HGEM records a 50% climb in productivity using Zoho One

The company

HGEM is a software business based in Bath, UK, that helps leading restaurants, cafes, bars, and pubs deliver exceptional hospitality experiences. It's the intelligence engine behind brands like Pret a Manger, Wagamama, and Dishoom, helping to inform their hospitality strategies through guest feedback, mystery dining, and performance analytics. It operates three proprietary software solutions, including 'The Hub', a central portal for clients to view and understand their data, 'Halo', an AI-powered agent that helps them identify patterns, trends and anomalies, and 'Mystery Dining', which allows mystery diners to rate visits, submit reports, and claim reimbursements.

The challenge

A decade ago, HGEM's Managing Director, Steven Pike, realised that the business had begun to suffer from tool sprawl. "Back in 2017, we were using a collection of different tools for different things," he recalls. His siloed stack included:

• Capsule CRM - for customer management.
• KashFlow - for financing and invoicing.
• A shared mailbox - for customer support.

Duplication, manual processes, and disconnected platforms were hampering productivity and efficiency, as well as the delivery of great customer service.

"Before Zoho, we had one version of the client in our CRM, and another version in our accounting system."

Steven Pike Managing Director, HGEM

Seeking a new CRM system that could connect multiple business departments in one space and create a single source of truth, Steven went to the market. He evaluated numerous platforms, including Salesforce, but he found its offering "too expensive". Drawn by its configurability, scaleability, and value proposition, Steven selected Zoho CRM. Soon, what started as a simple CRM replacement grew into a company-wide transformation.

The solution

"Zoho One makes onboarding particularly easy, slick, and efficient. You have everything in one place, and you can just tick the applications each person needs. Other key advantages are that you've got just one directory of users and a simplified billing process."

Steven Pike Managing Director, HGEM

In late 2017, HGEM implemented Zoho CRM, which quickly became its central hub for leads, customers, tasks and activities. "CRM is at the heart of our processes, and everything connects back into it," Steven explains. "Everything starts with our customer records."

Eager to learn more about the platform's functionality, Steven headed to a local meet-up for Zoho users in early 2018. The event was hosted by Bill Quinn of 1 Cloud Consultants, an official Zoho partner. Bill recommended that HGEM explore further applications that could bring even more unity to its tech stack, and shortly thereafter, Zoho Books and Desk were added into the mix. Just one year later, planning to send more marketing communications to his hospitality contacts, Steven upgraded to the Zoho CRM Plus bundle, which includes the Zoho Campaigns tool.

Eventually, with Bill's guidance, HGEM moved to the Zoho One suite of 45+ integrated business apps, rolling it out to 50 of his colleagues in 2025. It offers connected workflows and data uniformity across the platform, as well as intuitive user management and cost savings. Steven credits the bundle with huge gains in efficiency, estimating that his team is 50% more productive across the board. Today, HGEM's core products include CRM, Desk, SalesIQ, Campaigns, Books, and, most recently, MCP.

Impressive results with Zoho One

• 50% productivity gains.
• 50% faster ticket resolution.
• 30% of tickets are auto-resolved.

A well-connected stack

Zoho CRM. "Zoho CRM is at the heart of our processes, and everything connects back into it. Everything starts with our customer records," says Steven. The CRM's leads, contacts, and account records now form the company's single source of truth, which is tightly integrated with its three proprietary systems to prevent any discrepancy in client data. Tasks, reminders, and notifications ensure that client communication is timely, documented, and well-informed, helping to keep the team accountable and organised. Meanwhile, a series of custom modules help shape the CRM into a hospitality-ready solution. The 'Success Plans' module houses each client success manager's quarterly plans to help their clients improve and grow. A 'Commission Pools' module tracks the commission earned by each salesperson. "Here we track all the changes that people make, so we can follow things like bookings, attrition, and other key metrics," explains Steven. The standard 'Sales Orders' module has been adapted to hold HGEM's contracts and agreements, which are connected directly to Zoho Books. "Whenever we have a business challenge, we'll come to CRM and think, how can we solve it or record it, track it, or report on it in CRM? CRM has considerable flexibility to be able to shape things around our business," Steven adds.

Zoho Desk. Moving away from shared inboxes to Desk's ticketing solution has been a game-changer for HGEM. Today, four departments handle thousands of internal and external tickets monthly: Client Support, Mystery Diner Support, IT, and Privacy. Its structured work queues, agent assignment rules, knowledge bases and FAQs have helped to slash response times by 50% since implementation, whilst also improving the visibility of support performance metrics. Zoho's embedded AI assistant, Zia, is now drafting many first responses, further helping to generate accurate replies at speed.

Zoho SalesIQ. SalesIQ provides a dynamic, interactive chatbot on HGEM's website, assisting hospitality visitors with real-time answers to queries. Tightly integrated with Zoho Desk, it uses the ticketing application's extensive FAQ library to provide self-service answers to common questions - with impressive results. "About 30% of our tickets at the moment are handled autonomously in SalesIQ, and those are resolved on the spot," shares Steven. If a visitor requires further assistance, chats can be handed off to HGEM's human agents in just a few clicks.

Zoho Campaigns. Three segmented audiences - enrolled clients, prospects, and mystery diners - receive tailored communications, including newsletters, lead generation campaigns, and feature announcements via Zoho Campaigns. Using a two-way sync with Zoho CRM, HGEM can seamlessly segment its subscribers inside the platform, without any import or export process. Campaigns offers real-time reporting that helps HGEM's marketing team hone its messaging and offers over time. "When we run a campaign, we can easily see how it's performed, and quickly spot drop-outs to help us identify what might be causing them," Steven shares.

Zoho Books. "Zoho Books has managed our finances and invoicing for years, and it's an important part of our suite. It sits at the heart of all of our invoicing and accounting processes," explains Steven. It enables the Finance team to track cash flow in and out of the business, and submit detailed reports to its parent company, which feeds into the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Zoho MCP. The latest addition to HGEM's stack is Zoho's Model Context Protocol platform, which empowers AI agents to act upon user prompts. Steven built an impressive AI agent by connecting his Claude Cowork account to Zoho MCP, which produced an attrition analysis for him in minutes. "It has been fantastic. Much more effective than trying to build blueprints and workflows, or wrestling with code. The result was really useful, and the whole process was very quick. There's huge potential there to make things more connected and slicker," he enthuses.

Looking forward with Zoho One

"I would definitely recommend Zoho, and indeed I have done so! We're part of a collection of businesses, and they all have different CRMs. Lately, I've been showing them all how I use Zoho."

Steven Pike Managing Director, HGEM

Steven's plans for Zoho never rest for long. "I am someone who likes to play, tweak and optimise," he laughs, admitting that he's "inside Zoho most days, looking to make our business more efficient, informed, and effective."

Next, Steven has his sights set on a number of improvements:

• A customer portal to surface more data to external stakeholders.
• Experimenting with Zoho's new unified portal to connect more elements from each application.
• Launching AI-generated responses in SalesIQ.
• Exposing billing agreements to clients in a self-service portal.

When it comes to ongoing advice and support, Steven says he will always turn to Bill at 1 Cloud Consultants. "It's really useful to have someone closely connected with Zoho that I can reach out to for advice or different perspectives on what we can do. It's been a great connection to have all these years, helping us stay on top of what's new in the products we use. The plan is to keep evolving and innovating together."