Table of Contents
Overview
Zoho SalesIQ has established itself as a comprehensive customer engagement platform for businesses seeking to connect with website visitors, mobile app users, and customers across messaging channels in real time. The Nova ’25 release, announced in July-August 2025, represents the platform’s most expansive update to date, introducing over 30 new features and enhancements across conversational bots, artificial intelligence capabilities, messaging channels, workflow automation, and integrations.
This major release focuses on three primary areas: expanding AI-powered automation through enhanced Zia capabilities and ChatGPT assistant integration, strengthening instant messaging engagement with multi-WhatsApp business account support and Instagram story replies, and providing more powerful agent productivity tools including mobile app enhancements and workflow automation. Nova ’25 aims to transform SalesIQ from a straightforward live chat platform into a comprehensive AI-driven customer engagement ecosystem supporting sales, support, and marketing teams.
Key Features
Nova ’25 introduces an extensive array of capabilities designed to enhance every dimension of customer interaction:
Pre-built bot templates and flow management: Access ready-to-deploy bot templates optimized for common industry use cases including lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and FAQ handling, eliminating the need to build conversational flows from scratch. Import and export bot flows seamlessly across different brands or accounts, enabling reuse of proven workflows without manual recreation. Bot flow analytics provide visual reports showing where prospects drop off, which conversation paths perform best, and which messages drive desired actions.
Zia’s enhanced GenAI capabilities: Leverage Zoho’s proprietary AI assistant Zia for multiple functions including a writing assistant that helps live agents polish messages with grammar corrections, tone adjustments, and quick rewrites during customer conversations. Zia automatically generates conversation summaries for both calls and chats, allowing agents to review discussions at a glance without rewatching recordings or rereading transcripts. The AI provides instant conversational answers and context-aware responses powered by your knowledge base and historical interactions.
ChatGPT assistant integration: Beyond Zia, Nova ’25 introduces integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant capabilities, enabling bots to deliver precise, business-specific answers using custom data and knowledge bases. This integration allows for more sophisticated natural language understanding and generation within automated conversations.
Workflow automation module: Implement event-based workflow automation that triggers specific actions based on chat events such as particular keywords mentioned, specific pages visited, conversation sentiment detected, or milestones reached. Automate follow-up tasks, data entry, notifications, and routing without requiring agent intervention.
Advanced messaging channel support: Manage multiple WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) numbers from a single interface, enabling businesses with multiple brands, regions, or departments to maintain separate WhatsApp presences while centralizing management. Respond to Instagram Story mentions and engage with customers who interact with your social content. Use WhatsApp broadcast messages for proactive outreach, share and update WhatsApp templates directly from the mobile app, and schedule appointments directly within messaging conversations.
Profile-based access control and whisper chats: Implement granular, profile-based permissions allowing administrators to control exactly which features and data different team members can access at a feature level. Whisper chats enable team leaders and supervisors to provide real-time coaching to agents during live customer conversations without the customer seeing the internal guidance, supporting training and quality assurance.
Comprehensive mobile app enhancements: The upgraded agent mobile app enables handling both inbound and outbound calls with call recording for quality assurance and training purposes. Access Zia’s writing assistant on mobile to craft polished responses while working remotely. Edit images with markup tools and trim videos before sharing with customers. View auto-generated conversation summaries for quick context, add and manage conversation tags for organization, and re-engage WhatsApp visitors by updating and sharing templates on the go.
Android TV and Apple TV expansion: Display real-time engagement metrics, visitor insights, traffic sources, most-visited pages, and key performance indicators on large screens through dedicated TV apps for both Android TV and Apple TV platforms. The TV dashboard functionality allows sales floors and support teams to monitor collective performance visually.
Enhanced integrations: Improved connectivity with Bigin, Zoho’s small business CRM, streamlining lead management for smaller organizations. Integration with Zoho Lens enables remote assistance using augmented reality, allowing agents to see what customers see and provide visual guidance for complex product setup or troubleshooting.
How It Works
Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 operates through a multi-layered platform designed for both ease of initial setup and sophisticated operational capabilities. Organizations begin by installing the SalesIQ tracking code on their website or integrating the mobile SDK into their applications, enabling visitor tracking and engagement across digital touchpoints.
Bot configuration leverages the newly introduced templates for rapid deployment of common conversational use cases, or teams can build custom flows using the visual bot builder. The import/export functionality allows organizations with multiple brands or websites to replicate successful bot strategies across properties without rebuilding from scratch. Bot flow analytics provide ongoing visibility into performance, showing exactly where conversations succeed or fail.
Zia’s GenAI engine integrates throughout the platform, providing real-time assistance to both bots and human agents. When a bot encounters a query it cannot confidently answer, it can intelligently hand off to a human agent with full context. During human conversations, agents access Zia’s writing assistant for message enhancement and receive AI-generated summaries of previous interactions for quick context.
The workflow automation module monitors chat events continuously, triggering pre-configured actions based on specific conditions. For example, workflows can automatically create CRM leads when high-intent keywords are detected, send internal Slack notifications when priority customers initiate chat, or route conversations to specialized teams based on detected customer intent.
Messaging channel management centralizes interactions from WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, LINE, and WeChat into a unified agent interface. The multi-WABA support enables businesses to operate distinct WhatsApp numbers for different purposes while maintaining centralized oversight and reporting. Agents switch seamlessly between channels, and customers benefit from consistent experiences regardless of their preferred communication platform.
Profile-based access control ensures security and appropriate information access by defining exactly which operators can view specific visitor data, access certain bot configurations, or modify system settings. Whisper chats create a parallel communication layer where supervisors provide guidance to agents mid-conversation, invisible to customers.
The mobile app provides full-featured engagement capabilities for distributed teams, with particular emphasis on call handling with recording, media editing before sharing, and template management for WhatsApp re-engagement.
Use Cases
Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 serves diverse applications across business functions:
Automating round-the-clock customer support with intelligent bots: Deploy conversational bots trained on your knowledge base to handle common support queries 24/7, freeing human agents to focus on complex issues. Bot templates for FAQ handling, order status lookup, and troubleshooting provide starting points that can be customized to specific business needs. Automatic escalation to human agents occurs when bots reach confidence thresholds, maintaining service quality.
Enhancing sales conversations with lead scoring and automated workflows: Qualify website visitors in real time using lead scoring based on pages visited, time on site, and engagement patterns. Trigger automated workflows when high-value prospects exhibit buying signals, instantly notifying sales representatives or initiating proactive chat invitations. Guide prospects through the sales funnel with targeted messages, schedule demos directly through chat, and maintain engagement with automated follow-ups.
Managing unified multi-channel messaging for customer outreach: Engage customers consistently across their preferred platforms—whether website chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger—all managed from a single dashboard. The multi-WABA capability suits enterprises with multiple brands or regional operations that need separate WhatsApp numbers while maintaining centralized management and reporting.
Providing remote visual assistance through Zoho Lens integration: For complex products requiring setup guidance or troubleshooting, agents can initiate augmented reality sessions through Zoho Lens integration, seeing exactly what customers see and providing visual annotations, making remote support more effective than voice-only guidance.
Monitoring team and engagement performance on TV dashboards: Display real-time metrics on large screens in sales floors or support centers, creating visibility into visitor volume, agent availability, conversation volumes, and key performance indicators. The TV app functionality drives team awareness and creates accountability through shared visibility.
Streamlining operations for Zoho ecosystem users: Organizations already using Zoho CRM, Desk, Campaigns, or other Zoho products benefit from deep integration enabling seamless data flow between customer touchpoints and backend systems, creating unified customer views without manual data entry or context switching.
Pros and Cons
Advantages
Comprehensive feature set with unified platform approach: SalesIQ provides live chat, chatbot automation, visitor tracking, lead scoring, multi-channel messaging, call functionality, and analytics in a single integrated platform, eliminating the need to coordinate multiple specialized tools and maintaining data consistency across customer touchpoints.
Deep integration within Zoho ecosystem: Organizations using multiple Zoho applications benefit from native integrations that enable data flow between SalesIQ, Zoho CRM, Desk, Campaigns, and other products without custom development or middleware, creating comprehensive customer engagement workflows.
Cost-effective pricing for small to mid-sized businesses: SalesIQ offers a free plan supporting basic live chat for single operators, with paid plans starting at \$7 per operator monthly when billed annually. This pricing structure makes enterprise-class features accessible to smaller organizations, with transparent per-operator pricing that scales predictably as teams grow.
Strong AI capabilities through Zia and ChatGPT integration: The combination of Zoho’s proprietary Zia AI with optional ChatGPT assistant integration provides sophisticated automation capabilities including writing assistance, conversation summarization, and intelligent response generation, reducing agent workload and improving response quality.
Mobile-first agent productivity: The enhanced mobile app with call recording, media editing, writing assistance, and WhatsApp template management enables agents to maintain productivity while working remotely, supporting distributed teams and work-from-anywhere arrangements.
Disadvantages
Learning curve for advanced feature utilization: The breadth of capabilities in Nova ’25—including bot building, workflow automation, profile configuration, and multi-channel management—requires significant time investment to master. Organizations may need dedicated training periods or require experienced administrators to fully leverage the platform’s potential.
Support quality variation by geography: As an India-based company, Zoho’s support resources are concentrated in Indian time zones and may provide varying levels of service quality for organizations in other regions. Response times and cultural context understanding can differ for users outside primary support hours, potentially impacting issue resolution speed.
Maximum value requires Zoho ecosystem adoption: While SalesIQ functions independently, realizing its complete potential often requires integration with other Zoho products including CRM, Desk, Campaigns, or Analytics. Organizations using non-Zoho systems may experience friction in achieving seamless workflow integration, potentially necessitating custom development or third-party integration platforms.
Platform complexity can overwhelm smaller teams: The extensive feature set, while powerful, may overwhelm small businesses with limited technical resources who need simple chat functionality without complex automation, multi-channel management, or advanced analytics. The free plan offers basic features, but moving to paid tiers immediately introduces significant capability expansion that requires management.
How Does It Compare?
Understanding SalesIQ Nova ’25’s position relative to competing customer engagement platforms clarifies its unique value proposition and appropriate use cases:
Vs. Intercom: Intercom is a premium customer communication platform serving enterprises with three pricing tiers: Essential starting at \$29 per seat monthly (billed annually), Advanced at \$85 per seat monthly with 20 free lite seats, and Expert at \$132 per seat monthly with 50 free lite seats. Intercom’s Fin AI agent charges \$0.99 per resolution handled, and additional costs apply for channels like WhatsApp, SMS, and email campaigns. While Intercom is frequently praised for sophisticated user experience, elegant design, and powerful automation through its Workflows builder, the pricing scales significantly higher than Zoho SalesIQ particularly for growing teams. Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 provides comparable multi-channel automation, bot capabilities, and AI features at substantially lower base pricing (\$7-\$20 per operator monthly), making it more accessible for cost-conscious mid-market businesses. SalesIQ’s advantage lies in affordability combined with deep Zoho ecosystem integration, while Intercom excels in user interface polish, advanced automation sophistication, and comprehensive feature sets for enterprises prioritizing experience over cost.
Vs. Drift: Drift, now part of the Salesloft ecosystem, is a conversational marketing platform specifically designed for B2B sales teams and account-based marketing strategies. Drift focuses intensely on converting website traffic into qualified sales conversations, with features including AI-powered chatbots, real-time live chat connecting prospects with sales representatives, integrated meeting scheduling, and lead scoring. The platform emphasizes conversational sales and pipeline generation, powering over 30 million conversations in recent years. While Drift offers similar bot capabilities and live chat functionality, its primary focus centers on marketing and sales use cases rather than comprehensive customer support. Drift’s pricing sits at premium levels reflecting its enterprise B2B positioning, with costs typically exceeding SalesIQ significantly. Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 differentiates through broader applicability across sales, support, and marketing functions, unique features like TV dashboards for analytics, mobile call recording, and multi-WABA support for operational messaging. Organizations seeking specialized conversational marketing for B2B sales pipelines may prefer Drift’s focused capabilities and Salesloft integration, while those needing versatile customer engagement across multiple departments at lower cost find SalesIQ more suitable.
Vs. HubSpot: HubSpot provides live chat and chatbot functionality as components within its broader Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub offerings. HubSpot’s free plan includes basic chatbot functionality with simple chatflows and information collection. Paid plans range from Starter at \$15 monthly adding meeting scheduling and lead qualification, Professional from \$800 monthly with AI-powered responses and custom reporting, to Enterprise starting at \$3,600 monthly with advanced capabilities including multi-language support and sophisticated routing. HubSpot’s approach deeply integrates chat into its comprehensive CRM suite, providing unified customer data across marketing, sales, and service activities. However, accessing advanced chatbot features requires expensive Professional or Enterprise tier subscriptions. Zoho SalesIQ is lighter weight and more affordable for organizations primarily focused on chat and customer engagement without requiring a full-featured expensive CRM subscription. SalesIQ provides specialized chat-centric functionality at \$7-\$20 per operator monthly versus hundreds or thousands for comparable HubSpot capabilities. Organizations already committed to HubSpot’s CRM ecosystem benefit from native integration and unified data, while those seeking powerful standalone chat and engagement tools at accessible pricing find SalesIQ more appropriate. The choice depends on whether chat serves as a component of comprehensive HubSpot CRM adoption or functions as a focused customer engagement solution potentially integrated with non-HubSpot systems.
Vs. Zendesk: Zendesk positions itself as an enterprise customer service platform emphasizing ticketing, multichannel support, and comprehensive helpdesk capabilities. While Zendesk includes live chat and messaging through its Suite, the platform’s core strength lies in ticket-based support workflows and agent productivity tools for handling complex support operations. Pricing typically starts around \$59 per agent monthly for the Suite, scaling higher with advanced features. Zendesk targets larger enterprises with sophisticated support operations requiring robust ticketing, escalation workflows, and knowledge management. Zoho SalesIQ focuses more on real-time engagement, proactive visitor interaction, lead generation alongside support, and conversational interfaces rather than traditional ticketing. For organizations prioritizing live engagement, bot automation, and sales-support convergence, SalesIQ provides more specialized capabilities at lower cost. Enterprises needing comprehensive helpdesk infrastructure with ticketing, SLA management, and complex workflow routing may find Zendesk’s strengths more aligned with requirements despite higher cost.
Final Thoughts
Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 represents a substantial evolution of the platform, transforming it from a capable live chat solution into a comprehensive AI-driven customer engagement ecosystem addressing sales, support, and marketing needs. The release’s emphasis on AI automation through enhanced Zia capabilities and ChatGPT integration, expanded messaging channel support with multi-WABA functionality, and improved mobile agent productivity demonstrates Zoho’s commitment to keeping SalesIQ competitive with more expensive enterprise platforms.
The platform’s greatest strength lies in delivering enterprise-class capabilities—including sophisticated bot automation, multi-channel messaging, AI-powered assistance, workflow automation, and comprehensive analytics—at pricing accessible to mid-market and growing businesses. The free plan enables small teams to start with basic live chat, while paid tiers at \$7-\$20 per operator monthly remain dramatically more affordable than competitors like Intercom, Drift, or HubSpot’s advanced plans, making powerful customer engagement tools available to organizations with constrained budgets.
For businesses already invested in the Zoho ecosystem using products like CRM, Desk, Campaigns, or other applications, SalesIQ Nova ’25 provides exceptional value through deep native integrations that create seamless data flow and unified customer views without custom development. The platform functions as a natural hub for customer interaction across the broader Zoho suite.
However, prospective users should carefully consider several factors. The breadth of capabilities introduced in Nova ’25, while impressive, creates complexity requiring dedicated time investment to master. Small teams seeking simple live chat without extensive automation may find the platform’s capabilities overwhelming and may benefit from more focused solutions. Organizations outside Zoho’s primary support regions should evaluate whether support quality and availability align with their requirements, particularly for mission-critical implementations requiring rapid issue resolution.
The platform delivers maximum value when deeply integrated with other Zoho products, meaning organizations committed to non-Zoho systems may experience friction achieving seamless workflows without custom integration development. While SalesIQ offers third-party integrations with tools like Shopify, Slack, and Mailchimp, the ecosystem synergy peaks within Zoho’s own application family.
Zoho SalesIQ Nova ’25 is most compelling for mid-market organizations seeking comprehensive customer engagement capabilities without enterprise-tier budgets, businesses already using multiple Zoho applications wanting to unify customer touchpoints, teams requiring multi-channel messaging management including WhatsApp and social platforms, and organizations valuing AI-powered automation to scale customer interactions efficiently. Enterprises committed to platforms like Intercom or HubSpot for strategic reasons, or those requiring absolute cutting-edge user experience and design, may justify premium pricing despite higher costs.
For evaluating whether Nova ’25 fits specific needs, key questions include: Are we currently using or open to adopting other Zoho products for deeper integration value? Do we need sophisticated multi-channel messaging including WhatsApp business account management? Are AI-powered automation and bot capabilities priorities for scaling customer engagement? Does our budget favor cost-effective solutions over premium-priced platforms? Can we invest time in learning and configuring advanced features to realize the platform’s full potential?
The customer engagement technology landscape continues evolving rapidly as AI capabilities advance and channel proliferation accelerates. Zoho’s Nova ’25 release demonstrates the company’s commitment to remaining competitive through innovation while maintaining its core value proposition of delivering enterprise functionality at accessible pricing. For organizations aligned with this philosophy and willing to navigate the learning curve, SalesIQ Nova ’25 offers compelling capabilities that can genuinely transform customer engagement effectiveness without requiring proportionate budget increases.