Reports and Dashboards play a key role in CRM by helping you track your sales process and productivity. However digging deep into multiple reports and referring various dashboards to decipher how business is faring is a thing of past.

Imagine you are away on a business trip for a week and there's been a critical drop in your deals closure. Unless you check for the status manually by yourself, chances are you miss to take action at the right time only to realize it when the damage is done.

Thanks to Zia - Zoho CRM's data intelligence assistant, she brings Artificial Intelligence to your CRM analytics through Trend Analysis. You can now see your business trends and teams' performance though Trend Dashboard. Built on data from the past and current usage, the Trend Dashboard displays key sales metrics as patterns.

Additionally Zia automatically detects and notifies you of any anomalies in these patterns. A sudden spike or a dip from what is normal to your business is called an anomaly. She catches these anomalies and sends you prompt notifications. You do not have to look for inconsistencies in your business processes manually anymore. Zia brings them to you automatically so you can identify the problem areas at the right time to take actions or find what's helping in the growth of your business so you can invest in it more.

Availability

Viewing Trend Dashboards in Zoho CRM

To view the Trend Dashboards in Zoho CRM, go to Home > Dashboards > Trend Dashboards. The Trend Dashboards are categorized in two folders - Sales Trend and Sales Follow-up Trend.

Zoho CRM currently provides eleven pre-built components in the Trend Dashboards folders. All these components are displayed as Line Charts to show trend over a period. You can only view these components but you can not modify them or add new ones.

List of Trend Dashboard Components

You can filter and view the trend of each dashboard based on Users or Groups and Time Period. You can see the trend for daily, weekly, monthly or yearly for the set time period. You can also select a specific portion of the graph to zoom in and view the trend of the respective time-line.

Let's take a closer look at the Leads Creation chart. It comes with three key components;

• The Trend line - The Trend line shows the pattern in which the given business metric is supposed to fare going by your past data.
• The Actual line - The Actual line shows how the given business metric is faring in reality as against how it is supposed to, shown in the trend line. It is this line that shows any spike or dip.
• Anomaly - A sudden spike or a dip from what is normal to your business is called an anomaly. The red circles in the chart denotes anomaly.

As you can see, there is a steep dip in the Actual Line in the above chart, which interprets that your Leads creation has decreased radically for the month as against the previous months. Zia identifies this as an anomaly and sends you a notification, while you can look into what has caused this and fix it.

Viewing Zia Notifications in Zoho CRM

To view Zia notifications, go to the Home page and click Zia icon in the bottom right hand side corner.

Zia shows the following types of notifications:

• Alerts: Alerts are usually based on Leads Creation. These alerts bring anomalies in Leads Creation count into your notice.

• Attention: This gives you the status of your current sales metric as against the trend. These notifications could be based on your Team's performance or yours. They usually come with Tips. Attention could also be based on your Workflow Rules.
• Tips: Tips are given based on the root cause of the anomalies. Say for example, when there is a drop in your tasks closure rate, the tip will be to increase the frequency of you follow-up activities or make use of the Best time to Contact field for faster tasks closure.