Built for M&A Complexity: How a
North American Entertainment
Operator Unified on Zoho
How GENDA Americas unified customer service, sales, and contract management across a North American entertainment empire mid-acquisition.
Weeks
Not months, to go-live across North America
Faster
Technicians dispatch & resolution at thousands of locations
One Platform
Across a business that never stops growing with M&A
Executive Summary
Genda Americas is one of North America’s largest arcade entertainment operators, the North American arm of GENDA Inc. — a Tokyo-listed entertainment conglomerate that has made more than 58 acquisitions since 2018. When they engaged Customerization, they were a company in motion: absorbing competitors, inheriting multiple legacy platforms, and building an operation that had never had a formal CRM.
What began as a customer service platform implementation grew into a multi-phase transformation spanning service management, sales operations, contract lifecycle management, Salesforce data migration, and AI-assisted document processing. As the business expanded through acquisition, so did the scope. Each new phase builds on the last to meet the growing complexity of a consolidated operation. And the system had to work for the people actually doing the work, including a highly mobile field workforce requiring lightweight workflows that fit how they actually operate.
This case study is for organizations that have been through, or are about to go through, a major acquisition, merger, or consolidation. For leadership teams who know the business is moving faster than the systems supporting it. And for anyone evaluating a Zoho implementation partner who wants to understand what a true technology partnership looks like when the requirements keep changing.
The Company
GENDA Americas is the largest arcade entertainment operator in North America, with locations across the US and Canada. Its parent company, GENDA Inc., is a Tokyo-based entertainment group that has made more than 58 acquisitions since 2018.
The North American business grew through consolidation. What were once separate, competing entertainment companies operating independently are now unified under GENDA Americas. That consolidation brought together multiple entities, each with its own systems, workflows, and ways of working.
The business runs on two tracks
01. B2B side:
On the B2B side, GENDA sells, leases, and revenue-shares arcade equipment with partner locations including Cineplex and Cinemark across movie theaters, malls, hotels, bowling alleys, go-kart tracks, and family entertainment centers.
02. B2C side:
On the B2C side, it operates a proprietary brand of claw machines called Kiddleton, carrying exclusive IP-licensed collectibles deployed at Denny’s, Walmart, Kroger, and Toys R Us locations across the US. Kiddleton is expanding rapidly across North America.
GENDA also owns and operates its own arcades, including locations at Woodbine Center, Emoji Planet BC, and one of the largest malls in North America, where it runs two separate arcades on different floors.
Supporting all of this is a field workforce of approximately 300+ service technicians across North America, a network of regional managers, a centralized call center, and a growing roster of external contractors.
The Challenge
Multiple Companies, No Common Platform
Michael Williams, Senior Director of Marketing came to GENDA Americas through Player One — one of the major North American arcade operators acquired as part of GENDA’s expansion. He had worked with Zoho at a previous company and knew what a connected operation could look like. When he joined Player One, he knew immediately what was missing.
“The team was working across disconnected systems and inconsistent workflows. They’d been able to scale so fast — but without a shared platform, there was no consistent way to track activity or manage the pipeline across the organization.”
With more than 58 acquisitions since 2018, consolidation is how the business grows. Each new entity arrives with its own systems, its own workflows, and its own way of working. For the North American operation, that meant inheriting:
- One company running Salesforce for CRM
- Other companies with no formal CRM at all
- Multiple ticketing platforms across the group
- Contracts existing only as PDF files, with no way to search, audit, or report by expiry date or terms
- Machine and location data pulled manually from a flat file, once a week
With more than 58 acquisitions since 2018, consolidation is how the business grows. Each new entity arrives with its own systems, its own workflows, and its own way of working. For the North American operation, that meant inheriting:
- One company running Salesforce for CRM
- Other companies with no formal CRM at all
- Multiple ticketing platforms across the group
- Contracts existing only as PDF files, with no way to search, audit, or report by expiry date or terms
- Machine and location data pulled manually from a flat file, once a week
The CRM consolidation was one priority. The service operations standardization was another.
In the arcade business, machine uptime is revenue. A machine that is out of order on a spring break weekend, or on the release date of a major film tied to the machine’s IP, is lost money and a frustrated customer. The company runs machines at thousands of locations across the continent. Getting the right technician to the right machine, fast, requires a system that connects tickets to locations, locations to technicians, and technicians to the ability to take action.
Without a centralized solution, none of those connections between locations, people and systems existed reliably. Service tickets arrived through multiple channels with no consistent routing. Regional managers were notified by email and had to manually coordinate technician dispatch.
The change management challenge
In the arcade business, machine uptime is revenue. A machine that is out of order on a spring break weekend, or on the release date of a major film tied to the machine’s IP, is lost money and a frustrated customer. The company runs machines at thousands of locations across the continent. Getting the right technician to the right machine, fast, requires a system that connects tickets to locations, locations to technicians, and technicians to the ability to take action.
Without a centralized solution, none of those connections between locations, people and systems existed reliably. Service tickets arrived through multiple channels with no consistent routing. Regional managers were notified by email and had to manually coordinate technician dispatch.
The Ultimate Solution: Built Around the Business, Not the Software
The transformation roadmap prioritized service operations first to ensure the customer experience remained seamless during the initial phase of implementation.
Zoho Desk went in first, built around the specific workflows of a field-heavy operation with hundreds of locations and a highly mobile field workforce requiring lightweight workflows. Once the operational foundation was stable, the work expanded: Zoho CRM, contract management, data migration from different sources, and AI-assisted document processing followed in phases.
Phase 1: Zoho Desk
Phase 1: Zoho Desk
Phase 2: Zoho CRM
Phase 2: Zoho CRM
Phase 3: Expanding the Platform
Phase 3: Expanding the Platform
Phase 1: Zoho Desk — Customer Service and Field Operations
Phase one addressed the most urgent operational problem: a field-heavy business managing thousands of machine locations across North America with no central system connecting tickets, technicians, and locations.
Zoho Desk was implemented as the company’s unified customer service platform, operating across the US and Canada, handling two currencies, and solving several non-trivial problems:
01 Location-based ticket routing
Tickets enter the system through different channels, from the player scanning the QR code or calling to report an issue in an unmanned location like Walmart, or an arcade staff has an issue to fix, the system automatically identifies the location associated with the ticket, the machines associated with it, and the supervisor and technicians responsible for that area. Every relevant team member is notified immediately. This logic pulls from an integrated asset management system that now syncs location and machine data daily. Previously, that data was extracted manually once a week from a flat file.
02 Email-action workflow for field technicians
Hundreds of external contractors service machines across the network. A service portal login for them being on the road isn’t realistic. To solve this, Customerization built templated emails with embedded action buttons: a technician receives an email, presses a button, and the ticket is updated or closed. No login, no training required. As Michael put it: “The ability for external techs to close off an email — not only is it easier, it’s a game changer.”
03 Regional manager self-serve
When a new technician needs to be added to a location, the regional manager fills in a simple request to add form and the system handles the rest automatically. No middleman and no more coordination gaps. Before this process existed, manual processes created delays and inconsistencies in coverage.
04 SLA framework for enterprise partners
Major theater chains and other high-volume partners require formal service level reporting. The SLA framework is being configured to support contractual response time commitments and give partners direct visibility into ticket volumes and resolution performance across their locations.
05 Internal IT ticketing
Zoho Desk runs GENDA’s internal IT help desk as well, supporting hundreds North American employees. One platform handles both external customer service and internal support providing the internal IT team with a scalable enterprise service desk, ensuring internal support matches the high standard of their external customer service.
Phase 2: Zoho CRM — Sales Operations and Contract Management
Phase two brings together two distinct workstreams under one platform: consolidating sales operations into Zoho Crm, and building a contract management module that transforms how deals move to the signed agreement.
The CRM implementation is more complex than a standard deployment because it isn’t just a migration, it’s a consolidation. One of the acquired companies was running on Salesforce. Other companies were managing sales through Excel spreadsheets, email threads, and decentralized tracking methods that are common in rapidly growing, multi-entity organizations.
There was no single funnel, no consistent reporting, and no unified view of the pipeline — nothing outside of the accounting systems that could give leadership a clear picture of where the business stood from a sales funnel perspective.
The goal is one place for all sales activity: leads assigned automatically as they come in from digital properties, deals tracked consistently across the team, and pipeline data that finance and the executive group can actually rely on. For a business operating under a parent company with ambitious growth plans, that kind of visibility is what keeps everyone aligned so the right decisions get made on the right information, at every level of the organization.
“Now we can run workflows based on data that’s in the contracts. Before that? You were opening PDF files one by one.”
Migrating account history, contacts, and deal records into Zoho CRM without data entry and without loss of context required careful planning and execution. The alternative: starting fresh would have meant losing the institutional knowledge built across years of deals and customer relationships inside one of the acquired companies. That history came with them. For a sales team picking up accounts mid-consolidation, knowing where a relationship stands is the difference between a warm handoff and starting from zero.
The contract management solution addresses a different problem. When a company closes a revshare deal, revenue share contracts are complex — terms vary by machine type, location revenue projections, and more. A couple hundred different contract variations exist across the business. Every closed deal isn’t just a handshake. It’s a full contract with terms, conditions, and legal sign-off before it reaches the customer
Customerization built a custom contract management solution in Zoho CRM that:
- Converts a closed deal into a structured contract
- Routes the contract through a multi-level internal approval workflow, with different reviewers having different levels of access and edit rights
- Sends the approved contract to the legal team for final sign-off before it goes to the customer
- Enables reporting and auditing by contract terms, expiry dates, and deal type — none of which were possible when contracts existed only as PDFs
Phase 3: Expanding the Platform
The foundation is in place. Phase 3 will connect the remaining systems that sales, finance, and operations depend on and put the data that already lives in Zoho to work in ways that weren’t possible before.
CRM and ERP Integration
Sales people need real-time access to inventory, pricing, and lead times to close deals confidently. Today that data lives in Business Central, the company’s ERP: a system sales reps will never need to be inside. The next phase connects Zoho CRM directly to the MS Business Central so reps can pull what they need from within the tool they already work in, without touching the ERP. The systems stay separate. The information flows where it needs to.
Zoho Analytics
Executives and finance teams need a clean view of sales performance, pipeline health, and revenue tracking without requiring them to work inside the system directly. Zoho Analytics will deliver that: a reporting layer that sits on top of the CRM and gives leadership the snapshot they need, when they need it.
What Made This Work: A Strategic Technology Partner, Not Just a Vendor
GENDA Americas needed more than an implementation, they needed a technology partner who could quickly understand the business, see what was possible given where things stood today, and build systems flexible enough to adapt as conditions kept changing. It was clear from the start that Customerization was exactly that.
“We weren’t looking for someone to quote hours and move on. Every other partner did exactly that. Customerization looked at what we were actually building and said — this is going to be bigger than you think. A partner who could see that, and stay in it as it grew, was exactly what we needed.”
What Customerization brought to the table goes beyond technical skill.
Any experienced Zoho partner can configure a module.
What’s genuinely hard to find is the combination of: deep Zoho expertise across multiple applications, solution architecture, project management, and the ability to design for a business this complex, moving this fast.
For GENDA Americas, that level of capability wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was the baseline. What Michael didn’t expect was how far beyond that baseline the team would go. For a company of this size and complexity to go live this quickly, with a system built around the people actually doing the work – that wasn’t just competence. That was the right team, firing on all cylinders.
Results
Zoho Desk went live across the US and Canada, serving both external customers and internal employees — on schedule, across multiple business units, with complex business rules in place from day one.
For a company of this size, in the middle of a major acquisition, that alone was unexpected.
“I didn’t expect it to be implemented so quickly for a company of our size, with the complexities of our different business units, and our complex business rules in place. As quickly and as efficiently as it was — it was mind blowing.”
On the CRM side, the work is well underway. The data migration is in progress, bringing years of account history, contacts, and deal records into Zoho CRM without data entry or loss of context. The contract management module is already live — deals are converting to structured contracts, moving through approval workflows, and reaching legal sign-off before they ever reach a customer. What was once a manual process built on PDF files and email chains now runs on clean, reportable data.
What the platform delivers now:
- Machine downtime is reduced. The right technicians reach machines faster.
- Approximately 1,000 support tickets managed per day at go-live, routed automatically by location and assigned technician — replacing manual email coordination
- Hundreds of external field contractors connected to the ticketing system
- Regional managers self-serve technician assignments through a simple form, eliminating a manual process that regularly created gaps in coverage
- Internal IT operates on the same platform as customer service, giving the IT team formal ticketing infrastructure and the business unified visibility
About Customerization
Customerization is a certified Zoho Premium Partner based in Toronto, Canada. We are one of fewer than 60 Premium Partners in North America and one of just 15 in Canada. Our team of in-house consultants and developers brings 7 to 20 years of technology experience — spanning Zoho, enterprise consulting, solution design, and the full range of disciplines needed to serve complex, fast-moving organizations. We have completed more than 300 successful Zoho implementations across North America.
We serve small and mid-sized businesses, growth-stage companies, and enterprise organizations across Canada, the United States, and globally. Our work spans CRM implementation, business process automation, custom integrations, and digital transformation built on the Zoho platform.
We work as a partner, not a vendor. That means we engage with your business problems, not just your feature list. We adapt when your requirements change. And we stay in the conversation after go-live.