Zoho CRM

The import and export procedures for the Contacts module in Zoho CRM involve careful data handling to maintain accuracy, compliance, and security. When importing contacts, data should be pre-formatted in a compatible file type (CSV, XLS, or XLSX), cleaned to remove duplicates, and mapped correctly to Zoho CRM fields.

Exporting contacts requires proper access permissions, ensuring that only authorised users can extract data (See Compliance and GDPR Readiness). Given GDPR and confidentiality considerations, businesses must ensure that personal data is processed lawfully, with user consent where required, and that exports are securely stored and shared only with authorised parties. Additionally, measures such as data encryption, audit logs, and compliance with the organisation’s data retention policy help mitigate risks related to data privacy and security.

Data loss is a devastating situation for a business as the information held in a CRM affects all sales, customers, employees and future business ventures. Data backup mitigates the affect of data loss from server failure or malicious hacking attempts, this can be done in two ways.

Firstly, you can export specific sets of records from a module, for example, contacts, as a CSV file meaning a version of the contacts list can be present on a local hard drive, to enhance this security even further, this data could be linked or transferred to an SQL server for an added backup. This however only works if you have a generally small set of records, for larger databases, a whole CRM backup would be appropriate.

In Zoho CRM, you can request a complete copy of the CRM data for a small fee, or setup a twice monthly backup to ensure that no data is lost if anything happens to the online CRM system.

In terms of user management, CRM systems typically have different roles which have different permissions based on the role. These roles are then assigned to specific employees. In this case below, a salesperson should be able to look at leads and contacts but should not be able to delete them, which is more appropriate for a sales manager or administrator to control. The control of each role can be changed per module and the permissions per module.

In terms of security, as previously shown, each role can be modified in terms what they can change, delete or input in the CRM but also what they can see. For example, the salesperson role above cannot see campaigns, documents or accounts, meaning they cannot access that data, this might be an issue if they cannot see the accounts, as this is relevant to sales, showing the importance of managing roles correctly.

There can also be a type of field-level security in each module, meaning that different module layouts can be created depending on the role. For example, a data entry employee does not need to know the annual revenue of a specific account or the email of the clients in the contacts tab, whereas a sales manager would need to see this information. This is another layer to ensure only the correct people can see the appropriate level of data, which helps keep in line with compliance and GDPR readiness.

Lastly, ensuring that all users have strong passwords and authentication to access the CRM is another layer of security. This includes scales of security polices including a password policy (adjusting the requirements of accepted user passwords), multi-factor authentication and allowed IPs for even further control. Each of these systems can help prevent unwanted data access even in the event of a password leak etc.

Aside from the security measures that have been mentioned above, there are further systems in place within a CRM environment to ensure any confidential data is secure and true to GDPR compliance.

In Zoho CRM there are General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance settings. Modules such as contacts and leads could be under GDPR protection, therefore a consent waiting period must be set to stop data processing and personal data handling in terms of data export and transfer to other apps must be restricted.

As a part of GDPR compliance, explicit consent from the customer is required to store and process their data, a clear consent form is required, which Zoho CRM can provide. This could be emailed automatically to any new contacts or leads.

Depending if the business is based in the US and is based on health data, it must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In terms of the data in the CRM, this revolves around keeping the data within the CRM system and restricting the transfer of data to less secure environments in third-part apps or export.

As mentioned in the previous section, data encryption, audit logs and enhanced user security are also factors to ensure GDPR by keeping personal data secure with minimal risk of data leaks.

In Zoho CRM, automation using workflows are key to reduce manual workload to all users of the CRM. An example of this could be automatic lead assignment, this means if the lead source is a cold call and only one salesperson does cold calls, then the lead can automatically be assigned to this employee.

Other automations could include; follow-up task creation (when a lead is created, a task of follow-up call is created), email notifications (when a lead is created, a predefined email is sent to specific users) or auto-tagging (tags new records with the lead source, such as website lead).

For a quick summary, reports which highlight specific CRM data can be used to manually (or automatically using workflows) to show the state of different modules, for example deals. These reports are an effective way to quickly summarise data based on the filtering and aggregation settings. Shown below, this view is a clear way to show each accounts have which deals and revenue currently in the CRM with the closing date. While this is effective in summarising specific parts of the CRM database, a dashboard would be more effective in showing a business outline and the ability to drill into specific parts of the business.

How CRM data is analysed is depending on a number of factors. While Zoho CRM contains an in-built dashboard and analysis software which an create standardised dashboards of each module summarising business progress and highlighting effective employees. Whether the data is under GDPR or encryption however can affect how the data is analysed, it would be easier to use the in-built analytics in Zoho, the business may prefer to use Microsoft Power BI, which links to API and third-party app integrations.

A business is not solely made of a CRM system, there are multiple other apps and systems which need to be connected, including advertisement tracking (e.g. Facebook or google), cloud file systems, SQL servers, commercial (e.g. spoify) or analysis softwares like Power BI. By setting up an API, these can be all connected to the central Zoho CRM. There are multiple stages to the OAuth 2.0 client process:

1. Register your client (API credentials) : A server-based application could be used with this such as Power BI, python or a web based program. This part is about setting up the client name, home page URL and the authorised redirect URL. A client ID and client secret is created, needed as a part of connecting to the API.

2. Generate grant token (Authorisation code): As a part of the security process, a login to Zoho CRM is required to generate an authorisation token required for access to the CRM data.

3. Generate access and refresh tokens: Using the authorisation code, access to the CRM data is now permitted via an access token (used in the API requests but tend to expire within 1 hour) and a refresh token so we can get another access token without the requirement of logging in again. This can all be done within the Postman software which facilitates easier connections to APIs.

4. Use access token to make API calls: To access the data, the authorisation token must be used to access the CRM. Postman was used to test the API below.

A more applicable use of the API would be to import the the data into Power BI for further analysis. This still uses the same API and authorisation code, allowing the data to be successfully imported as shown in power query below.

After 1 hour however, the data will not be able to be refreshed as the authorisation token will have expired. By using the refresh token previously obtained, the logging in step can be skipped to get another authorisation token quickly. To do this in Power BI, the M code should be used below along with parsing the data out of the JSON format.

let
    Deals = let
        RefreshTokenURL = "https://accounts.zoho.eu/oauth/v2/token",
        Body = "client_id=1000.0Q0XV6DVMPC43B0DDJGNULS6VYYLBG&client_secret=16d6268bb7e2291e61ff60c3d94b2c5352053*****&refresh_token=1000.63e2425791efdc63180a9f6743224ead.48688df0fde9e0bae1b4750060******&grant_type=refresh_token",

        // Fetch a new Access Token
        TokenResponse = Json.Document(Web.Contents(RefreshTokenURL, [Content = Text.ToBinary(Body), Headers=[#"Content-Type"="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"]])),
        AccessToken = TokenResponse[access_token],

        // Fetch CRM Data from Zoho API (Deals)
        CRMResponse = Json.Document(Web.Contents("https://www.zohoapis.eu/crm/v2/Deals", [Headers=[Authorization="Zoho-oauthtoken " & AccessToken]])),

        // Extract Only the "data" Field (CRM Records)
        CRMData = CRMResponse[data],

        // Convert Records to Table
        CRMTable = Table.FromList(CRMData, Splitter.SplitByNothing(), null, null, ExtraValues.Error),

        // Expand all columns (including "id" column)
        ExpandedCRMTable = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(CRMTable, "Column1", {"id", "Deal_Name", "Stage", "Amount", "Closing_Date", "Owner", "Created_By", "Modified_By"}),

        // Rename "id" Column (Before Expanding "Owner")
        RenamedCRMTable = Table.RenameColumns(ExpandedCRMTable, {{"id", "Deal_ID"}}),

        // Expand "Owner" Field (name, id, email)
        ExpandedCRMTable2 = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(RenamedCRMTable, "Owner", {"name", "id", "email"}),

        // Rename Owner's "id" Column to Avoid Conflict
        FinalTable = Table.RenameColumns(ExpandedCRMTable2, {{"id", "Owner_ID"}})
    in
        FinalTable
in
    Deals