Zoho has unveiled a new version of Bigin, its CRM solution for small business, to provide new tools and insights.
“Small businesses face challenges in choosing the right technology for managing their customer-facing operations because of constraints related to time, cost, and software implementation,” says Andrew Bourne, regional manager of Zoho Africa. “Bigin is the only solution that brings together all customer operations like sales, onboarding, delivery, training, advocacy, and more into an intuitive interface that takes only 30 minutes to deploy.
“By bringing together all the facets of customer operations into a single view, Bigin allows small businesses to have a more accurate understanding of the customer’s journey. These insights help them attract and retain customers, ultimately growing the business. The fast-growing adoption of Bigin shows the expanding appetite of small businesses who want and need CRM technology suited to their particular needs, helping them move beyond old-school spreadsheets.“
Since Bigin’s launch in 2020, it has stood out as a robust, easy-to-use CRM solution, thanks to a 30-minute set-up promise. Bigin saw revenue growth of 113% in 2022 in South Africa, indicating that revenue has doubled over 2021.
Zoho has observed that around 65% of Bigin’s customers globally have never used CRM previously, making it the ideal choice for business owners who are looking to move away from spreadsheets. When they outgrow Bigin, Zoho also offers them an easy migration to its
full-fledged CRM solution. Bigin now boasts 20,000 customers and continues to help small and micro businesses manage all of their customer-facing operations within a unified platform.
Zoho provided the following information on the updates to Bigin:
Bigin’s latest version includes the introduction of Team Pipelines, which allow customer-facing teams to manage their distinctive operations using a set of pipelines and sub-pipelines within a single Bigin account. Competitive offerings often cater only to a single function — like sales — whereas Bigin is an efficient solution for all customer-facing teams. New features compile customer operations into one place and enable tighter alignment and collaboration between individuals and teams without compromising the simplicity that makes Bigin stand out.
Key Product Updates
Team Pipelines: This feature connects and streamlines various customer operations in one place, offering small businesses an easy way to manage their day-to-day processes and a single source of truth for analyzing customer data.
Connected Pipelines:Automates the flow of customer data across processes, improving the customer experience and saving time on manual data entry.
Toppings: Additional functionality and third-party integrations can be added to address specific business needs. Examples include the ‘Email-In’ topping which maps emails to customer records and the ‘File Cabinet’ topping which automates file collection and management.
Mobile Capabilities: Zoho is providing new features across all platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, Android, and macOS and has added a new feature called Dynamic Display which allows users to customize the appearance of records in their pipelines. Bigin also recently updated its apps for the Apple’s iOS16 and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 launches, where it was an exclusive launch partner.
Developer Center: Bigin has opened its developer platform to a network of global app developers and partners who can create custom solutions for unique business needs. With various tools and components like custom fields, buttons, links, widgets, related lists, and REST APIs, developers can create new Toppings and monetise them in the Bigin Marketplace.
Customer Quote
According to Dawid Roux, Chief Executive Officer of V4 Creative, ” Zoho Bigin became our company’s business life cycle. We have been using Zoho Bigin’s platform for our sales pipeline for more than a year now and since then Bigin has introduced a lot of value-added features that made our business processes so much easier to maintain. Recently Bigin introduced Team Pipelines and since the launch of this new feature, we are able to excel in other business pipelines such as our active projects, marketing, and after-sales. This intuitive new feature made it possible for our team to have a 360-degree view and be able to use a single platform for all our business management and communication needs.”