catalyst allows businesses to create internal apps for worldwide teams. It gets rid of the need for physical hardware and even allows for integration with third party servers.

The widgets that are available allow small businesses to build custom user interface components so they can work with Zoho CRM’s data in real time.

The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Zoho CRM have most of these new features now with some to be rolled out later.  Zoho CRM has three editions at prices ranging $12 – $45 /user/month The Ultimate Edition starts at $100 /user/month.

Zoho is a business operating system providing  a variety of productivity and collaboration tools. Zoho One is their integrated suite of business applications introduced in 2017.  They have headquarters in Pleasanton, California, and Chennai, India.

For more information on Zoho CRM, click here.

Image: Zoho

This article, "New Zoho Chatbot Zia Geared for Small Business Teams" was first published on Small Business Trends