Understanding Zoho PathFinder

Zoho has recently announced that they’ve launched their Zho PathFinder product and in this article, we’ll look at what it is and how it could be useful in your business.

What is Zoho PathFinder?

Pathfinder is Zoho CRM’s new journey discovery tool. With PathFinder, you can discover your customers’ journeys across multiple touchpoints and channels, and understand how they interact with your brand. PathFinder is a significant step in the evolution of Zoho’s journey orchestration capabilities. Journey orchestration is the ability to observe customer journeys in real-time, and manage the business’ responses to create the most meaningful experience for them.

PathFinder is all about accepting the dynamism in customer journeys, and automatically building a journey map based on the customer’s choices throughout their experience with a brand.

PathFinder can be used to:

Visualize your customers’ journeys with intuitive maps.
Identify the most successful paths followed by your customers, common dropoff points, etc.
Filter journeys based on customer criteria and identify common paths among various demographics.
Get a better understanding of user intent and preferences.

PathFinder gives you a bird’s-eye view of your business. Based on the paths customers follow, you can determine which touchpoints in your business are profitable, where customers are stagnating the most, whether there’s a product that customers find more interesting than others, which touchpoints your customers seldom use, and so on.

For instance, let’s look at this Sankey report.

From the report, you can derive the following insights:

Among the available channels, lead generation is mostly happening via web forms.
Outbound lead generation via phone is not as productive and customers from that channel are not progressing, which indicates this touchpoint needs to be fixed or removed.
Users are responding well to email qualification methods unless they’ve already come into the business as pre-qualified customers.

These are truths that you can derive by looking at how customers interact with these touchpoints. You can compare and contrast all channels at once and thereby achieve the following:

Optimize the quality and responsiveness of your touchpoints
Remove unproductive touchpoints
Swap-test possible touchpoints to assess their performance

Zoho Business Process Improvement Tool

By its nature, business is transactional and therefore demands a streamlined process, which not only encourages good process discipline but also increases productivity and revenue. Through its ability to detect important signals, PathFinder enables you to determine how the current process is performing for your business.

A quick look at the following Path report will help you understand the different realities of your business process.

This report reveals the following:

About 13 contacts were directly created without other recommended processes before.
About five users received no follow-up after the first outgoing email campaign.
About 20 webform leads received no contact after submitting.

These are reality checks that enable you, as a manager, to identify and address shortcomings in your business process as they happen. With these insights, you can achieve the following:

Encourage and ensure consistent follow-up with leads.
Eliminate unproductive steps in the process.
Correct errors that slow down the flow of business.

Zoho PathFinder Pricing

Zoho PathFinder is included within Zoho CRM so is expected to be bundled into your current Zoho pricing bundle. During the launch period, PathFinder will be available to Enterprise and Ulitimate editions of Zoho CRM only.

Limits on the number of new records that PathFinder can capture based on edition:

Enterprise: Up to 50,000 records per day across all processes.
Ultimate: Up to 1,00,000 records per day across all processes.

Limits on the number of transitions performed based on edition:

Enterprise: Up to 1,00,000 transitions per day across all processes.
Ultimate: Up to 2,00,000 transitions per day across all processes.

Zoho PathFinder Demo

Zoho PathFinder is the latest addition to CommandCenter, Zoho CRM’s journey orchestration platform. In this webinar demo, you’ll learn how to set up this feature and create maps of your customers’ brand journeys.

Zoho PathFinder Reports

Zoho PathFinder will depict the paths in three different graphical reports, to comprehend the observed journeys better, a Path Report, a Sankey Report and a Journey Report. These reports will unveil all the paths taken in your business and help you infer different findings at once.

Setting Up Zoho PathFinder

To enable PathFinder, you need to configure three important components:

Touchpoints – Interactions users have with your business, captured as Signals.
States – Stages present in your business that users access in their desired order.
Identifiers – Unique parameters to identify users each time they access and resume their journey with your business

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are user interactions in your business. Every time a user interacts with your business, the interaction triggers the corresponding touchpoint to connect the user record with the respective state. For example, opening an outgoing email, receiving an incoming call, creating a record, receiving an API, conversion of a record, edit of a record, are all user interactions with your business. If you receive an incoming call, this interaction will be logged as a touchpoint and corresponds to the user in the respective state.

States

States are independent steps or stages that customers use to navigate across your business. They act as milestones that could indicate users’ progress in your business. For example, logging in to the website, wish-listing a product to the favourites, adding the product to the cart, and completing of payment are different actions you can configure as steps, which when your customers click, will be connected to form a path. If a customer logs in to your website and adds the product to the cart without wish-listing them as favourites, then only the states – Log in > Added to cart > Payment completion will be connected as a path. In PathFinder, once all the states are laid down, you can discover the possibility of multiple journeys in one shot, analyze and compare each journey, and optimize the customer experience based on the findings.

Identifiers

Identifiers are unique parameters that identify your users as they enter your business. Identifiers recognize these users whenever they resume their journey. This is an important aspect, as it determines the accuracy of the paths. For example, mobile number, last name, date of birth, email address, Twitter handle, and website are among the different fields that could denote a visitor.

Zoho PathFinder Help Docs

Zoho has provided comprehensive help documentation on how to use PathFinder and how to configure PathFinder for your business needs. Download the documentation below.

Using Zoho PathFinder in your business

If you’re looking for ways to streamline your customer journey and automate your processes, you’ll love our suite of Zoho integrations. If you’d like a quick chat to discuss your business needs and see if PathFinder and/or integrations will suit your needs, get in touch today.