[Zoho CRM] Streamline Workflows with Activity Extraction, Query Suggestions, and Advanced Analytics

[Zoho CRM] Streamline Workflows with Activity Extraction, Query Suggestions, and Advanced Analytics

Dear all,

Zoho is excited to introduce a series of quick yet impactful enhancements to our Activity Extraction in Email IntelligenceAsk Zia, and Zia Presentation features.

The enhancements include:
  • Multiple activity support in Activity extraction
  • Capturing commitments from sent emails
  • Query suggestion in Ask Zia
  • Story mode for Zia Presentation
  • Best time analytics and VoC forecast charts in Zia Presentation
These updates bring added depth and efficiency to how you manage email information, simplify data retrieval with Ask Zia, and provide detailed insights in the form of meaningful stories for your presentations. Let's dive in.

1. Enhancements in Activity extraction


Zia has excelled at extracting vital information from emails to generate CRM activities, greatly improving the process of capturing key details such as meeting schedules, task assignments, or call plans directly from emails. This functionality has minimized the need for manual data entry and significantly reduced the potential for errors. Zoho is now elevating this feature to a new level with their latest enhancements.

  • Multiple activity support
    Previously, it was only possible to capture a single activity from an email, even if the email contained mentions of multiple activities. The activity that was captured would be the one with the earliest due date or time. Now, Zia is capable of recognizing multiple activities within a single email and recommending the creation of those activities in your CRM.

    You can change the configurations if needed, or proceed with the activity creation as it is.

    Multiple activities can also be captured from the Zia notification panel. If you have activity extraction notifications enabled, Zia will display up to two activities along with their due dates in the panel notification. By clicking on the notification, you can proceed to view the full email and configure the activities from there.


  • Capturing commitments from sent emails
    Zia now has the capability to identify and categorize commitments made by CRM users or sales reps in emails. This includes references to meetings, calls, and tasks agreed upon with customers, enabling these activities to be recorded within your CRM.

    Once you send an email containing a commitment, Zia will display a link in the sent email confirmation message. Clicking this link opens a pop-up, allowing for the quick creation of the commitment activities.

    This guarantees that all commitments made to customers are meticulously tracked and addressed, ensuring that no critical detail in emails is overlooked.

2. What's new in Ask Zia?


Ask Zia simplifies your workflow by retrieving data, managing tasks, and providing intelligent insights. Whether it's pulling up sales figures, scheduling meetings, or offering predictive analytics, Ask Zia is designed to streamline your CRM experience with ease and efficiency.
  • Introducing query suggestion
    Zoho has supercharged Ask Zia with advanced query suggestion capabilities, making your interactions with Zoho CRM faster and more intuitive than ever.

    If you type front slash "/" in the Ask Zia chat window, Zia will instantly suggest queries—relevant questions based on your CRM usage pattern. Once you start typing a query, Zia dynamically generates suggestions based on the keywords you enter. You can easily select from these suggestions or continue typing your query.

    For instance, just hitting "/" could bring up a personalized list of your frequent queries like "Show campaigns with campaign owner as myself and status as active" or "Show deals with amount greater than 1000".Ask Zia QS 1.png

    These immediate suggestions save overall time, speeding up your CRM interactions. Zia also adapts to your specific CRM usage habits and thereby keeps changing the suggestions over time.

3. Story mode and advanced analytics in Zia Presentation


Zia's presentation tool uses algorithms to auto-generate professional, visually appealing presentations with charts and KPIs, saving time and ensuring data accuracy. This allows users to create slideshows quickly and concentrate on other tasks.

  • Zoho is now introducing the all-new Story Mode in Zia Presentation. This feature transforms your data into captivating narratives, highlighting key insights and trends in a coherent sequence. By making your presentations more engaging and easier to understand, it allows you to tell the story behind your data effectively.

    For instance, if Zia suggests graphs from the Deals module and finds a related forecast, it adds this forecast directly to keep the story flowing well. If no Deals graphs are suggested because Zia thinks you don't use that module much, it adds the forecast at the end instead.

  • To offer deeper insights into customer interactions and future trends, we've integrated advanced analytics into Story Mode, featuring the Best Time Analytics and VoC Forecast charts.

    The charts for VoC forecast includes:
  • Open deals categorized by the intent in the form of a pie or donut chart
  • Table for the deals lost based on the intent
  • Tabular representation of the main keywords for analyzing a forecast.Voc Charts.png
  • For Best Time Analytics, Zia shows important charts, like the best times to contact customers and how they interact. It uses data from individual users or the whole organization, depending on settings. If a manager adds team members, Zia includes their data in the analytics automatically.

Feature Availability:
  • The features and these enhancements are available for Enterprise and above editions of Zoho CRM with 20+ user licenses.
  • Activity extraction from emails and Ask Zia features are available across all data centers except CN and JP data centers and currently support only English language.
  • Zia Presentation is available for orgs in the US data center alone and supports all left to right (LTR) languages.
  • For more detail on the feature availability and limitations click here.
Let us know your feedback in the comments below.