Archive for Zoho

Zoho One Offers Incredible Value With Process Automation, Telephony, Single Sign-On, and BlockChain Capabilities

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 12, 2019 by itnerd

Today Zoho unveiled the next generation of Zoho One, the operating system for businesses that is designed to run an entire organization—from sales and marketing, finance and HR, operations and business intelligence, and more—all on a unified technology platform. Zoho One now boasts a new business workflow management application, Orchestly, that lets customers effortlessly create, manage, and optimize their business processes through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. In the two years since its launch, Zoho One has seen considerable growth and now serves more than 20,000 customers who make Zoho One the operating system for their business. With three new services added to the operating system, one new application tying together every corner of business operations, and several updates, Zoho One continues to pack unmatched value.

Approximately 25 percent of Zoho One customers use more than 25 applications on the platform and more than 50 percent utilize beyond 16 applications; This demonstrates that businesses are embracing the benefits of an all-in-one solution. Zoho One’s momentum is a product of a major shift in customer expectation and rejection of complexity in favor of easy-to-use, all-in-one platforms that deliver immense value. As Zoho One continues to grow with and for its customers, the platform is expanding, reimagining and redefining how technology platforms should be moving forward and setting the tone for the entire industry.

Zoho One launched with a suite of 35 distinct applications. Within two years, it has evolved into a powerful operating system for businesses with over 45 applications, along with several built-in services including AI, Business Intelligence, Messaging, Search, and more. Zoho One is today a customizable, extendable, and integratable platform all at the same cost to customers.

Bold New Operating-System Services

Communications

  • PhoneBridge, Zoho’s telephony platform, which integrates over 50 telephony vendors on one side and several Zoho applications on the other side, is now available within Zoho One.
  • PhoneBridge integration enables telephony in Zoho apps like CRM and Recruit. It allows customers to make calls from Zoho apps, and provides contextual information on incoming calls. Enabling PhoneBridge will give users context for all incoming calls from Zoho CRM, Zoho Recruit, Zoho Mail, and 20+ other apps.

Single Sign-on

  • The new Single Sign-On service from Zoho One allows customers to integrate any third-party applications onto their Zoho account. Zoho Single Sign-On now supports around 50 third-party applications and is growing day-to-day.
  • Not only does Single Sign-On make it more convenient to manage both Zoho and third-party applications, but because Zoho’s SSO works with third-party systems like active directory, it also makes it scalable for mid-to-large sized businesses.
  • Zoho One admins can now enforce YubiKey authentication as an added factor for increased security, on top of existing multi-factor authentications already supported.

App Management and Provisioning

  • Zoho One currently enables provisioning for all 45+ Zoho apps. This is now being extended to custom apps created through Zoho Creator as well as external apps available through Zoho Marketplace.
  • Zoho, third-party, custom, and SSO apps can be provisioned either individually to users or as groups conditionally provisioned with custom criteria.
  • Zoho One’s new Admin Panel with dashboards and reports allows admins to monitor user activity and app usage, enabling them to find and manage underutilized resources. Admins also get extensive reports on user management, sign-in activity, app usage, and account security.

Business Workflow Management

Orchestly

  • With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Orchestly enables managers with no coding skills to define processes with little effort.
  • Using Orchestly, managers and administrators can automate and run their regular workflows, including cross-departmental workflows such as purchase approvals, content publishing, asset management, and onboarding.
  • In the case of onboarding a new employee, the recruitment, interview, offer submission, and onboarding is handled across the recruiting department, HR department, legal department, and whatever team the applicant is joining. Because so many departments and applications are involved in this process, Orchestly is able to cut across these various teams and applications to create comprehensive workflows and automate complex processes.
  • Onboarding a new employee involves multiple departments, each potentially with their own workflows. Orchestly is able to manage and automate a process that bridges each of those departments and their workflows.

Products and Services Innovations

Zoho Sign

  • The enhanced Zoho Sign now provides an additional level of verification for customers by adopting blockchain-based timestamping through Ethereum, the globally accepted, open-source platform.
  • Whenever a document is signed using Zoho Sign, an Ethereum transaction will happen in the background, to which the hash of the signed document will be added to the transaction notes.

All Levels of Support

  • Zoho One offers free Concierge service, where potential customers can consult with the Zoho team to better understand how Zoho One can help their business.
  • Additionally, Zoho is introducing Jumpstart for Zoho One, helping customers through their initial implementation. All Zoho One customers are provided support, out-of-the-box, but now enterprise customers can request premium support.

Zoho One is the operating system for business. It means more to a customer than just being a suite of 45+ applications. Zoho One is a platform—built on one technology stack—over which an entire business can be run. Zoho One breaks down departmental silos and helps drive smarter decision-making. It can be customized with powerful service options and it grows to fit each business’ needs and goals, leading to shorter time-to-value and overall success.

Pricing

Pricing for Zoho One is $30 per employee or $75 per users. In a world where vendors are nickel-and-diming customers, every new feature, service, and product mentioned in this press release is included in Zoho One for free.

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Mastercard & Zoho Expand Access To Tools To Help Small Business Owners

Posted in Commentary with tags , on July 11, 2019 by itnerd

Mastercard today announced it is expanding its partnership with Zoho to bring small business owners around the world a comprehensive array of products and services to make running their enterprise easier, more efficient and more profitable.

Every business is on a quest to increase efficiency and productivity; for small business owners it can be a matter of survival. With Zoho’s platform, Mastercard is able to offer its small business customers access to a suite of marketing, accounting and CRM tools to automate and digitize time-intensive, paper-based processes. Scaling its existing partnership from India to the rest of the world, Mastercard and Zoho are enabling simpler business operations for SMBs globally.

In fact, small businesses account for nearly 50 percent of the world’s GDP and employ almost two thirds of the global workforce1. Through Mastercard’s financial institution and acquiring partners, small businesses will now have access to various solutions such as enterprise resource planning and finance software, customer relationship management, and marketing solutions, amongst others.

Zoho is a cloud-based platform accessible via website and app and can be delivered via API. Zoho’s technology stack is flexible, taking the heavy lift off the integration process and making bringing solutions to market faster. Mastercard and Zoho shared solutions will be available later this year.

You can also read my review of Zoho here.

 

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Review: Zoho

Posted in Products with tags on July 1, 2019 by itnerd

When you think of CRM software that is based on a “software as a service” (or SAAS) model, one company comes to mind. And that is Salesforce. Now that makes sense as they’ve been around forever and pretty much own this market. But another company should pop to mind if you’re looking for CRM software that is on a SAAS model. That company is Zoho. I say that because Zoho offers pretty much everything that any business could need. Be it sales and marketing automation, customer support and a help desk, product configuration and reporting and customer analytics. Not to mention accounting and invoicing among others. But the key thing is that it’s aimed at small to medium business at a price that they can afford.

One thing that’s cool with Zoho is that you get a number of choices when it comes to what you can get for your business:

  • The free edition, which includes just 10 users, comes with sales leads, marketing, and customer support automation with reporting and forecasting tools. You can sign up for that here.
  • The Standard edition includes sales forecasting, customized dashboards, a document library, marketing campaigns, and the ability to send mass email. You are however limited to 100,000 records in terms of the size of the database.
  • The Professional edition includes email integration, social CRM, Google AdWords integration, inventory management, workflow automation, and role-based security, along with an unlimited number of database records.
  • The Enterprise edition adds territory management, custom modules and functions, time-based actions, custom related lists, and multiple currencies.
  • Ultimate takes the Enterprise version and carves out a space for just your business as well as having a handful of other feature for larger businesses.

You can find comparisons of the above tiers here and pricing can be found here.

There are two other tiers that are worth mentioning:

  • Zoho CRM Plus includes all of the features in the Enterprise edition, as well as email marketing, online customer surveys, visitor tracking, and advanced social media marketing and analytics. Pricing starts at $50 a month and you can sign up here here.
  • At the top of the food chain Zoho One. It’s a single license that provides access to every app in Zoho’s portfolio. You can find out pricing here.

A big plus with the Zoho product lineup is Mobile app support that is available across all plans, free and paid. The apps are available for iOS and Android, and even the Apple Watch and from my testing work very, very well. But for me, the thing that stands out are the deep integration of all the apps with each other. Everything is very well integrated and feels like they were built at the same time by the same team. I point that out because it’s main competitor Salesforce doesn’t, or at least no longer has that feel as it feels like certain aspects have been “bolted on” after the fact. A close second in terms of things that stand out is that you have so many features to work with, especially if you pick one of the upper packages. Most business will not utilize all the features that come with Zoho if they pick one of the upper packages, and that’s a good thing because it means that a business is unlikely to grow out of it. There is one other thing that I should point out because it iskind of unique. It is Zia which is Zoho’s AI that your customers can chat with. And because it is context aware, it is highly skilled at finding the right answers from say a knowledgeable of documents for example. But it doesn’t stop there, Zia is available in Zoho’s other apps such as Zoho Writer which is their word processing software so it can offer advice on your writing for example. There are no separate fees for enabling Zia, but some Zia abilities are only available in enterprise-level plans.

The final thing that stands out to me is the most important things that business care about. And that’s price. If you browse through their pricing and compare it to Salesforce, it’s an amazing value seeing as I have heard of companies who have hundreds of people using Salesforce paying as much as $2000 a license a year. This makes Zoho very compelling in my books and well worth a loo if you need CRM software in your business regardless of what size business it is.

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Infographic: Research Reveals The Increasing Value Of Accountants For SMBs

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 6, 2019 by itnerd

SMB infographic-01

Source: Zoho

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Zoho’s Announces New Marketing Platform

Posted in Commentary with tags on April 9, 2019 by itnerd

Zoho announced today at Zoholics Austin its new marketing platform that executes marketing campaigns across multiple channels while coordinating their orchestration centrally, against outcomes, plans, and budgets. Designed to help businesses of all sizes coordinate marketing tightly with sales, the platform is integrated with Zoho CRM and a number of other third-party applications.

The platform is driven by Zoho MarketingHub, a new application that addresses the crying need for marketing coordination across the proliferating marketing channels of the digital world. It also allows marketers to create personalized journeys for prospects based on their different intermediate responses to the campaigns that engage them. By designing and automating these customer journeys, personalized marketing can be executed on a very large scale. Journeys map the user experiences across multiple channels that include web, social, email, mobile, and event marketing.

Zoho MarketingHub integrates with a number of Zoho apps, including Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Sites, Zoho Survey, Zoho Backstage, and Zoho Social. Furthermore, it also integrates with other customer applications, notably Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Zoho’s Marketing Platform Empowers Businesses To:

Provide a multichannel marketing experience

  • The marketing platform can support over 20 different marketing channels, including website, social, events, text, email, ads, offline, and more. They can all be orchestrated to work seamlessly to create unified, cross-channel marketing journeys.

Fully automate marketing functions based on customer behavior

  • If a customer abandons their shopping cart, the marketing platform can generate a text reminder, which may lead that customer to a personalized email with their abandoned items. After the customer buys those items, the platform can be programmed to automatically send out a survey. These journeys can be personalized based on the user’s preference.

Engage through a highly integrated marketing experience

  • Not only does MarketingHub integrate out-of-the-box with several Zoho applications, it also integrates with several third-party applications including Shopify, Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, and others. Through a pre-integration with Zoho CRM—or other third-party applications—marketers can access existing customer data or log the data of new, qualified leads.

Access built-in support

  • The marketing platform comes with several built-in elements including prebuilt journeys, forms, and templates, among others. Marketers can use these elements to get a jumpstart on the implementation of their marketing campaigns.

Leverage sophisticated analytics tools to measure campaign success

  • After executing a campaign, marketers can access reports on ROI and other performance indicators. The platform uses advanced analytics to provide complete visibility across channels, helping marketers successfully plan their next campaign.

 Zoho MarketingHub starts at $240 per year per user for 1,000 leads. The Premium edition starts at $480 per year per user for 1,000 leads.

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Zoho Launches Next Generation of Office Suite

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 14, 2019 by itnerd

Zoho announced today at Zoholics Mexico City its new version of Zoho Office Suite, which includes four sophisticated, cloud-based productivity software applications—Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, and Zoho Notebook—enhanced with Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered assistant. Zoho Office Suite provides deep contextual collaboration to meet the diverse, end-to-end business needs of users, whether they are part of a small business or enterprise.

Applications in the Zoho Office Suite are not only integrated among themselves, but also with Zoho’s communications tools (Zoho Mail and Cliq, a cross-platform messaging app), Zoho’s collaboration tools (Zoho Projects and Zoho Connect, a private social network for business), as well as Zoho’s several other business applications. These contextual integrations, for example, enable users to merge data from Zoho CRM into a document and send it for signature through Zoho Sign.

Create a Better Document, Spreadsheet, or Note with Zia

  • In Zoho’s document creation software, Zoho Writer, Zia detects context-based grammar mistakes, rates the readability score of each document, and suggests style corrections to improve overall writing quality. Click here for more information on Zoho Writer’s new features.
  • In Zoho Sheet, Zia offers deep insights into users’ data sets by automatically showing the most relevant charts and pivot tables for their data. Zoho Sheet also supports Natural Language Querying where users can ask Zia questions about their data and Zia will respond with the appropriate function, chart, or pivot table, which can then be added to their spreadsheet. Click here for more information on Zoho Sheet’s new features.
  • Zoho Notebook is the newest addition to Zoho Office Suite and one of the most advanced note-taking applications on the market. Zia Voice, Zoho’s conversational AI, can help users create a customized recipe “smart card” by grabbing the relevant visuals, instructions, and shopping lists from their favorite website—all initiated by voice command—and organizing it neatly into the application.

Dynamic Creation Tools for Today’s Workers

  • Zoho Writer features a new automation hub with document merging, fillable documents, form-based document creation, and one-click signature collection capabilities.
  • Zoho Writer can work completely offline on web, mobile, and iPad editions, syncing everything to the user’s account upon reconnection.
  • Zoho Writer offers a distraction-free mode, plus a focus mode that highlights the paragraph in development and dims everything else in the document. There’s also an option to enable typewriter sounds to bring back the nostalgia of writing on a typewriter.
  • Zoho Show’s user-focused interface helps the author easily and quickly populate slides and choose from a variety of themes, with options to include smart elements, tables, charts, and path animation.

Zoho First-to-Market Exclusives

Zoho Sheet is the first spreadsheet software to offer data-cleaning capabilities to address inconsistencies and eliminate duplications. The data-cleaning tool processes the given information, lists all possible errors—with options to replace them—and rectifies them at the click of a button.

  • Featuring custom functions powered by Zoho’s very own scripting language, Deluge, Zoho Sheet allows users to create their own personalized functions. For example, users can create a script or deploy a pre-built script to pull data across an accounting app to fill in a Zoho Sheet sales or expense report.
  • Zoho Show allows users to run presentations on Apple TV-enabled devices as well as Android devices by turning the user’s mobile phone into a controller, from which the presenter can beam and control slides on multiple TVs at one time.

Zoho Office Suite is available to single users for free, $3 per user per month for SMEs, and $6 per user per month for enterprises.

About Zoholics

Zoholics, is the annual series of user conferences across the globe, is an opportunity to meet our team face-to-face and learn directly from the staff behind our applications. Visitors will have ample opportunity to network with like-minded people from companies of all sizes and industries who have turned to Zoho to transform their business. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/zoholics.

 About Zoho

Zoho is the operating system for business—a single online platform capable of running an entire business. With apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho is one of the world’s most prolific software companies. In 2017, Zoho introduced the revolutionary Zoho One, an integrated suite of applications for the entire business. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/one.

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