Zopim is now integrated with Zoho CRM! To find out how it works, read our detailed guide here.
Arvind from Zoho CRM has also published our guest post (below) on their blog.
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Zopim integrates with Zoho CRM
31 Jan 2011
This is a guest post by Qing Ru, VP Marketing of Zopim.
If there is one thing that differentiates Zoho CRM from its competitors, it’s the way they excel at managing leads and contacts. That’s something many salespeople appreciate: the ability to store everything about a customer under one page, including emails, activities and product purchases. And we are just about to make it better.
With the recent integration that Zopim did with Zoho CRM, salespeople will get the edge they always needed – the ability to draw upon every single conversation they had with a customer.
Zopim is an award winning proactive chat tool that many small medium businesses use to chat with their website customers. With this integration, Zopim automatically pulls out the customer’s details from Zoho CRM prior to the start of a chat conversation. So before the customer starts typing his first word, the salesperson already knows who he is, and he can read all their previous conversations before greeting him like an old friend.
Most importantly, salespersons do not need to fuss over manually inputing customer’s details nor meddle with the CRM interface. At the end of every chat session, a link automatically shows up, giving salesperson the option of saving the chat under the contact’s profile with just one simple click.
A detailed guide on how to set up the integration is available here. For more screenshots and detailed walkthrough, this post will be beneficial.
I was thrilled to hear of the Zoho integration; it is certainly the missing piece we've been searching for. The current issue however is that those from our website that we would be interested in adding to Zoho are leads and certainly not cases. Will you be offering the option to add these chats to leads or even prospects? The 'cases' module in Zoho is meant for something else entirely and would only serve to have redundant and faulty data added to the system.
You're right Marc, some users would want to save the transcript as "Contact" or "Lead". Most CRM actually allow users to convert Cases into Leads, and it's a pity that Zoho CRM doesn't make allowances for that. Not to worry, I will discuss this with the technical team and let you know.
Thank you for your response Qingru, please let me know if/when this change is made. It is odd to me however that in their description of this new integration, they suggest it is a tool for salespeople (“salespeople will get the edge they always needed”) and ‘cases’ are for support personnel. Very strange indeed.
Where’s the capability to do our own integrations? Great that you’re doing integrations with various CRM solutions, but there are thousands of applications out there, and you won’t cover them all (let alone the bespoke ones).
Do you have plans to give you users’ dev teams this capability?
Hey Damien,
You’re right, doing the integrations ourselves is definitely not scalable. At the start, we are just want to integrate with the apps we love, that our users use, those we think are awesome and fantastic – but are unlikely to initiate an integration with us.
It’s unsustainable of course to keep building integrations ourselves one after another, especially for a small company like us. Despite our growth spurts, we are still an early stage web company trying to constantly improve our core product (i.e. live chat) and enhance the user experience both for support reps and website visitors. That’s our strength and our focus when it comes to development. That is also why our integration library was built to scale, such that we could do all ten integrations in 2 weeks (no easy feat i tell ya).
Eventually, we want an ecosystem to form around us, with more new startups building integrations with us. So, yes, API is definitely in the pipeline, but only after the new Dashboard is rolled out, iterated, and improved on. Also, despite the fact that almost all the kickass companies we integrated with have (or are going to) featured us, we are still trying to ‘get it right’ marketing to their users. Because building an integration is not as easy as throwing something out there and expecting people to use it, they have to be convinced that it makes sense for their business, and I tend to think different companies have users of different demographics even though they might be selling the same thing (i.e. CRM).
OK, I went ahead of myself, sorry! Short answer: yes we are building an API. In the meantime, if you think we have missed out on any kickass companies, drop us names!
Cheers,
Qing
The Zoho Integration is suddenly broken. No change on my end and all of a sudden it no longer is talking. What happend?
Hey Richard,
Is there still an issue? If there is could you drop us a ticket at support [at] zopim [dot] com its much easier for us to keep track of these things and assign the issues to the relevant people.