An Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English from #ZohoDay25
Blue Star Limited is a well-established global leader in air conditioning, refrigeration, and engineering solutions, with seven manufacturing facilities, more than 10,000 retail outlets, and operations in 20+ countries.
Predictably managing sales, customer support, and operations across such a massive network is no small feat, as different regions often retain their own lead tracking and spreadsheet-based processes that would never provide enterprise-level scale and visibility.
For most companies, the realities of 2020 drove the need to build out new digital capabilities. But for Blue Star’s CIO, Udit Pahwa, that meant implementing shared features to support operations for their massive dealer network, starting with a new CRM.
“Our journey started with Zoho CRM for the pre-sales process. We started with one small business function in one business division,” Pahwa said. “And what started in one small function in one division slowly grew to five divisions, and today, 100 percent of our pre-sales across all businesses and divisions and locations run Zoho CRM.”
Driving buy-in and adoption
Executives and managers with P&L responsibility want two things from their application estate: high predictability, and low risk, with visibility in a single pane of glass.
“We started with one business division and the head of that business division who owns the P&L was himself very digitally savvy,” says Pahwa. “He said, ‘I have a vision to not work on spreadsheets every day in the morning when I get up. I should open my mobile app to see where I stand, where my team stands, where the organization stands.’”
If Blue Star’s IT team could promise analytics views atop Zoho CRM that get closer to real-time with each release, getting executive buy-in would be pretty easy.
Unfortunately, as you get down to the many individuals within the line of business, they are less concerned with dashboards, and more concerned with productivity, and how much time any process or technology change might be used as an employee tracking or policy enforcement tool, and take precious time away from helping customers.
“The way we handled [objections] was we told the sales team what is in it for them, how this is going to benefit them, and how this is going to add to their productivity and make them more resourceful,” said Pahwa. “I think that this two-pronged approach of answering ‘what is in it for me?’ for the team, and having executive support, has helped us achieve 100 percent adoption of the CRM in our sales team.”
Don’t assume low-code can’t scale
Any digital transformation should start with setting realistic, achievable goals that make it worth the effort. Then, aggregating requirements from all stakeholders. Bringing in a new process for creating applications can be tricky in these early stages, when many team members are not aware of what a low-code platform like Zoho Creator can deliver.
“Whenever you transition or cross platforms, it’s taken up as an opportunity by either the users or the IT team to add some value, which proved to be a bit of a bother when we had some application which had, let’s say, 10 features when we were bringing it into Creator, and then suddenly there is a demand to scale it up to 25 features,” said Pahwa. “So it involved redesigning the architecture, like doing something from the ground up to scale up, but it was fun.”
There is a common perception that while low-code app builders can be very useful for smaller companies who favor quick time-to-market, they are not ready to scale for enterprise use. But since Zoho Creator is already running optimally on Zoho’s massive global SaaS platform, with portability to local private infrastructure as well, the resulting apps are ready for their moment in the enterprise hybrid cloud sun.
“I think we’re entering the modern age of low-code, especially in the last three years with the newer versions [of Zoho Creator] coming out. We have users to the tune of 2,000 to 3,000 running on a single application, and it scales beautifully,” Pahwa said.
Rallying around new features
With implementation, training and support help from Zoho, Blue Star created a Dealer Enquiry (DEQ) system that centralized operations and automated workflows, combining enhanced decision-making with advanced analytics.
Using their new DEQ system, Blue Star was able to reduce both customer response times and manual user errors by over 40 percent. That’s a huge ROI when you think about the hundreds of status updates and inventory requests just one out of 10,000 shops may make in any given business day.
They are also keeping an eye on improving site reliability and operational support by recently signing up for Zoho’s ManageEngine ITSM suite of products.
“When we did a competitive benchmarking,we looked at a host of other tools which are available, probably the top five. We found that the ease of integration of ManageEngine with all the other existing Zoho tools, specifically for us, was more amiable than any other tool that we were evaluating,” Pahwa said.
A potential synergy is emerging here, so ManageEngine can provide better observability and issue tracking for Zoho Creator-based apps, while the team can extend Creator apps to use ManageEngine activity and data as a monitoring resource.
Blue Star have also brought in Zoho Vault to give everyone on the extended team zero-trust policy-based access to just the applications and permissioned data they needed atop the OneAuth multi-factor authentication framework, so they no longer need to worry about loopholes or open backdoors in one application or another.
The Intellyx Take
While dealer satisfaction is at an all-time high and process efficiency is improving across their enterprise, Blue Star is far from done with their digital transformation journey.
“I’ll know it when I see it” likely describes how most line-of-business managers and front-line users would define what they really want from their enterprise applications. But once constituents see the possibilities, they often become new capabilities in short order, thanks to the agility of low-code development using Zoho’s easily integrated suite of solutions.
©2025 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber. None of the other organizations mentioned here are Intellyx customers. No AI bots were used to write this content.
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