Citrix recently launched its first developer program, inviting developers around the globe to participate in building creative and impactful microapps.
Zoho, which offers cloud-based business suite of apps, partnered with us to build a Citrix Workspace integration leveraging the microapps service for its flagship product, Zoho CRM, which enables sales representatives to manage customer relationships effectively.
The Business Challenge
Improving employee experience is a top business priority, especially now as organizations are scrambling to support employees working from home. The apps an employee accesses every day and relies on to get work done play a vital role in employee experience.
For the sales rep, a mission critical app might be a customer relationship management (CRM) system. But sales reps only spend about 18 percent of their time in the CRM system; that includes the manual activities such as looking up information on leads and customers and updating the CRM with every status change for a lead or customer.
Think about this famous quote from management guru Peter Drucker:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
In a company where information isn’t organized, and there’s no guidance or automation, your sales reps might be thinking:
“If you can’t even find it, how will you measure it?”
Zoho Partners with Citrix to Deliver Focused Experiences
To address these challenges, Zoho CRM built eight microapps using Citrix’s low-code microapp builder to effectively manage primary customer relationship functions.
The Zoho CRM microapps integration enables sales reps to create and view accounts, contacts, deals, and leads within Citrix Workspace. They can access these microapps securely and instantly, from any location or device, and perform these functions even when on the move.
The Zoho CRM microapps act as subunits of the Zoho CRM, helping sales reps focus on the right tasks at the right time. These microapps can help sales reps see and interact with only the information they need, without overwhelming them with other, irrelevant data.
The outcome? An AI system of growth, where sales reps can spend more time qualifying leads and building stronger customer relationships and less time switching among apps, searching for meaningful data.
Diving Deeper into Zoho CRM Microapps
Customers looking to integrate Zoho CRM microapps into their Citrix Workspace can simply enable the microapp service, which is available in all Citrix Workspace editions.
Zoho CRM microapps are single units that streamline overall CRM functionality to solve specific CRM use cases. With these microapps sales reps can,
- Create Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Deals
- View details of Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Deals
Zoho CRM is securely integrated using the HTTP connector, which lets Citrix build on top of the existing APIs to create scalable solutions. Any race conditions will be avoided as Zoho CRM System of Records (SoR) will remain as the single source of truth. Administrators can determine the scope of the data pulled during each sync. A full and incremental synchronization schedule is also defined by the administrator per each individual integration.
The Zoho CRM microapps will soon be available to download from the Citrix Ready Marketplace. Meanwhile, you can use this sharefile link to gain early access.
Hear from the developers themselves!
“Once we started analyzing the platform, we realized how super easy it was to build the integration,” Pradeep Arokia Raj, Senior Product Manager at Zoho, told The Tech Blog Writer. What stood out for the Zoho developers were:
- The form builder, which is just a drag and drop tool for the components needed to perform an action.
- The scheduler, which helps sync the data between the system of record and Citrix Workspace automatically.
- Quick support from Citrix Ready and Citrix Workspace platform team, which helped accelerate their microapp development.
And just for the record, the microapps weren’t built in weeks or months, but just in few days by people who had no prior knowledge of the Citrix technologies.
This is the first of the many posts to come from Citrix Ready and our partners who are using microapps to revolutionize the employee experience. Get started today by signing up for our developer program.
