Zoho has enhanced its CRM app with new accounting and telephony functionality via integration with QuickBooks and several telephony systems.
Zoho CRM for QuickBooks and Zoho PhoneBridge — which hooks into PBX systems from Asterisk, Avaya, Elastix, and Trixbox — each take about 20 to 30 minutes to download and configure, Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist, told CRM Buyer.
Zoho added the functionality in pursuit of its larger goal to expand its reach into related CRM areas, such as order management and call tracking, and embed itself deeply into the enterprise.
Connecting Disparate Accounting, Customer Data
At bottom, the integration with QuickBooks — specifically the on-premise version of QuickBooks, not its online iteration — is all about giving Zoho customers a way to automate the financial data that is inevitably generated from a sale or marketing contact, Vegesna said.
“Until now, a user would have to manually re-input the customer data that results from the sale into the accounting systems,” he said. Once the integration between Zoho CRM and QuickBooks is activated, account and customer data are automatically generated in both systems.
The company began experimenting with just two Zoho modules at first, Vegesna explained. “Now we have expanded the integration to six different modules: contacts, products, quotes, sales orders, vendors and invoices.”
To implement the integration, users first download a small piece of software offered by QuickBooks, called “Web Connectors.” Then the user configures Zoho CRM for the integration. The configuration options in the integration allow users to resolve conflicts while synchronizing data, set up field mapping for standard and custom fields, and view history of data transfers.
Pricing for Zoho CRM for QuickBooks is US$25 per organization per month.
Zoho PhoneBridge
The integration and implementation process for Zoho PhoneBridge is similar, Vegesna said. The company plans to extend PhoneBridge to other Zoho applications besides CRM — and it plans to develop integrations to other telephony systems, such as Cisco.
When the integration goes live, Zoho users can support telemarketers, sales reps and customer support agents with the contact data in Zoho CRM. It is perfect for a variety of outbound and inbound call marketing strategies, Vegesna said, as it automatically displays key contact details such as name, telephone number and email address as a screen pop-up during a call, and captures and logs all call details, including notes added during a call.
The integration allows the user to store the customer communications in Zoho CRM.
Zoho PhoneBridge is priced at $6 per user per month.
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