Zoho Upgrades Bigin to Redefine Small Business CRM Market

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A leading global technology company, Zoho Corporation, has upgraded its customer relationship management (CRM) solution for small businesses, Bigin, with new features for better performance.

According to the firm, the platform has been fortified with new capabilities like team pipelines, toppings, and developer centres, which will allow users to manage all types of customer operations.

It is believed that the upgrade will redefine the small business CRM market as it would provide small and micro businesses with the tools and insights they need to maintain and grow meaningful and high-value relationships with customers in a challenging economic environment.

“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,” the Country Manager for Zoho Nigeria, Kehinde Ogundare, stated.

“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,” Ogundare added.

Since its launch in 2020, Bigin has stood out as a robust, easy-to-use, and welcoming CRM solution thanks to its 30-minute set-up promise. Bigin saw a revenue growth of 161 per cent in 2022 in Nigeria, indicating the revenue has doubled compared to 2021.

Zoho has observed that around 65 per cent of Bigin’s global customers have never used a 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.

The introduction of Team Pipelines allows 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.

The Connected Pipelines feature automates the flow of customer data across processes, improving the customer experience and saving time on manual data entry, while the Toppings feature allows the addition of additional functionality and third-party integrations 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.

The Dynamic Display allows users to customize the appearance of records in their pipelines, while the Developer Centre gives room for global app developers and partners to 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.

Bigin by Zoho CRM starts at N2,100/user/monthly (billed annually) for the Express edition and goes up to N3,600 user/monthly (billed annually) for the Premier edition, though a free edition is also available.