Zoholics USA 2025 Pre-Event Sessions and New Features

As attendees prepare for Zoholics USA 2025, a palpable sense of anticipation surrounds the unveiling of new features and advancements across the Zoho suite. A consistent theme emerging from various sources points towards a significant emphasis on automation and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) as key drivers of innovation within the Zoho ecosystem. These advancements are poised to empower businesses with more efficient workflows, enhanced decision-making capabilities, and ultimately, a stronger competitive edge. 

• Zoho CRM:

  Zoho CRM is expected to showcase significant enhancements centered around the theme of enhanced automation in sales processes. The integration of AI-powered features, potentially leveraging Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, aims to facilitate smarter client acquisition strategies, deliver more personalized and impactful customer experiences, and significantly improve overall sales efficiency. Specific anticipated new features include more robust dashboard customization options, allowing users to apply real-time filters based on various criteria such as timeframes, specific users, picklist fields, and even tags. This granular filtering capability will enable users to instantly slice and dice their CRM data to gain immediate, actionable insights. Furthermore, the ability to download the underlying data of dashboard components in formats like CSV or Excel will allow for more in-depth analysis and reporting. In the realm of sales forecasting, Zoho CRM is expected to offer more accurate projections through the customization of which users are included in forecasts. This will allow for the exclusion of specific roles, entire sales territories, or even individual users who may not directly contribute to sales targets. Additionally, the introduction of owner and manager adjustments to revenue expectations will provide a more realistic and nuanced view of the sales pipeline.
  
  Communication within Zoho CRM is also set to receive significant updates with enhancements to the WhatsApp for Business integration, including the ability to create and get approval for message templates, associate these templates with automated actions, and engage in more streamlined conversations with threaded replies and the preview of audio messages. The exciting addition of Line integration will further expand communication channels, allowing businesses operating in regions where Line is popular to connect directly with prospects and customers from within Zoho CRM. Recognizing the importance of nurturing existing customer relationships, Zoho is anticipated to launch an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) add-on for Zoho CRM. This new feature will be designed to help businesses extract greater value from their existing accounts by enabling them to identify their most promising accounts, enrich these accounts with valuable data sourced from across the internet, and then execute highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. For sales teams focused on efficiency and accuracy in the quoting process, enhancements to the Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) capabilities within Zoho CRM are expected. These enhancements will likely include the expansion of Guided Selling support to encompass custom modules, allowing for a more seamless integration of guided selling into any sales process, ultimately improving the speed and accuracy of quote generation. Managing data access and collaboration effectively is crucial, and Zoho CRM is anticipated to unveil a significant makeover of its data sharing rules interface. This overhaul is expected to feature improved navigation, more detailed views of existing sharing rules, and simplified options for activating, deactivating, and even cloning sharing rules, along with enhanced search and filtering functionalities. Further refinements are expected in the areas of data management with updates to subforms, providing more granular control over data input and access permissions. Similarly, formula fields are anticipated to receive improvements, such as the introduction of auto-refresh capabilities for time-based formulas and the ability to define criteria for stopping formula executions, leading to more accurate and efficient data handling. To combat the growing issue of spam calls, Zoho CRM is expected to introduce a native telephony spam blocking feature, allowing users to create and manage block lists of unwanted contact numbers within the CRM's built-in telephony system and integrated third-party providers.
  
  Users of Zoho's Kiosk Studio can also look forward to enhancements aimed at improving overall control and usability, potentially including new options for displaying records and performing actions. For enhanced visibility of key performance indicators, Zoho CRM is likely to introduce features that allow users to lock shared dashboards to prevent unauthorized modifications and display large numbers in a shortened format for easier comprehension. Finally, to improve data quality and save valuable time, Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, is expected to receive updates that enable automatic data enrichment, seamlessly filling in missing details for Leads, Contacts, and Accounts within the CRM. The sheer breadth and depth of these anticipated updates in Zoho CRM underscore a clear strategic direction focused on enhancing user experience, ensuring greater data accuracy, and empowering sales teams with more intelligent and automated tools. The significant emphasis on automation across a wide range of functionalities indicates a strong drive to boost sales efficiency and minimize manual, repetitive tasks. Furthermore, the deep integrations with popular communication platforms like WhatsApp and Line highlight a growing recognition of the critical importance of meeting customers on their preferred channels. This move towards a more comprehensive omnichannel communication strategy within the CRM platform signifies a fundamental shift towards a more customer-centric approach to sales engagement.   

• Zoho Marketing Automation:
  Zoho Marketing Automation is poised to showcase advancements firmly rooted in the theme of delivering highly personalized and data-driven marketing experiences. These enhancements are expected to be significantly empowered by the integration of AI and sophisticated automation capabilities. A key anticipated new feature is the seamless integration with the popular e-commerce platform WooCommerce through a dedicated WordPress plugin. This integration will enable the automatic synchronization of crucial customer and order data, allowing marketers to create highly targeted campaigns and segment their audiences based on purchasing behavior, ultimately leading to a more effective e-commerce marketing strategy. To provide marketers with a more holistic understanding of their leads' journeys, Zoho Marketing Automation is expected to introduce smarter profile stitching.
  
  This enhancement to the existing Web Analytics feature will automatically link a lead's interactions across various touchpoints, including email engagement, website visits, and form submissions. This comprehensive view of the customer journey will empower marketers to tailor their efforts more effectively and deliver more relevant content. Campaign management is also set to receive improvements with the introduction of a Skipped Contacts Report. This new report will provide users with clear insights into why certain contacts might be skipped in their active marketing Journeys, simplifying troubleshooting and ensuring that campaigns stay on track for maximum impact. Recognizing the importance of data accuracy in marketing analytics, Zoho Marketing Automation is anticipated to unveil enhanced features for data accuracy.
  
  This includes improved bot filtering capabilities, designed to differentiate between genuine human engagement and automated activity like bot scans, ensuring more reliable open and click rates. Additionally, compliance with Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is expected to be addressed, providing marketers with more dependable engagement insights despite Apple's privacy changes. Expanding its data integration capabilities, Zoho Marketing Automation is also expected to introduce seamless integration with the cloud-based data warehousing service Snowflake. This integration will allow users to effortlessly import contacts from Snowflake into Zoho Marketing Automation for highly targeted campaigns, complete with field mapping and a one-way synchronization to keep data organized and up-to-date without manual intervention. Beyond these anticipated new features, Zoho Marketing Automation already boasts a comprehensive suite of robust functionalities for lead generation through signup forms, landing pages, and pop-ups, as well as sophisticated lead nurturing capabilities, behavioral marketing triggers, and the ability to create hyper-personalized customer journeys. The platform also offers powerful tools for multichannel marketing, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media integration, along with a dedicated marketing planner for efficient campaign management and advanced analytics for measuring campaign effectiveness. The planned updates to Zoho Marketing Automation strongly emphasize the critical role of accurate and comprehensive customer data in formulating and executing effective marketing strategies.
  
  The introduction of new integrations and enhanced reporting features aims to provide marketers with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of their target audience and the overall performance of their marketing campaigns. By prioritizing features that enhance data quality and provide a 360-degree view of customer interactions, Zoho is empowering marketers to make more informed decisions and implement more precisely targeted campaigns, which is essential for maximizing marketing ROI in today's highly competitive digital environment. Furthermore, the strategic integrations with key platforms like WooCommerce for e-commerce and Snowflake for data warehousing underscore Zoho's commitment to seamlessly connecting marketing efforts with a broader spectrum of valuable business data. This level of integration enables businesses to leverage sales data, customer purchase history, and other critical insights to craft more personalized and impactful marketing experiences. By effectively bridging the gap between marketing automation and other essential business systems, Zoho is facilitating a more unified and holistic approach to customer engagement, ultimately leading to increased conversion rates and the cultivation of stronger, more enduring customer relationships.   

• Zoho Finance (Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, etc.):

  The Zoho Finance suite is expected to highlight its ongoing evolution with a significant focus on integrating AI-powered features and further enhancing automation capabilities across its various applications. Anticipated advancements within Zoho Books include the potential introduction of AI-powered financial forecasting, enabling businesses to proactively anticipate cash flow trends and make more informed financial plans. Automation in the realm of tax compliance is also expected to be a key focus, with potential new tools designed to simplify the process of navigating complex and ever-changing regulations, reducing the stress and potential for errors associated with manual compliance efforts. Deeper and more seamless integration across the Zoho Finance suite, particularly between Zoho Books, Zoho Expense, and Zoho Inventory, is also anticipated.
  
  This enhanced interconnectedness aims to provide businesses with a comprehensive 360-degree view of their overall financial health, facilitating better oversight and more informed decision-making. For businesses managing projects and client billing, the introduction of robust features for real-time bank reconciliation and streamlined project billing processes is also expected. Attendees of Zoholics can also anticipate pre-event workshop sessions that will offer in-depth training on a wide array of Zoho Finance applications. These sessions are likely to cover Zoho Books for core accounting, Zoho Invoice for efficient invoicing and payment tracking, Zoho Inventory for managing stock levels and orders, Zoho Payroll for simplifying payroll processing, Zoho Billing for subscription and recurring billing management, Zoho Commerce for e-commerce functionalities, Zoho Expense for automated expense reporting, Zoho Practice for accounting professionals, Zoho Checkout for online payment processing, Zoho Payments for integrated payment solutions, and Vikra, Zoho's advanced inventory management system. These comprehensive workshop offerings underscore Zoho's commitment to providing thorough training across its entire finance suite.
  
  The anticipated advancements within Zoho's finance suite strongly suggest a strategic emphasis on leveraging the power of AI and automation to simplify inherently complex financial processes. This focus aims to improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and provide businesses with more insightful and forward-looking financial intelligence. This evolution signifies a clear move towards enabling more intelligent finance management within the Zoho ecosystem. Furthermore, the emphasis on deep and seamless integration across the various applications within the Zoho Finance suite underscores the critical importance of a unified platform for effectively managing all facets of a business's financial operations. This interconnectedness effectively eliminates data silos, significantly improves operational efficiency, and provides a holistic and comprehensive view of overall financial performance. By seamlessly connecting these various financial applications, Zoho empowers businesses to gain a complete understanding of their financial health, from the initial stages of invoicing and expense tracking to the complexities of inventory management and payroll administration. This unified approach fosters better collaboration between different departments within an organization and establishes a single, reliable source of truth for all financial data, ultimately leading to more accurate reporting and significantly improved decision-making capabilities.   

• Zoho Collaboration (Zoho Cliq, Zoho Projects, Zoho WorkDrive, etc.):

  Zoho's collaboration tools are expected to showcase significant enhancements focused on boosting team productivity and streamlining workflows through the strategic application of automation and the increasing integration of artificial intelligence. Potential new features across Zoho Cliq, Zoho Projects, and Zoho WorkDrive are anticipated to include enhanced team collaboration functionalities. These may involve more sophisticated automated task assignment capabilities, real-time synchronization of project updates to keep all stakeholders informed, and more intuitive and efficient file sharing mechanisms across different teams.
  
  Zoho WorkDrive is also expected to introduce advancements in file management, potentially including more robust file versioning control to track changes effectively and secure external sharing options to facilitate collaboration with partners and clients outside the organization. To further streamline project workflows, Zoho is likely to enhance the ability to seamlessly transition from initial brainstorming sessions and idea generation directly into the assignment of actionable tasks, all within a unified platform, fostering a more cohesive and efficient project lifecycle. Recognizing the increasing prevalence of remote and distributed teams, Zoho is also expected to focus on advancements specifically catering to their needs. This could include further improvements to remote collaboration tools within Zoho Cliq for enhanced communication and virtual teamwork, as well as more specialized project management features within Zoho Projects tailored to the unique challenges of managing geographically dispersed teams. Existing powerful collaboration tools within the Zoho ecosystem, such as Zoho WorkDrive for secure file sharing with external stakeholders,
  
  Zoho Meeting for conducting effective virtual communication and online meetings, and Zoho Connect for building a strong sense of community and fostering engagement among distributed team members, are also likely to be further emphasized and potentially receive updates. The significant emphasis on enhancing collaboration tools throughout the Zoho suite directly reflects the evolving nature of work, with a growing number of businesses embracing remote and hybrid work models. Zoho is strategically investing in developing features that empower teams to collaborate seamlessly and effectively, regardless of their physical location. This strategic focus ensures that businesses can maintain high levels of productivity and strong team cohesion in today's more flexible work environments. Furthermore, the increasing integration of automation within these collaboration tools signifies a clear drive to streamline team workflows, significantly reduce manual overhead, and ultimately free up employees to concentrate on more strategic and higher-value activities. This focus on automation across various collaborative processes aims to improve overall team efficiency and boost productivity.   

• Zoho Desk:

  Zoho Desk is anticipated to showcase its continued evolution with a strong emphasis on delivering exceptional and highly personalized customer support experiences. This is expected to be achieved through the strategic integration of AI-driven guidance and a focus on enhancing personalization at every touchpoint of the customer support journey. A key area of focus is likely to be the further enhancement of Zoho's AI assistant, Zia. Anticipated improvements include a deeper understanding of customer queries, enabling Zia to provide more nuanced and contextually relevant responses.
  
  Additionally, Zia is expected to become even more adept at handling routine customer support tasks with remarkable precision, all while maintaining a natural and conversational tone that customers expect. Zoho Desk is also expected to introduce more advanced AI-powered Guided Conversations. This feature aims to transform traditional, often rigid chatbots into highly responsive and empathetic support systems. These intelligent systems will be capable of autonomously handling a significant portion of customer requests, specifically those at levels 1 and 2, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. Furthermore, these AI-powered conversations will be able to contextually route customers to the most appropriate solutions, proactively suggest and even perform actions on the customer's behalf, and seamlessly escalate conversations to human agents when necessary. To empower human support agents and enhance their efficiency, Zoho Desk is likely to introduce a suite of intelligent response assistance features. This may include a Reply Assistant that analyzes customer queries for context and sentiment and suggests relevant responses by leveraging data from the knowledge base. A Content Generator could also be introduced to help agents craft tailored responses by utilizing both the knowledge base and broader open-domain data based on prompts provided by the agent.
  
  A Writing Assistant might offer intelligent linguistic recommendations to help agents refine their tone and communication style, while a Content Analyzer could evaluate responses to identify grammatical errors and improve overall clarity. For instant messaging channels, Zoho Desk is expected to make its Zia Answer Bot available across all platforms. This enhancement will provide 24/7 support by leveraging natural language processing and the organization's knowledge base to answer frequently asked customer queries. To provide agents with deeper insights into customer interactions, Zia is expected to gain the ability to analyze customer responses to identify underlying sentiment and key topics, enabling agents to make more informed decisions and tailor their subsequent interactions more effectively.
  
  Furthermore, Zia might be enhanced to automatically generate concise, one-click summaries of entire customer conversations, highlighting the customer's core needs and the support actions that have already been taken. The Guided Conversations builder is also anticipated to receive a significant redesign, featuring a cleaner and more intuitive user interface for improved navigation. This new builder may also include integrated flow metrics to help users measure the usage and drop-off rates of different conversation blocks, as well as block previews for a smoother bot-building experience. Additionally, the introduction of one-click integration blocks could allow for effortless connection with other applications within the Zoho ecosystem, such as CRM, Connect, Cliq, Projects, Mail, and Calendar, potentially without requiring any coding. To provide agents with a more comprehensive view of the customer's context, Zoho Desk is expected to introduce the ability to integrate external data directly into the platform. This could allow agents to track shipments on a live map, fetch order details from e-commerce platforms, or view invoices from finance tools, all within the Zoho Desk interface. Private extensions for custom modules might further enhance this capability by bringing in even more specific external data and triggering automated notifications for both agents and customers.
  
  To further empower agents and streamline workflows, Zoho Desk could introduce customizable buttons within the ticket interface. These buttons would allow agents to access external tools or trigger custom functions with a single click, effectively turning the ticket interface into a powerful command center tailored to their specific needs. For improved data handling, Zoho Desk is expected to introduce intelligent data fields that can perform real-time calculations based on values from other fields, eliminating the need for manual calculations and providing instant access to information like cost estimations, sales commissions, or available inventory stock directly within the ticket details page. Finally, Zoho is likely to focus on improving the accessibility and overall user experience of self-service options for customers. The comprehensive integration of AI across Zoho Desk clearly indicates a strategic focus on automating and significantly enhancing customer support operations.
  
  These AI-powered features are designed to improve the productivity of support agents, reduce response times for customers, and ultimately deliver more personalized and efficient customer service experiences. By leveraging AI for crucial tasks such as generating suggested responses, automatically summarizing conversations, and intelligently routing customer inquiries to the most appropriate agents, Zoho is empowering businesses to handle a greater volume of customer interactions with increased efficiency and accuracy. This not only leads to a more positive customer experience but also frees up human agents to concentrate their efforts on addressing more complex and critical customer issues that require a human touch. Furthermore, the strong emphasis on seamless integration with other Zoho applications and the ability to incorporate external data sources underscore the paramount importance of providing support agents with a unified and comprehensive view of the customer.
  
  This level of integration allows support agents to gain a holistic understanding of the customer's entire history and interactions with the business, including past support tickets, purchase details, and other relevant information. Armed with this complete context, agents are better equipped to offer more personalized, informed, and ultimately more effective resolutions to customer issues, leading to faster resolution times, increased levels of customer satisfaction, and stronger customer loyalty.   

• Zoho Creator:
  Zoho Creator is anticipated to further solidify its position as a leading low-code application builder, empowering businesses to develop custom applications tailored precisely to their unique operational requirements without the need for extensive traditional coding expertise. Attendees can likely expect to see announcements around enhanced automation capabilities within the platform, allowing businesses to further streamline repetitive tasks and optimize their core business processes through the creation of highly customized applications. Continued emphasis on seamless data integration is also expected, with Zoho Creator likely to showcase even more robust capabilities for easily connecting and consolidating data from a wide variety of sources.
  
  This will provide businesses with a unified and comprehensive view of their critical business information directly within the custom applications they build. Furthermore, Zoho is expected to highlight advancements in the integration of artificial intelligence within the Zoho Creator platform. This could involve the introduction of new AI-powered components and functionalities that would enable users to build more intelligent and sophisticated business applications with greater ease and speed than ever before. The ongoing development and enhancement of Zoho Creator, with its strong emphasis on low-code and no-code functionality and the increasing integration of sophisticated AI capabilities, clearly demonstrates Zoho's commitment to democratizing the process of application development.
  
  This strategic direction empowers a wider range of individuals within an organization, not just those with traditional programming backgrounds, to actively participate in the creation and deployment of custom solutions that directly address their specific challenges and opportunities. By providing a user-friendly platform that requires minimal to no traditional coding knowledge, Zoho Creator enables business users to rapidly prototype, build, and deploy applications that streamline their workflows and improve their efficiency. The increasing integration of AI further simplifies this process, allowing users to incorporate intelligent features and automation into their custom applications with greater ease, ultimately fostering a culture of innovation and enhancing organizational agility within the business.