How Relay Built an Enterprise Growth Engine on Zoho One

The challenge

When Relay pivoted from consumer hardware to a B2B model in 2020, it did so with no shared infrastructure, no software contracts, and no existing customer records. Everything had to be built from the ground up.

The leadership team had prior experience with Salesforce, and Rivers had previously built sales and support systems. When they evaluated it for Relay, the verdict was clear: too complex and too expensive for a company that did not yet know the shape of its business.

Without a system in place, leads were assigned manually, every update required individual action from a rep or SDR, and manual data entry consumed 25–30% of sales time. On the support side, the company's previous Intercom system proved unscalable and lacking in the advanced features required as the customer base shifted toward enterprise accounts.

Underlying both problems was a near-total lack of business visibility. Leadership's expectations of data were high from day one—both the CEO and President came from consulting firms that treated analytics as a management discipline. The early reality did not match those expectations: data was scattered, siloed, or simply not captured, which meant that basic operational decisions took far longer to make than they should have.

The solution

Relay's decision to adopt Zoho One came down to a straightforward calculation: the company did not yet know what it was going to need, and a platform that could cover every operational surface area from day one offered more value and flexibility than finding individual tools for each function. Salesforce assumed a defined process and defined scale that Relay did not yet have. Point solutions left ticketing, analytics, and automation as separate, unresolved problems. Zoho One offered one platform and one licensing model, with transparent per-user pricing that meant the entire team could have access from day one.

Relay started by implementing Zoho CRM, then migrated support from Intercom to Zoho Desk as their B2B customer base grew. From there, the team built outward: Zoho Flow for automation, Zoho Analytics for business intelligence, Zoho Sign for contracts, Zoho Forms for lead capture, Zoho WorkDrive for document management, Zoho SalesIQ for website engagement, Zoho Projects for engineering collaboration, and TrainerCentral and Zoho Learn for customer and internal training. Today Relay actively uses more than 20 Zoho applications across every function of the business.

Revenue operations in Zoho CRM

Leads enter Relay's system through Zoho Forms, are checked against the CRM via Zoho Flow to prevent duplicates, and are automatically assigned to the right person. Existing customers and engaged leads often use the form as well, so Sean designed the flow to ensure their submissions are contextually linked to the right CRM records, rather than having SDRs reach out as though they were a truly new lead.

The full sales cycle runs through Zoho CRM Blueprints, which define every stage from lead assignment through qualification and close, enforce required fields at each transition, and automatically trigger follow-up workflows. This reduced manual data entry from 25–30% of a sales rep's day to approximately 5 percent. Contract signatures run through Zoho Sign with Blueprint-tracked steps, and a workflow automatically creates a renewal deal 60 days before contract expiry.

When a deal closes, account tier classification triggers the onboarding flow. Product training invitations go out automatically via Zoho Flow to the customer's employee list through TrainerCentral, accepted invites create contacts in the CRM, and training progress feeds back in real time. This has enabled Relay to move away from live, manual training for each new customer, freeing up more time for Customer Success Managers. Effective training is key for adoption of the new system for Relay's customers, and high adoption is a key driver of retention and long-term relationship building.

Customer support in Zoho Desk

Relay migrated from Intercom to Zoho Desk in 60 days. Because Zoho CRM was already live, agents immediately had full customer context on every ticket without leaving Desk. The team built out a complete ticket lifecycle using Blueprints, two-tier SLA policies, round-robin assignment, and automated supervisor follow-ups for pending tickets. Custom functions handle the tasks that fall between the formal workflows: preventing closed tickets from being reopened on customer reply, surfacing open ticket counts for the same account, and syncing CRM data into the ticket after triage.

One of Relay's most distinctive support capabilities involves no inbound tickets at all. The company's data scientists monitor device health signals in Amazon Redshift; when algorithms detect audio degradation or battery wear, tickets are automatically created in Zoho Desk via API before customers have reported anything. For a defined set of high-value accounts, replacement devices are dispatched proactively. This model—possible only because the data layer and support platform are connected—is a direct contributor to Relay's ability to maintain a low churn rate.

Connection and automation with Zoho Flow

Zoho Flow is the connective tissue of Relay's Zoho One deployment. More than 200 flows connect Zoho applications with third-party tools including Calendly, Google Calendar, Slack, Notion, Klaviyo, and Jira. Flow enables Relay to maintain a visual overview of all of the connections, rather than having more scattered integrations. Flow also serves as a prototyping environment: new automations are built in Flow first, typically within a day or two, and migrated to an enterprise-grade middleware platform if they prove critical to operations. This lets the team innovate quickly without putting core processes at risk.

Driving growth with data in Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics functions as Relay's decision layer, aggregating data from Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, Zoho Projects, and Zoho SalesIQ to give managers the ability to build their own dashboards without going through the data science team. Relay also uses Zoho Analytics to produce reporting for customers that request it—for example, a hotel chain that asks for data on which of their locations are using Relay's services.

Analytics has driven each of Relay's major structural decisions: when to add SDRs, when to split the sales team into market segments, when to build an enterprise function, and when to cancel an underperforming outbound campaign. The campaign story is illustrative. A third-party firm operated the campaign, which drove demo volume sharply upward. However, Analytics showed that no-show rates were high and conversion had dropped, indicating that no real value was being generated by the demos resulting from the campaign—so Relay chose to cancel the engagement.

The results

Rapid growth on the platform

Relay grew from approximately 30 B2B customers in 2020 to several thousand in four years on Zoho One. The workforce grew from around 15 employees to approximately 150, and the sales organization expanded from one person to 25 reps, 3 managers, and 10 SDRs across inside sales, enterprise, and retail channels. As the business divided and specialized, the platform scaled with it.

Manual work down, customer satisfaction up

Blueprint automation cut manual data entry from 25 to 30 percent of a sales rep's working day to approximately 5 percent, surpassing the team's stated goal of 10 percent. The efficiency gains extended to the customer success organization, where Rivers credited the shift directly to training automation: "We went from a one-to-one sales rep to success rep ratio to three-to-one. That's a huge savings."

Customer churn has been cut in half and now sits below 1% annually, driven by training adoption tracking through the TrainerCentral and Zoho Flow integration, proactive device-health support from the data science and Desk connection, and Analytics-surfaced trends that flag emerging churn risk before it materializes at the account level.

Relay's customer satisfaction score has been above 90% for more than two years and is currently running at 95%. Average time from ticket creation to first response is 15 minutes, and average total handle time is just over an hour.

Analytics-driven organizational design

Data gathered from all the different components of Zoho One and analyzed in Zoho Analytics has enabled Relay's RevOps team to predict which prospects will make a purchase right from first contact, at the demo stage, and throughout the deal process, informing decisions about how to optimize the sales org going forward.

Each major decision that enabled and supported Relay's rapid growth was made because the data made the case for it. Rivers put it directly: "All of that growth is due to our ability to understand what's going on. Zoho Analytics gives us that ability to look at it and make decisions on our business." For a leadership team that came into Relay expecting to run on data, the platform delivered that from day one.

Conclusion

Relay chose Zoho One precisely because, at the time of procurement, leadership couldn't be sure what would be needed to support the company's growth and development. A platform that could cover every operational possibility without forcing a re-platform decision when the business outgrew a point solution was the right answer for a company building the plane while flying it.

Four years later, that bet has paid off in every direction. As the business continues to scale, marketing automation is being brought fully online within Zoho One, and customer success workflows currently handled in a third-party tool are on the roadmap to be incorporated into the platform. Relay's deployment demonstrates that a fully integrated, single-vendor platform can serve as a genuine competitive advantage—not just a cost-saver—for a fast-growing B2B company navigating rapid, sustained expansion.