As part of the continuing Small Biz in :15 on Location interviews, the trip to Austin, Texas for ZohoDay 2022 has resulted in yet another conversation small businesses will be able to appreciate.

This time around it is, “Doing Surprising Things With CRM.” with Vibhav Vankayala, Product Marketing, Zoho Corporation and Dilip Nagarjaran, product manager of Zoho CRM, who point out surprising things you can do with CRM.

A single digital application can provide a wide range of solutions for a small business. However, not everyone knows everything there is to know about the application or what they can do with it. And whether the tool is simple or complex, there are options that are not always used by the business purchasing the application. Vibhav Vankayala will share what some of those options are when it comes to CRM

Check out the full interview with Gopal Sripada above on YouTube or listen on SoundCloud using the player at the bottom of the page.

The first part of the conversation is between Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor of Small Biz Trends and Vibhav Vankayala, followed by Dilip Nagrajaran.

Shawn: If you were to think of one thing that small businesses might not initially think they can do with CRM, what would that be or might not realize?

Vibhav: It is to compete with a much bigger player. For example, you have a neighborhood mom-and-pop store. Maybe they’re always thinking 7-Eleven is big, I’m never gonna get to that level of service; they have AWS they have this, they have that.

However, Vibhav says these small businesses can because the eCommerce revolution has brought in the power for smaller businesses to compete with large companies, even Amazon. He adds:

“Set up a competent CRM, eCommerce, and customer service and you don’t even need agents, for example, you could always start with self-service,” he says.

According to Vibhav, you don’t need to hire 20 people, a contact center, and a large space to get a customer service operation going.

He adds, “It doesn’t have to be all that, all you need is a self-service park to start, and having that is still better than nothing and customers not being able to reach you. So yeah, it’s the ability to actually punch above their weight.”

Shawn: There’s something you said that also spurs another question which I think fits into the other idea that we were talking about with surprising things you might not know about CRMs. So let me ask you, how does CRM help you predict what a customer wants before you have any way of knowing that they want it?

Read more: The Surprising Things You Can Do With CRM