Zoho Corporation IOT Integrated CRM Development - Innovation Plan

Innovation plan
Zoho Coporation IOT Integrated CRM development
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This project report is prepared an innovation
management plan for the proposed innovation for
Zoho corporation. The report explores the industry
and the organiation and assesses possible innovations
that the company can adopt. A choice of IOT
integrated CRM solution has been made for it would
bring the company an expansion in portfolio. The plan
gives details of the process of development that
would be used. It explains the process of design
thinking that would be used for the designing go the
solution and also presents the plan for cross-
functional management for actual development using
SCRUM methodology.

Introduction
Zoho is a leading organization that provides cloud based solutions including applications that come
from the wide range of functionalities. As the applications developed by the company are cloud based,
they can be accessed from any location and device including tablets, computers, and mobile devices.
Zoho has applications to help companies in collaborating over projects and sharing information within
teams. Zoho CRM is the flagship product of the company which is a cloud based CRM system which
helped users manage their customer relationships by streamlining sales and marketing functions
across the organization (Zoho Corporation, 2009).
CRM systems are the popular products in the industry and modern CRM systems are getting more
advanced. There are three trends that expected to dominate the innovation for CRM solutions in near
future. These include Automatic workflow adjustment, chatbots with conversational interfaces, and
IOT integration with CRM. In near future, CRM systems would make adjustments in their workflows
to enhance the efficiency of the organization. It would involve the use of Artificial Intelligence to
understand how users of the devices interact with the CRM software and based on the analysis of this
interaction, suggestions would be given to the system user for the optimization of software (Rizvi,
2017).
Companies need their employees to engage with the consumers directly. When Chatbots would be
integrated with the conversational interfaces of a CRM solution, they would introduce natural
language processing capabilities into the system such that conversations would happen between the
employees and the customers not just through normal textual chats but also the audios integrated with
the chat system. This would enhance the experience of the consumers while they are interacting with
the company representatives thereby increasing their level of satisfaction from the conversation.
They are soon expected to get integrated with the IOT devices used by the enterprise system users.
This integration would allow companies to have its CRM integrated with portable IOT devices such
as mobile phones, cards, wearables, and home appliances. Integration of CRM with the IOT devices
can unfold many opportunities for the organizations as they would be able to personalise the customer
experiences to a higher degree. This integration would provide companies a better insight into the
customer and would allow companies to access an actionable profile of a consumer (Kowalke, 2017).
Integration of CRM with the IOT devices would bring customers of the organizations closer to the
brand representatives as their experiences would be customized with enhanced interaction with
devices (Sande, 2015). Zoho corporation can integrate its CRM system with the IOT devices as the
innovation. This would help Zoho expand its offerings for corporate customers. This innovation plan
has been prepared for Zoho Corporation to develop a module that can be installed over the CRM
systems of Zoho such that they would allow integration of IOT systems with their CRM solution. The

document contains the design thinking process details that would be used in the project, user
involvement, integration, prototyping, testing, and cross-functional management (Palermo, 2015).
Design thinking
Design thinking is an approach that involves an integration of emotions and thoughts of customers
with the requirements of a business or an innovation. It enables creation of customer experiences
based on these factors to build executable prototypes of a technology solution. The technology that is
being developed must be able to drive the emotional responses of consumers to bring innovation. A
number of different design thinking approaches have been taken by various innovative companies.
Innovation by Design (IbyD3) s an approach that can be used for delivering a high fidelity prototype
that can be translated into a minimum viable product or stand alone applications within a few weeks
time. This uses a methodological approach to development of a design with two key phases including
discovery and synthesis. The same approach would be taken for the development of the IOT
integration solution for Zoho CRM application.
Discovery: In this phase, the quantitative facts about the proposed innovative solution would be
analysed by business analysts. This would allow the project team to get close with the challenges to
be addressed and understand how different user personas of CRM solution would be impacted by the
change that the innovation would bring. These personas would highlight the challenges, opportunities,
and then would help in building an action plan for designing interventions needed to bring change in
the organization to be able to adopt the innovation. Design thinking needs people to embrace the
tendency to think about emotions of consumer rather being logical and process oriented. So, if the
managers and project team of Zoho corporation is more used to logical thinking then the team would
have to be oriented towards design thinking by making them empathize with the customer while
planning a design for IOT integrated CRM solution (E&Y, 2017).
Synthesis: The objective of this phase of design thinking is to build a solution that is desirable for
customers without thinking about its viability so that unique and unconstrained ideas can emerge and
the teams can expand their thinking on development. The focus would remain on the key problem
which is to bring an all encompassing experience to the CRM users through the interconnection of the
IOT devices thy use to the CRM systems. At this point, the team may try to make improvements in
the ideas because of engineering bias but the same has to be avoided if rich and free ideas are needed.
At this point, the team would develop preliminary sketches for the prototype of the solution which
could be refined through the use of user interface mock ups. With these mock-ups, the developing
team would be able too gather the feedback on the prototype to be developed so that the same can be
injected in the next iterative phase of the project development. The synthesis phase ends with a plan
for the development of a prototype for the solution suggested (GENPACT, 2018).

Figure 1:INNOVATION by design—the process
Innovation by design process would be used in the synthesis stage in which the project would begin
with scoping of the development, refinement, co-innovation, alignment, and then the development of
the product. As shown in the figure above, the IOT integrated CRM development program project
would go through a series of processes till a prototype design is prepared which would be tested in the
field to come up with a selected design of the solution.
User Involvement
The previous section revealed a process of evolutionary development that can be used for the IOT
integration project. The use of prototype would affect the role of a user on the project. The end user
may cooperate with the IT tam during the process of development to enable development of the most
mature software. The project team involved in the development of the integrated system would need
to communicate with the stakeholders on understanding their needs and requirements so that a higher
level of usability can be achieved in the development with incorporation of the needs of the
stakeholders. Resulting from this interaction, a context-depended solution that can smoothen the
integration of IOT devices with the CRM solution of Zoho could be developed using appropriate IT
management practices (Weichbroth & Sikorski, 2014).