Restore Information Management uses Zoho Flow to cut change-request admin time from 12 minutes to 2 minutes

About the company

Restore Information Management is the leading UK-owned provider of information management services. They specialize in secure document management storage, scanning, inbound and outbound communications, and workflows.

Generating change request forms from desk tickets

Before Restore Information Management moved onto Zoho, there was no service desk at all; change requests ran on email. The team created the form in  Microsoft Word, emailed it out, and relied on the customer to download it, type in their name, save it, and send it back, at which point someone archived the file.

That last part is where the real problem sat. Anyone could type a name into a Word document. If a customer later disputed a change, Restore Information Management had an email trail and an archived file rather than proof of who agreed to what and when. The customer experience was no better: Some people found the process confusing enough to generate complaints, and a few printed the form, signed it by hand, scanned it, and emailed it back.

Internally it was a sequence of manual steps that each had to go right. Generate the document, copy and paste details from the inquiry, send the email, save the file in the correct place, name it correctly for archiving, and run internal checks before anything went out.

When Restore Information Management rolled Zoho Desk out as part of a second phase of their move onto Zoho, the CRF process was one they specifically wanted to bring in. Their implementation partner, Deloitte (a Zoho Partner), supported that initial build, and the team has since taken over day-to-day management internally, with Deloitte continuing to provide support. They also started using Zoho Flow to automate other parts of the process.

An agent now creates a task against the Desk ticket in Zoho Desk, set to a change-request category with mandatory fields so nothing gets missed at capture. Saving it triggers the workflow in Zoho Flow, which pulls the task data together with customer information from the linked ticket, account, and contact, and populates a Zoho Writer template built with merge fields. The template flexes to what was entered: Tick-boxes on the task determine whether a given section appears in the document at all.

The flow then sets the task to draft and writes a link to the generated document back onto it, because the team was clear that they didn't want anything going straight to a customer. An agent opens the document, checks the content and formatting, and can edit the Zoho Writer document directly at that point if something needs changing.

Getting the form signed, chased, and recorded

Once the agent is satisfied, they update the task status to Approved, which triggers another set of actions. This workflow sends the document to the customer for signature through Zoho Sign. It comments on both the task and the ticket with a link to the Zoho Sign document, and then puts the ticket on hold while it waits.

Two custom functions do the work: one extracts the document ID out of the Writer URL, and the other sets the reminder behavior on the Zoho Sign document to match what the team wanted. There's also a deliberate short delay in the flow to avoid overlapping API calls.

Zoho Sign's reminders repeat at a set interval until a document is signed. Restore Information Management wanted exactly one nudge after two days, then a human decision. So the flow holds a two-day delay, checks whether the document is signed, in progress, or completed, and sends a single reminder if it's still outstanding, commenting on the task and ticket to record that it went out. If the customer still doesn't respond, the ticket is moved from On Hold to Active in Zoho Desk, prompting an agent to chase it down manually.

The flow then branches into a decision box, and based on the response, if accepted, the flow retrieves the document, finds the associated task, returns the ticket to an active status, and logs the outcome as a comment on both. On a decline, it also captures the reason.

One neat detail underpins all of it: The task ID is stored in the Zoho Sign document's description field, because the team needed somewhere to hold it in order to pair the two records back up.

"This flow makes our agents' roles easier, as they never have to leave Zoho Desk. Everything they need is visible where they already work, and the processing, checking, and chasing that used to be manual happens on the back-end automatically due to Zoho Flow."

Elly Blease, Product Manager - Zoho, Restore Information Management

Benefits and ROI

The failure points the old process relied on avoiding are simply gone. Nobody depends on naming a file correctly, saving it to the right folder, or remembering to send a follow-up. Everything is consistent and tracked against the ticket, and sign-off is auditable through Zoho Sign rather than inferred from an email chain.

"Zoho Flow turned a process that depended on people doing the right thing at every step into one that runs the same way every time. Handling a CRF took roughly 12 minutes of admin's time. It now takes only 2, with most of it review and approval. And there's no human error anymore—that's given us a lot more confidence in the system."

Elly Blease, Product Manager - Zoho, Restore Information Management

Instead of an attachment and a set of instructions, customers now receive a clear digital document with one obvious action, which removed the source of the complaints Restore Information Management was getting.

"The team just doesn't have to think about the admin anymore. The form is created almost instantly, the ticket updates itself, reminders are automatic, and a single action takes care of everything else. It frees them up to focus on progressing customer work rather than managing the process around it."

Elly Blease, Product Manager - Zoho, Restore Information Management

Alongside the CRF flows, Restore Information Management runs a smaller supporting flow that updates fields on Zoho Projects and Zoho Desk tasks automatically when they're created. The feature the team singles out beyond the connectors is visibility: Being able to see exactly how a flow ran, what data passed through it, and where something went wrong makes debugging far easier than working in code alone.