Disclosure: I work at Skyfall Labs, an official Zoho Partner, so I have a commercial interest. The facts below are from Zoho's own help pages, linked at the end; advice is labelled as advice. Originally published on skyfallhq.net.
Many teams run Zoho CRM with every lead landing on one person and no sense of which leads matter. Assignment rules and scoring rules are the built-in answer to both. This post walks through what Zoho's help pages say about setting each up.
Two features, two jobs
Assignment rules decide who receives a record. Zoho describes scoring rules as a way to qualify prospects by behaviour, insights, attributes and persona details, where a higher score means the prospect is more likely to become a customer. Set them up separately.
Setting up an assignment rule, per Zoho
- Go to Setup, Automation, Assignment and create an assignment rule for a module.
- Choose whether the rule applies to all records or only those matching criteria; criteria can compare a field to a value or one field to another.
- Choose who receives the record: specific users, roles or groups, or users matched by a condition such as country.
- Optionally check user availability by online status, shift timing or both, and optionally add a follow-up task for the assigned user.
- Select a default user for records that cannot go to the chosen users.
What assignment rules cover and do not cover
Per Zoho, assignment rules work for Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Deals, Tasks, Cases, custom modules and team modules. When several users are selected, records rotate between them in a round-robin pattern. Each rule entry supports up to 25 criteria.
Zoho states the rules apply only to records created through import, web form and API, not to records created manually. You need the Assignment Rules & Threshold permission in your profile. Zoho's page does not list which editions include the feature, so check its feature availability page.
Setting up a scoring rule, per Zoho
- Go to Setup, Automation, Scoring Rules and create a new rule; name it, set the type to Manual Score, pick the module and a layout (or all layouts).
- Optionally add criteria on the module's fields so the rule applies only to matching records.
- Add channels (for example Email, Calls or Webinar), set criteria for each factor, and choose Add or Subtract with a number of points.
- Optionally add score fields to the record; Zoho allows up to six per rule, and they use up numeric custom-field limits.
What a score can be based on
Zoho lists factors under channels such as Email (incoming mail, opened, clicked, bounced), Campaigns (opened, clicked, bounced), Calls, Webinar registration, Survey, Deal Insights (closed won, closed lost) and others. Channels appear only if their integrations are enabled, with Calls and VOC Insights as exceptions. Touchpoint scores apply only to Leads and Contacts.
Zoho's own example is 10 points for each email response, with an extra 15 points once a lead has more than 10 responses.
Limits and existing records
Zoho says each layout can have up to ten rules, of which five can be active. When you add score fields you are asked whether to update old records; only records created or modified in the past 6 months are updated, and updating old records does not trigger related workflows. For the Standard edition, Zoho says criteria and scoring are available only for the Calls channel. You need the Manage Automation permission.
Designing the rules (practical advice)
This section is advice from experience, not vendor documentation.
- Write the routing logic in plain words first: by territory, by product, by source, by team capacity. Then build it.
- Make sure the fields your criteria depend on are mandatory or picklists, so values arrive spelled consistently from your web forms.
- Always set a sensible default user so no lead is left unowned.
- Score on signals your sales team agrees indicate intent, and review them with the people who work the leads, not only the admin.
- Define what the team does at a given score, otherwise the number is decoration.
- Test with a handful of dummy web-form leads before relying on a rule.
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