Witness the remarkable new iteration of Zoho One. And reimagine your business as teams share insights across over 50 applications and third party apps from Google, Microsoft, Quickbooks and more.

“Now we have about 75,000 customers using Zoho One,” explains Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. “These customers are distributed all over the world and the average number of applications they use is around 22 to 23 and that has been growing and that option has been pretty significant across various org sizes, small to mid-size to enterprises as well.”

The new AI enhanced Zoho One unifies features across 50+ Zoho apps and third party integrations in a variety of ways.

One layer of integration involves Spaces, divided into Personal, Organization and Department. Take a look at how these are arranged below.

Get the Personal Touch

Say you operate a Seattle-based coffee roaster – with national distribution.

Each member of your marketing department needs personal productivity tools. Think design tools to work on the elements of a campaign and file storage to upload those assets. They also likely need a chat feature to discuss projects with other members of the team.

“You know, sometimes we want to just put our head down and do the work … and we need our own space for ourselves, that is the personal space.” adds Vegesna. “So we created a personal space with relevant tools that you may use.”

Each member of your sales team needs email to receive leads and video-call features to follow up with potential cafes or supermarket chains potentially interested in carrying your coffee.

But instead of popping in and out of 10 or 20 applications, Zoho One’s new integration offers a magic trick.

Abracadabra and each member creates a Personal Space where emails can be read and sent, calls made and files stored and shared.

All this happens within a dashboard created to improve productivity.

Expect to compete with big brands like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee in no time, as Zoho One supercharges your sales and marketing teams.

These individuals require personal space to do their work but also they look for ways to share quickly with other members of the team.

Fortunately other aspects of Zoho One’s unified new approach fill just this need. Stay tuned.

Keep Your Organization Communicating

Of course, you also need a way to communicate and collaborate across your organization.

“If you’re in a collaboration mode within your entire organisation, well you get into the Organisation Space where there are a lot of tools out there that can help with various collaborations that you may do – various forms of collaboration.” Vegesna adds.

Say you operate a real estate brokerage in Reading, Pennsylvania. But you have regional agents throughout several counties in the Southeastern part of the state.

You need tools to help you bring those agents together on a regular basis, even when spread out over 50 miles or more.

Town Halls

The Organization Space enables you to set up town halls with your agents wherever they are located.

Set up your town halls with clearly defined durations and agendas. For example, establish a Monday morning session to update agents on new listings and the progress on existing listings.

Share exciting news on offers received as well as successful closings and other landmark accomplishments.

Set up another town hall midweek, perhaps an ask me anything session for new agents who are just learning the ropes.

Forums

Use Forums to help agents collaborate on projects, do more showings and ultimately make more sales.

For example, encourage agents in one county to post their listings, photos, asking price and other details.

This allows realtors in another county who might have the perfect buyer to set up a showing or request more information on the listing with just a few clicks.

Or suppose one realtor has an open house coming up this weekend. Forums provide a place to announce the event and ask other realtors to attend and possibly bring clients who might be interested.

Other Tools

Town Halls and Forums both reside within Zoho Connect. But make no mistake. Our hypothetical real estate brokerage need not get siloed within one application.

You see, the new Zoho One seeks to ease boundaries between apps with simple dashboards allowing collaborating teams to enable or disable apps at will.

“While you may be navigating multiple applications, it feels like a single unified interface across the board,” Vegesna points out.

So our southeastern Pennsylvania real estate company likely also uses Zoho Projects to manage staging of properties or closings on property sales to ensure nothing gets missed.

But the company also uses Zoho Social to create campaigns for individual properties – or to bring in new listings.

“So users can create multiple dashboards, pulling data across multiple applications and the default dashboards that we create themselves pull data across the operating system,” Vegesna adds.

Cool, huh?

Improve Departmental Efficiency

But most importantly, the new Zoho One’s philosophy of unification tackles the big daddy of all business challenges, departmental efficiency.

Miss this important detail and your business always ends up throwing more money out the window than you take in at the door.

The new Zoho One allows teams to create dashboards for any department you can imagine – using any tools they need.

“They are organized whether it is CRM related, whether it is HR related, support related,” Vegesna begins. “If you want to add any of these, like a help desk overview, you pin it in or you add that and it kind of shows up here.”

Imagine the accounts receivable department of a collection agency in Santa Fe, New Mexico working mainly with local hospitals and other healthcare providers.

Few businesses better exemplify the connection between departmental efficiency and profitability.

Fail to track delinquent accounts, schedule calls to make payment arrangements or track and process payments made? You soon face angry clients and the possibility of cancelled contracts.

Fortunately, a variety of Zoho tools provide the perfect solution.

Use Zoho Billing’s Accounts Receivable Aging Summary to identify delinquent accounts.

Employ Zoho Projects to create a ticket system for contact and payment negotiations. Then use Zoho Payments to make paying down that debt effortless.

Zoho Books helps track incoming payments from customers – as well as the cost of collection.

Create a dashboard – or multiple dashboards – and give your team a 40,000 foot view of your collection operations.

This allows piling up delinquent accounts, delays in contact, delayed payments and excessive costs in the collection process to stick out more clearly.

“What if we can take all of these applications … and make them behave like a single application – and where you remove the boundaries between these applications on the data and make the entire thing behave like a single unified experience where the context becomes the king?” Vegesna muses.

Can you see the potential?

New Zoho One Puts Ghost in Machine with Zia

Another important change in the new version of Zoho One happens to be the further integration of Zia – Zoho’s AI assistant.

AI already featured prominently in Zoho’s offerings. But the new Zoho One incorporates Zia into almost everything.

“So Zia is kind of sprinkled throughout the operating system,” Vegesna explains.

For example, Zia helps Zoho take its famous low code app building feature in Zoho Creator to a whole new level.

Zoho Creator already makes app creation a breeze with its simple drag and drop elements. But now give Zia a prompt and it builds what you want and even installs it.

Say you needed a checklist of CRM or other tasks for the day.

Or, as in the example of our imaginary accounts receivable department above, you need outstanding invoices ordered by the due date. This allows your team to track accounts to determine when they have reached delinquency – or when payments are late.

Perhaps you just need a simple way to create a meeting schedule for the day or for the week. This represents just a sampling of the kinds of widgets Zia can whip up for you, according to Zoho.

“It will create a widget for you and plug that right in,” Vegesna explains.

Equally important, Zia helps you sift through reports for important insights.

Vegesna adds, “ For example, in this case, I’m looking at a report. I can expand into it, zoom into it, ask Zia to do some analysis where Zia will give me a summary on that particular report.”

So, Zia parses through huge volumes of information surfacing only the important bits for your project.

Suppose you need the sales numbers on your ecommerce site from 2024 and the first half of 2025. Or perhaps you need a summary of traffic and engagement from your last social media campaign.

Zia scours reports from Zoho Commerce, Zoho Social or any other applications to provide the summaries you need.

Unification of Experience, Intelligence and Integration

Think of the way AI removes barriers between apps and data as a unification of experience.

No longer do you work in Zoho Service Plus or Zoho People Plus or Zoho Marketing Plus. No longer do you work in sales or finance or HR.

Instead, you collaborate across applications with the help of AI. You find the data you need regardless in which department it resides.

Then think of the way Zia works across all applications. It delivers widgets and surfaces and summarizes data to help you better understand what happens across your business not just in one little silo.

Consider this unification of intelligence.

Bringing Third Party – To the Party

This brings us to unified integration.

This integration happens not only between Zoho applications. The new Zoho One also integrates with third party applications – like QuickBooks, Mailchimp, HubSpot and more.

And it allows integration between these third-party applications themselves. So your business gets to choose the tools that work best for you – whether they exist in the Zoho ecosystem or not.

Imagine an SEO firm in Silver Springs, Florida. Perhaps they use Zoho Projects to manage ongoing activities. Perhaps they use tickets for ongoing tasks like optimization of clients’ sites, link building and keyword research activities, for example.

Maybe they also use Zoho CRM to nurture leads from marketing campaigns and bring in new clients.

But when it comes to bookkeeping, they prefer Quickbooks – even though they use Zoho Invoice to bill clients and Zoho Payments to collect fees.

Fortunately, with the new Zoho One, this presents no problem.

“You can bring in third party dashboards as well, plug them right in with single sign-on enable,” Vegesna explains. “You get a complete overview of it, and then the concept of boards and removing the boundaries is a critical piece and we don’t restrict it to dashboards themselves.”

Perhaps our Florida SEO company also uses GoDaddy to host the websites it builds for clients and for the domain name registration that goes along with this.

Vegesna further explains how this integration in particular works.

“So to make it really simple, we have also partnered with GoDaddy, where within the domain unification, all you need to do is login to GoDaddy, authorize changes to some of these records, and we will make these changes to their domain with their permission automatically,” he says.

Final Thoughts

No matter what your business needs, the new Zoho One offers over 50 applications to help you achieve your business goals.

More to the point, the new iteration of Zoho One eliminates boundaries that once siloed data and app functionality. It allows businesses to create their own dashboards combining app functionality and moving data seamlessly as needed.

New AI functionality including use of Zoho’s AI assistant Zia across the platform, allows businesses to build widgets and manipulate and summarize data.

The platform upgrade even allows seamless integration with other third party software outside the Zoho ecosystem.

This gives your business ultimate flexibility to choose the tools you want and integrate them the way you want.

Visit the new Zoho One today.

This article, "New Zoho One Uses AI to Reminagine Your Business" was first published on Small Business Trends

Think one place to share email, spreadsheets, documents, calendars and notes. Many tools offer all this stuff and more, of course.

But small businesses also need it all on a budget.

Zoho continues to build onto its own collaboration and productivity suite with all these aims in mind. And for a service that starts as low as $1 per user per month and offers more robust plans at between $3 and $6 per user per month, prepare to be amazed at what you get.

“We’re really trying to make Zoho Workplace the most flexible collaboration suite in the market,” says Rakeeb Rafeeque, head of market strategy for Zoho Workplace.

And flexible seems like just the right word for it.

Zoho Workplace Gives Your Team a New Home

Zoho Workplace bills itself as “a beautiful new home for your team’s best work.” That new home has everything you need. But you also get the option to move the furniture around anyway you want.

So turn the key and look inside. The best phrase for how the rooms are laid out in your team’s new home seems to be “open concept.”

“One interesting part about it is that all of these apps are also connected into each other,” explains Rafeeque.

Say you run an automotive ecommerce store in Indianapolis. Or maybe you operate a burger franchise in Fresno. Just go into your main dashboard in the morning.

You find a monthly financial report in Spreadsheets. You read a message from an important supplier in your email. Then you open Calendar to check the time for the morning’s first meeting.

And you check all these things from just one place.

“So we’re not asking you to open your email on one side, your chat on the other side, your files on the other side and then kind of figure out what you’re supposed to do by juggling through all these multiple tabs and windows,” says Rafeeque.

Instead, Zoho Workplace offers one “pane of glass” through which to see everything that’s happening. Zoho calls this dashboard the “center of gravity” for your business.

And it really changes how you and your team collaborate and keep track of what comes next.

Sounds easy, right? We thought so!

Within Zoho Workplace you find a variety of individual applications covering email, collaboration, video conferencing, texting, telephone and employee engagement.

Take a look at some of the key application suites that make Zoho’s productivity platform a standout.

Zoho’s Email Suite Gives Enterprise Scale at Small Business Price

Imagine an email suite on par with the ones your biggest competitors use. But that suite delivers for a cost well within your small business budget.

Open Zoho’s Email Suite, an integral part of the Zoho Workplace experience. You might first think this seems like part of a much more expensive enterprise grade platform.

Well, yes and no. Zoho’s email suite brings robust functionality at a level comparable with more expensive enterprise tools.

That includes Zoho’s robust security and spam protection. The company’s data and threat protection detects and eliminates threats like phishing, malware or spoofing emails from ever reaching your employee’s inbox.

This protection also prevents email accounts used by your employees from being hacked into and data from that email being compromised or stolen.

And Zoho offers a scalable service any enterprise would consider impressive.

The real difference comes down to price – as low as $1 per person for the email alone.

And just look at the features!

With Zoho Mail, every member of your team gets an enterprise grade custom domain hosted scalable email inbox.

This comes with its own email calendar and task manager.

For example, suppose a client shoots you an email containing an important date for an upcoming meeting. You can highlight that date in your email and with one click add it to your calendar.

Or create a simple to do list using the Tasks feature. Before this client meeting you need to create a list of important product features, create a slide deck then create a brief explanation video.

How do you keep track of all this – and remember to do it? Well, Zoho Mail’s task feature allows you to create a checklist so you won’t forget.

And all of this comes with Zoho’s trademark security ensuring communications aren’t compromised and your inbox stays free of spam.

Zoho’s Content Collaboration Suite Gives Teams a Place to Create

Imagine the marketing department of your Phoenix-based software company needs to pull together a new ebook to use as a lead magnet for a new email campaign.

To complete it, they need not only images from your latest corporate event but data from your sales department and a list of features from your product development team.

The sales team hastily pieces together some spreadsheets to be turned into more attractive graphics for the ebook. And your product team creates a document giving a rough overview of your new platform. Meanwhile, the photos are uploaded one by one by the team who ran the event.

Your various departments share all this stuff very quickly and easily in a brilliant content collaboration suite offered as part of Zoho Workplace. The achievement proves all the more impressive because of the fact that your marketing department is in the Philippines, your sales team is in Eastern Europe, and your event was held in New York City!

If your marketing, sales, and product development team serve as the brain and nervous system of your business, then Zoho Workdrive serves as the beating heart.

Zoho’s content collaboration software offers a document and spreadsheet management system allowing teams to create and share files quickly.

It also offers a desktop sync feature for pulling up documents from your own local drive and placing them in the collaborative space.

Finally, it features Zoho’s office suite equipped with a document editor including a word processor and tools to create both spreadsheets and presentations.

Zoho’s Unified Communication Suite Gets Your Team Talking

Of course, communication remains one of the most critical components of collaboration.

So any platform aiming to help your teams to work together must help them talk together too.

Zoho Cliq accomplishes this by bringing together video conferencing, voice, chat and more.

“We’d really like to see Zoho Cliq as the center of the user experience,” says Rafeeque. “It’s most likely the first app a user opens in the morning among the workplace apps.”

The app offers not just video and voice chat but also a telephoning system – plus the texting so ubiquitous in today’s business and social settings.

Imagine you run a fast fashion brand based in Miami with manufacturing in Malaysia. Overnight  (your time) some questions come in about a new line of swim wear you’re developing.

You respond instantly via text and if necessary plan to hop on a call later this evening when it’s early morning in Kuala Lumpur.

Next you text your marketing team in New York City and the company managing your ecommerce site in the Bay Area. You set up a video conference call for later that day to discuss strategies for rolling out the new swimwear line on your website and on social media.

All these communications, across the country and around the world, happen through various tools all located within the Zoho Unified Communication suite.

“It’s really like a virtual office where you talk to each other,” Rafeeque says.

The platform allows you to check co-workers’ status to determine whether they are in a meeting, on a call or available to talk.

Thus, the Zoho communication suite allows you to interact with co-workers around the world as easily as if they worked in the next cubicle.

Zoho Employee Engagement Builds Culture Even Among Remote Teams

Ever since Covid 19, remote work powered by technology continues to grow.

Both businesses and employees recognize the benefits and pitfalls.

For employees, remote work offers flexibility. You choose where to live and eliminate long punishing commutes. But this new way of working also robs employees of the social interaction and camaraderie offered by the office.

For businesses, remote employees represent lower overhead with less need for office space and on-site resources. But they also present challenges. Businesses need to rethink how to measure productivity and consider new ways to build cohesive company culture.

Zoho’s Employee Engagement Suite, Zoho Connect, helps enhance the benefits of remote work while addressing some of the difficulties.

For example, the Forums feature allows employees to share something a bit more personal with fellow employees. You might tell others about  a cool trip you took recently, a poem you found inspiring or a piece of everyday wisdom you find helpful in life.

Posts in Forums take the place of a conversation you might have had with some co-workers in the breakroom or standing around the water cooler.

But also consider posting about a new project launch or something else you’re doing for work. This way Forums also allows other employees to share in your sense of accomplishment.

“It’s also a way for the leadership to stay in touch with the rest of the company,” Rafeeque explains.

Consider Zoho Connect’s Townhall feature. It allows business owners to address the whole company at once in a virtual setting. At the same time, employees get a chance to send in questions about the company’s direction.

This gives employees the feeling of being more strongly invested in the company. But it also offers you as a business leader an unvarnished insight into your employees’ thoughts and concerns.

What Sets Zoho Workplace Apart?

When comparing Zoho Workplace with collaboration and productivity suites from the competition, It helps to look at the flexibility Zoho offers.

You started as a small business with 10 to 20 employees. But consider that with Zoho when you reach a team of 300 to 400, no one will force you to switch to a more expensive plan. That represents a big difference from others in the market, says Rafeeque.

Not only that, but Zoho allows businesses to mix and match plans for their team members. Maybe you operate a logistics company or an HVAC business. Drivers and repair teams in either of these businesses need email but not a full collaborative suite.

With Zoho Workplace you can buy a less expensive “mail lite” plan for these team members and save the more comprehensive and expensive plan for the back office team.

In fact, Rafeeque says, this happens to be what 30 to 40 percent of the more than 450,000 businesses already using Zoho Workplace already do.

Zoho says surveys of these businesses show an average of 60% savings when switching to Workplace from other leading collaboration suites.

Cool AI Features Round Out the Platform

Zoho also incorporates its own Zia AI platform and OpenAI functionality into Workplace with some interesting results.

For example, stop banging your head against the keyboard trying to come up with the perfect turn of phrase for that next email. Simply tell Workplace what you want to say and let its email generation feature do the rest.

Avoid reading every email in a thread or the full conversation in a chat you’ve just been added to. Let Workplace’s AI feature summarize the conversation for you.

Workplace’s AI tools also allow you to create documents and presentations with a few prompts. Or take a photo of a budget report or list of customers and watch as Workplace’s AI organizes the data into a spreadsheet.

In addition, Workplace’s AI Writing Assistant tells you whether you’ve used too many run-on sentences, whether you’re using passive or active voice and how readable your message might be.

Meanwhile, Zoho’s Message Assistant in Cliq not only tells you about spelling and grammar errors in your text messages. It also gauges whether the text you’re about to send comes across as too angry.

“Hey, calm down, bro!”

Workplace’s AI even offers image generation. So with a few prompts, let your design department know exactly what you want that graphic or T-shirt design to look like.

Final Thoughts

Small business teams need a place to collaborate these days, even if they find themselves in different cities – or different countries.

Meanwhile, small businesses, or those just getting started, need to control costs. They require the tools of an enterprise company without its financial resources.

Zoho Workplace addresses this paradoxical need with a platform that does it all – and at a low cost.

Email, instant messaging, phone systems, document sharing and design, townhalls, forums, spreadsheets, presentation creation and more: you find it all here.

And remember the robust AI tools to help you create and perfect your interactions with other employees.

Yes, Zoho Workplace brings everything you need to collaborate and improve your productivity together in one place.

Take a look at Zoho’s Workplace today – or call the Zoho sales team for more details.

This article, "Zoho Workplace Offers Premium Collaboration at Lower Cost" was first published on Small Business Trends

Well, if you own a small business, you know how difficult establishing that flow can be.

You must integrate the efforts of your sales and marketing and operations teams and ensure proper fulfillment and a flawless customer experience. And those just represent the broadest brush strokes.

Fortunately, Zoho’s workflow integration and automation platform, appropriately enough called Flow, helps with a lot of this. And it does so at an affordable price for small businesses.

Zoho Flow Offers Unique Value to Small Businesses

“The most important thing that we are focused and we are deliberate about is the value that we provide for our customers,” says Hari Shankar M., Head of Product and Strategy for Zoho Flow.

Flow occupies a unique space among competing integration solutions. On one end, stand native integrations. These feature instant value with no code necessary. But on the downside, they offer limited basic functionality. Forget customizing them for your business’s specific needs.

On the other end stand custom integrations. These offer robust functionality and lots of ability to shape a tool to your company’s workflow. The trouble comes when you need to implement these tools.

“You need a developer. You need a tester. You need somebody to get the business use cases, structure it all out and more based on the structure and needs of the company,” explains the Zoho Flow team.

And all this customization comes at a huge cost. Imagine paying all these consultants plus the lost time and probably revenue while they create a customized solution. Then imagine the time and money lost while your team learns to use it.

Flow Provides the Best of Both Worlds

Flow occupies a middle ground between the simplicity of native solutions and the flexibility of a customizable option.

It offers the best of both worlds – particularly appealing to small businesses.

“Especially for small businesses, they benefit when a platform is easy to use, with minimal learning curve and adoption becomes simpler,” explains Hari.

The platform offers 1,000+ apps for businesses to build customized integrations that meet their specific needs. These apps include 50+ Zoho apps, 100+ WordPress plug-ins, business suites like Microsoft, Google, and Atlassian, and data bases like SAP and SQL. Zoho Flow also allows users to connect apps beyond its app portfolio with the help of incoming and outgoing webhooks. Users can select from over 25,000 workflow templates to start building integrations catering to their business needs.

These tasks might include creating a checklist, sending out emails, updating leads in your CRM and more.

Users then further customize each task using utilities like Zia, Zoho’s multi-product AI ecosystem, creating a workflow to perfectly fit their requirements.

“Users don’t need to deal with coding or integrating APIs- Flow makes it easy for even small businesses to get started smoothly,” the Zoho Flow team adds.

Flow Proves Perfect for SMBs

A number of features make Zoho Flow a perfect choice for SMBs.

First, Zoho focuses on making its platform easy to use. As mentioned earlier, you create a workflow by dragging and dropping triggers and actions, then customize them using the modules provided.

Zoho also built a very scalable platform. Small businesses need software that can grow with them. Currently, Flow customers create an average of 26K workflows a day with a total of 350K workflows last year – and a total of 2 billion tasks.

Zoho defines a task as whenever data flows from one application to another, like from Shopify to QuickBooks, for example.

The company also provides integration with WordPress plugins including WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, Elementor, WPForms, Ninja Forms and more.

WordPress remains an important part of the SMB tech ecosystem, so Zoho focuses on providing the integration small businesses need. In fact, at least 55 installs of the dedicated Zoho Flow WordPress plugin happen daily, says Hari.

All of this plus Zoho’s trademark security, privacy and compliance make up a package costing just $25 a month for a standard plan and $41 a month for the pro option. Zoho Flow is also included in Zoho One and Zoho Creator.

Compare that cost against the money you save by integrating and automating tasks you and your team now handle manually.

“It’s the whole package basically from development experience – how someone can easily do it by themselves – and as well as the pricing point where they don’t have to shell out a lot of money for getting these automations happening,” says Hari.

Small business owners often worry that options like these will take too much technical know-how. This means expertise they have no time to learn and have no money to hire.

“But like you already saw, it’s a lot of drag and drop. The platform itself is very intuitive. There are so many assistive systems in place to kind of help them out with that journey. So they do not have to be scared that OK, it’s integration. I’ll have to use code etc.” says the Zoho team.

It seems easy to understand then why Zoho Flow is such a favorite with small businesses. The company estimates 80% of Flow customers fall into the SMB category with 12.50% being mid-market businesses and 7.50% categorized as enterprise clients.

See Zoho Flow In Action

Hari explains how this easy to use platform works. With mindblowing ease, users set up a workflow. Then add in an unlimited number of decisions branching out based on varying sets of criteria.

Look at one example that should have ecommerce businesses clamoring to sign up.

Say you run a Shopify store selling bathrobes, towels, and other bath items. You make a sale on a few bars of soap.

Now watch how Zoho Flow can reduce your cost, create wonderful customer service and perhaps create a repeat customer in the future.

First, if the customer has purchased from your store before, Flow recovers that customer’s email contact from Zoho CRM and QuickBooks. If not, Flow creates a new entry in Zoho CRM and QuickBooks for your new customer.

In either case, Flow generates and sends an invoice to your customer for the purchase.
Then, Flow sends the customer discount coupon codes with a value pre-set based on the size of the purchase.

Flow sends these discount coupon codes in a week, 10 days, or whatever other interval you designate in an attempt to generate additional sales.

All of this happens based on a pre-selected group of criteria you establish giving you ultimate control.

However, it all happens automatically – without you or your team lifting a finger. So with one simple workflow, Zoho’s automation and integration platform streamlined your sales, accounting and marketing processes.

And this probably results in you not just saving time but money as well.

Integration of this kind can help you grow your company as well. Because this gives you time to work on other aspects of your business – like developing new products and exploring new markets.

Still, prospective clients sometimes express doubts.

“A lot of times I get asked this question. Hey, why should I automate my data or my processes? Why should I integrate my applications and my ecosystem? To which I just tell them one answer. Automation helps you scale but integration helps you grow,” the Zoho Flow team says.

“Now why do I make that statement? We understand that from our customer stories,” he adds.

The Customers Speak

Zoho customers certainly see how Flow helps them scale and grow.

Take Revenue Ranch, a solopreneur business consultant in Los Vegas, Nevada. Revenue Ranch bills itself as “the premium business education and consulting firm for founders who want consistent, profitable and smooth growth without having to sacrifice their personal income and well-being.”

But though Revenue Ranch offers training and other information on profitability and growth, the company faced some problems of its own before Zoho Flow came along.

Frank Cowell, chief revenue boss at Revenue Ranch, runs the whole business himself. He offers clients consulting and training often in groups. Cowell prides himself on providing a great customer experience. But this leaves little time for things like mapping data and onboarding clients.

And Cowell faces even more challenges once his clients are onboarded. He needs to be sure they get added to the proper training modules, receive the right training materials, take part in the right meeting and join the right group.

“Let’s say a client is canceling or upgrading their subscription, going between email then to CRM then maybe to Meeting then to TrainerCentral. It’s a hassle for him,” explains Hari.

Using Zoho Flow, however, resulted in a savings of more than $10,000 annually for Revenue Ranch. It also resulted in cutting out more than 180 hours in manual work. Cowell also saw more data consistency and he reinvested all the savings he realized into his business.

Next up, we look at Alps Education, an education company based in Huddersfield, England.

The company provides platforms that help educators of students aged 14 to 18 in the UK.

“You know education is demanding, right? Students, parents, a lot of demand comes through,” Hari explains.

“And Alps Education was in that position where they get a lot of demand. And that resulted in oftentimes having a poor customer experience where it’s either a churn or a lead just walks away from them,” he added.

Invoicing and renewal orders became major pain points for the company resulting in loss of both customers and revenue.

In particular, the company experienced trouble properly tracking invoices. This meant either not knowing where these invoices had all gotten to or being unsure which were paid and which were not.

All that changed when the company started using Zoho Flow to automate and integrate its business process.

Today, Alps Education sees a 60% increase in the completion of onboarding new customers. This obviously directly translates to increased revenue.

But the company also says it now saves more than 100 hours annually in work previously spent on non-value added tasks. Changes included completely automating invoicing for one of their peak periods.

The staff saved 50% of the time taken in preparing reports due to the availability of real time data, all while also seeing increased customer satisfaction and retention.

For the last example, check out Innoliving, an ecommerce business specializing in health and fitness devices and beauty tools, based in Ancona, Italy.

Before using Zoho Flow, Innoliving’s head of ecommerce and online operations Ferdinando Ploschberger faced plenty of challenges especially during peak season.

Customers placed orders in one format. But shipping labels required a reformatting of customer information.

Still a third format needed to be entered for the company’s logistics provider.

And without any integration to tie the various systems together or automation to handle the process, all this needed to be done manually.

This meant Ploschberger needed to hire and train people to do the work, especially during busy periods. And this cost him time and money.

Since discovering Zoho Flow, the company automates more than 150,000 tasks. Order processing now peaks at 2,000 a day up from 100 orders a day before implementing Zoho Flow.

Ploschberger estimates a savings of 1,500 hours annually and now offers same day shipping.

But perhaps most importantly, the company estimates automation and integration using Flow increased its revenues by over half a million Euros.

Why Do You Need Zoho Flow?

Shankar M. points to this last bit as the real reason small businesses need to consider integration and automation like Zoho Flow.

“From the customers’ story that should be evident. They have been able to save a lot of money or even actually make more revenue out of Zoho Flow’s implementations. So it’s the whole package at a great value,” he explains.

As we’ve seen, Flow’s automation helps small businesses just like yours scale. And integration helps them grow.

Today, Flow sees users not just in the technology sector like IT and IT related services. Businesses in professional services, manufacturing, real estate and construction, healthcare, retail, education and financial services use it as well.

We saw how, at a relatively low cost, Zoho Flow streamlines processes like sales, accounting, marketing and much more.

It integrates systems from bookkeeping software to CRM to WordPress plugins and too many others to mention.

And all of this helps save time for you and your team, decrease costs and increase revenue.

What’s more, Zoho Flow occupies the perfect middle position between native and custom integrations.

While native integrations offer limited functionality and lack of customization, custom integrations require greater expertise and considerable time and cost to implement.

By contrast, Zoho Flow offers no-code solutions with simple drag and drop templates.

And customizable tasks include creating checklists, sending out emails, updating leads in your CRM and the list goes on and on.

To learn more about how this versatile software fits into your business operations, visit Zoho Flow today or contact Zoho Support for more information.

This article, "Zoho Flow Streamlines Tasks, Saves Time and Money" was first published on Small Business Trends

Whether you run recurring webinars in Seattle, Washington, a nail salon in Duluth, Minnesota, handling sales for an organization, or a barber shop in Atlanta, Georgia, scheduling appointments remains the core of your business.

Despite this fact, many businesses continue to use emails and phone calls or something even more prehistoric to handle the most important aspect of their operations.

“Businesses continue to rely on pen and paper to jot down details and schedule meetings, which really doesn’t help in scaling up,” says Surekha Jagadish, head of Marketing for Zoho Bookings.

Zoho’s automated scheduling software offers a way to cut down on no-shows and integrate other software for payments, marketing, customer experience and more.

But first, take a look at the alternatives.

Scheduling Alternatives and Bottlenecks

Writing down appointments on registers when customers stop by or call on the phone, seems easy enough.

But this system requires you to dedicate a manager or receptionist to those duties.

Or you need to ask employees to take out time to manage appointments, the time they should be using to serve customers.

Consider our barber shop and nail salon examples.Imagine leaving someone with shaving cream all over their face or only one hand pedicured to go and deal with scheduling issues.

The alternative involves leaving the customer who wants to schedule the appointment in a limbo while you finish with your current customer.

Either choice divides your staff’s and your own attention.

But even options like email or chat platforms like Whatsapp fall short.

Consider  when customers ask for appointments via emails or chat platforms, someone must take time to corral all those incoming requests.

Surekha points out how all these scheduling systems:

• Leave your prospects without a clear response about whether the appointment is scheduled or not.

• Fail to capitalize on the moment your prospects are most motivated to schedule an appointment with your business.

• Lead to additional complications when prospects need to cancel or reschedule an appointment.

• Lead to prospect frustration because of lack of a prompt response.

• Lead to additional work for you and your staff.

• Limit your appointment scheduling to business hours even though this may not be the period of peak customer interest.

“These are all the challenges that come even when they use normal email, your WhatsAppor any chat platform to schedule appointments,” says Surekha

“Because there is a lot of communication happening back and forth, and figuring out who’s available and who’s not.”

How Zoho Bookings Addresses These Pain Points

Fortunately, Zoho’s software engineers devised a solution to all these problems – plus some you may not have even considered.

Visit Zoho Bookings for a view of how scheduling should be.

Once you embed the  booking page on your website, prospects use the intuitive dashboard above to schedule, reschedule or cancel their own appointments. Consider the problems this solves.

Scheduling now takes up next to none of your staff’s time. Forget sending confirmation emails or returning phone calls to confirm appointments.

Most importantly, prospects now schedule appointments when they are most motivated – perhaps immediately upon seeing a marketing message. And that happens even if your staff has already closed up shop for the day and gone home to be with their families.

Prospects see their appointments have been scheduled. And when you and your staff check the next day, you know it too.

But the tool offers much more than a simple online calendar and appointment scheduling platform.

Zoho calls Bookings its  end to end appointment scheduling software. This comes from the fact that Zoho Bookings handles the process from the time a prospect enters your business through the time services are delivered. And, this process extends to helping understand what the customer thought of your service and how they can be made a return customer.

To accomplish all this, Zoho Bookings interacts with payment providers, CRMs and other solutions both inside and outside Zoho, where necessary.

But first, take a look at how Zoho Bookings works – and how this helps a wide variety of businesses with their scheduling needs.

Zoho Bookings: An Overview

To begin with, Zoho Bookings offers a simple and intuitive way to set up your scheduling for various services and prompts you to add details specific to your business.

First, fill in the required details in the screen below.

You begin by adding your business name and website. You also add the preferred currency for your business.

Then move on to a page where you will be asked for relevant details about your company.

All the while, a progress bar shows the number of tasks you’ve completed – and those still needing completion to fully set up and get you meeting ready.

The above page asks for the industry that best describes your business.

Select from a variety of options including HR, sales, marketing, finance, and more.

Then select the specific customer needs you will be addressing with your services. This is AI-generated based on the industry you select.

For example, suppose you run a software as a service solution. You need to set up appointments to walk clients through account setup. You might select “customer support” and then “technical support” as shown above.

On the other hand, if you offer personalized Zumba training and want to use Zoho Bookings to set up one-on-one tutorials, you might choose “fitness” and then “personalized service.”

Cool, huh?

Now, look how Zoho Bookings helps you set up your availability. This allows customers and clients to pick times that work best for them.

In the screen above, first set your time zone. For instance, if your business calls the U.S home, you might set the time zone to Eastern Standard Time for New York City or Pacific Standard Time for San Francisco.

Next set hours and days of availability. Do you and your staff limit availability to weekdays and standard office hours – say 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.?

Or do you offer some availability to customers or clients after hours or on weekends?

Whatever the case, Zoho Bookings allows you to effortlessly plug in your availability, allowing customers to simply choose a day and time that works for them.

“So once the app is set up, we would create a one-on-one service relevant to the industry they choose so they can book a sample appointment and get started,” explains Yogesh S., Senior Product Manager for Zoho Bookings.

Types of Booking Services

In addition to setting the business availability , Zoho Bookings also permits you to offer various types of meetings to customers or clients.

This allows you to further customize your appointment options based on your business needs.

One-On-One

First, Zoho Bookings offers  One-On-One meetings.

“The one-on-one meeting is the most widely used while schedulingmeetings,” Yogesh S. explains.

This session allows a single host to meet with one participant virtually or in person.

Consider again our Atlanta barber shop. Use the setup screens above to establish your regular hours. Customers access the application and set appointments based on your availability.

Imagine other virtual and in person uses for the app. A local podiatrist offers patients a simple way to set up appointments, for example. Or a life coach presents the opportunity to set up virtual consultations.

Group Booking

The group booking feature allows a single host to offer multiple clients or customers the opportunity to sign up for a class or other group interaction.

Remember our Seattle-based webinar presenter? Use Zoho Bookings to set up times when you will be available to present your webinars, that are scheduled repetitively. Interested participants then use the application to choose and schedule a time that fits their availability too.

If you’re a university department head, think about the options of using group booking to set up – say – online Spanish or math classes for the summer semester.

Collective Booking

“The collective booking is the reverse of group booking,” Yogesh S. says.

Here, Zoho Booking offers the option of multiple hosts and a single participant or customer.

Think about how this booking option might work when setting up panel interviews for screening job applicants. Or use it to set up a board meeting or similar group discussion.

Consider this option also when your sales team needs to meet with a customer or client for a product demo or other sales call.

Resource

This last option offers a simplified method of booking anything from conference rooms to equipment rental, says Zoho.

Use the resource booking feature to schedule use of offices or meeting rooms at your coworking space.

Or automate the scheduling of space at businesses and organizations ranging from bars to churches to banquet halls for special events.

Other Features

Of course, Zoho Bookings offers many other features as well.

For example, on the Zoho Bookings landing page above, you see how businesses can create various services. Customers visiting your landing page schedule appointments based on the type of service they want.

In the case of the hypothetical sales organization above, we see clients initially have the opportunity to schedule discovery calls where sales people learn about their needs.

Another option involves a more general sales meeting.

Switching to the healthcare sector, imagine a family medical practice offering appointments for complete physicals, wellness visits or follow-up visits, for instance.

Above, Zoho Bookings also offers several methods of sharing links to its appointment page with clients and customers.

Consulting businesses, as one example, routinely send emails to their lists. Zoho Bookings offers the opportunity for them to add a link for prospects to click through and sign up for a  one-time consulting session.

But the software also offers another choice. Whether you are promoting your services as a periodontist or a web designer, simply allow patients or clients to book appointments through an embedded widget on your site.

The company also offers a white label option so that your scheduling page need not look like it comes from a separate provider. The customizable booking page allows you to incorporate your own branding elements so that your customers recieve a seamless experience. AI integration helps match your embedded scheduling widget with your site’s overall appearance and branding.

Zoho says more options for getting clients to the booking page are on the way.

The software also offers email, SMS and calendar invite notifications. These remind your customer or client of upcoming appointments and hopefully reduce the incidence of no-shows.

Zoho Bookings also offers interaction with a raft of other services both native and from other providers. For example, the software integrates with Zoho Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.

Integration with Zoho Meeting, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom offer flexibility when  setting up online meetings.

The software also integrates with payment and CRM options.

These services allow you to take payments for virtual appointments and to send followup email marketing in the hopes of turning clients who book a call into repeat customers, for example.

A few interesting Zoho Bookings’ features, are an in-built calendar that can showcase staff availability across days and weeks. Businesses can pick and choose the timeslot they want to share with specific customers, with the ability to copy and paste these timeslots across all email providers. Staff will also be able to send notifications and reminders via WhatsApp to their clients, shortly.

Zoho prices its Bookings service at $6 per user per month for its basic package and $9 per user per month for companies with up to three locations or departments. Additional workspaces for more teams or locations can be paid for as add ons. And Zoho offers custom plans based on a business’s specific needs.

Final Thoughts

With 14 million appointments already scheduled, Zoho Bookings enjoys the trust of 29,000 plus customers thus far, the company says.

Large concentrations of these clients inhabit the healthcare and education sectors as well as real estate. But the software lends itself to businesses of all kinds. Since Zoho created Bookings to accommodate the needs of healthcare businesses as well, they also made the software HIPAA compliant.

Among companies proudly relying on Bookings, Zoho counts Spaghetti Agency, a UK digital marketing firm.

Prior to using Zoho Bookings, Spaghetti Agency complained of too much back and forth with clients delaying the scheduling of calls.

After adopting Bookings, the company reports saved time scheduling thanks to customers being able to see real-time availability while setting up appointments.

Whether you operate a medical office in Poughkeepsie, New York, an online sales team In Toronto, Ontario or a beauty salon in Detroit, Michigan, you need scheduling software that works for you.

Stop wasting time taking calls by phone or email. Adopt a booking application you can customize to fit your business.

Learn more about Zoho Bookings and the whole Zoho ecosystem today.

This article, "Schedule For Success with Zoho Bookings" was first published on Small Business Trends

Project managers, rejoice! Zoho just introduced an application to usher in a bright new future for what you do.

On March 11, 2025, Zoho revealed its new unified AI-driven project management platform Projects Plus.

“Zoho Projects Plus is basically a collaboration of hybrid project management,” explained Zoho senior evangelist Aarthi Elizabeth. “One is your traditional projects and the other is your agile methodologies.”

“It then brings in data analytics as well,” Elizabeth added.

For many businesses, this constitutes a game changer. Think about the possibilities.

Zoho’s current Projects software sees greatest use amongst businesses in construction, manufacturing, banking, financial services, insurance and IT services. And the new Projects Plus application – which can be used on its own or with the earlier software – works not just for enterprise businesses but for small businesses too.

In fact, Elizabeth points out a majority of current users of Zoho projects software are small to medium sized businesses.

Building a Foundation with Projects Plus

Say you run a construction company. You just won a major contract – perhaps for a school or medical building.

Congratulations! Now you need to get down to work. Completing the project on time and on budget means keeping track of a small army of contractors all responsible for a small piece of the puzzle of your completed building.

You need to oversee the work of plumbing, HVAC, electrical, framing and masonry contractors and likely many many more.

Suppose your flooring contractor runs into delays. This may hold up other contractors too, putting you behind schedule. Or suppose your excavation contractor encounters hard rock or clay at the job site rather than the loose sandy soil expected, likely driving up that part of the budget.

Certainly you built additional time into your construction schedule in case of delays and contingency funds into your budget for such added costs.

But unexpected delays and costs remain just that – unexpected. Suppose you had a tool that could alleviate some of the guesswork.

Making the Best of Uncertainty

Or imagine you operate a light manufacturing business. You create plastic garbage and recycling bags in an industrial park in Northeastern Pennsylvania but have suppliers all over the world.

For example, your plastic extruders and blow film machines come from Taipei, Taiwan as well as any parts you need to repair them. Your polyethylene pellets used in making the bags come from a plant outside Houston, TX.

The bag making machines themselves created to cut your plastic film into your final product come from Guangzhou, China. Finally, the dyes and additives used in the plastic making process come from a manufacturer in Neenah, WI.

Obviously, to keep producing your bags to satisfy your customers’ needs, you must keep control of all these sources – and probably more. You need to watch if costs increase from domestic suppliers. And you need to monitor whether import taxes and shipping costs impact materials and equipment from suppliers overseas.

You also need to track inventory of your raw materials so you know when to order more – allowing time for shipping. And you require an organized maintenance system for your machinery so you can anticipate problems instead of being surprised.

One Platform to Rule Them All

Enter Zoho Projects Plus. While a traditional project management software might have once been sufficient, today’s project managers need something extra.

“The role of data in project management has become more critical than ever and that brings us to Projects Plus,” said Elizabeth.

According to Zoho, over the past 15 years data usage by project management teams increased by at least 100 times. And the company expects that to speed up as project managers become more and more reliant on AI.

This puts project managers on the frontier of a massive change in the way businesses get things done.

It signals a shift from intuition based decision making to data driven decision making. This in turn requires a strong data management platform with integrated AI solutions.

Imagine you work as a project manager for an IT services company charged with installing patient records software at a large number of hospitals and related medical offices connected to a large regional health network.

You know from experience roughly how long it takes your technicians to install the software. But suppose the team runs into unexpected trouble.

Drop the ball and you run the risk of not hitting installation deadlines outlined in your company’s contract.

By contrast, a data driven platform with AI solutions stands a far better chance of estimating project completion times based on an average of past performance. And your company could rely on this estimate with a far greater confidence of accuracy.

This represents the shift to a more data driven project management in general.

So what makes Zoho Projects Plus so unique? Glad you asked?

Platform Pillars of Projects Plus

Zoho’s new Projects Plus comes with some important platform pillars to help organizations understand what the application can do.

Data Democratization for All!

First, the software provides data democratization. What does this mean?

“Our aim is to make data accessible to everyone on the project team, and not just data engineers and analysts,” explained Elizabeth.

Suppose you work as a loan officer at a regional bank. You notice that a certain kind of loan the bank offers seems to often go into default. But you need to be sure your experience isn’t just anecdotal before reporting your insight.

You need not contact IT to have them pull data from past loans. A dashboard allows you to see the rate of default by type of loan across the company. Now you see whether the defaults represent a few isolated incidents or a troubling trend.

Contextual Generative AI for Smarter Decisions

Second, Zoho Projects Plus offers an important AI component.

“We have added contextual generative AI with which you can generate content and leverage conversational AI to make smarter decisions,” said Elizabeth.

Imagine the insurance company you work for puts you in charge of managing rollout of a new product you never offered before.

Use contextual generative AI to evaluate data on the new product and then generate possible risks associated with it – as well as strategies to mitigate that risk.

Hybrid Project Management for Traditional and Agile

Third, Zoho Project Plus offers hybrid project management.

“Enterprises across verticals can make use of our unified hybrid project management which is a user-friendly platform which brings traditional and agile methodologies together,” said Elizabeth.

Imagine you head the marketing department for a large ecommerce website. Your team uses agile methodology when doing project management for ongoing campaigns. You do this so your team can quickly tweak and make changes to campaigns even while underway based on customer feedback.

Meanwhile, the product management department uses a more linear and methodical approach. New products are carefully planned and then rolled out when ready for customer consumption. This makes a more traditional project management approach a better fit.

Still, both departments must talk to one another. It helps the product management department to hear customer feedback. And it helps the marketing department to know the release schedule for new products so they can develop new marketing campaigns to promote them.

“And they can also leverage the broader Zoho ecosystem to scale their businesses as they expand horizontally and vertically, “ Elizabeth added.

Collaborative Work Management to Bring Your Team Together

Fourth, Zoho Projects Plus creates a collaborative project management environment where innovation thrives.

“Our collaborative work management capabilities reduce the gap between remote teams making them more productive through content collaboration, communication and automation,” said Elizabeth.

Say your hypothetical construction company falls behind on your project. Your excavation contractor discovers hard rock at the site. Or torrential rains delay his or her work for days.

Now masonry, framing, plumbing, electrical and a whole host of other contractors are behind as well.

Contractors all on the same platform keep each other apprised of delays to avoid lots of needless team meetings. This collaboration also minimizes the cost of workers being onsite when no work can be done.

Now, imagine a marketing company with a social media team in the Philippines, a video production house in New York City, and copywriters in London, UK, and Bucharest, Romania.

Coordinating a huge campaign with video, blog articles and social media components becomes easier when teams are on one platform. They share information – and digital assets needed for the campaign – quickly. And other teams can easily see the progress of tasks completed and deadlines met.

The Cycle of Life

Take a look at how Zoho Products Plus takes your team through the entire lifecycle of a project. It begins with ideation then moves on to research and development and right on through to production.

Imagine a software company creating and designing applications for the fintech industry. Your team starts with collaboration.

Your sales team receives feedback from customers that they need a solution to automate approvals of online loan requests.

Jump On Forums

Your sales team jumps on the Forums section within Projects Plus. Members of your software development, operations, and user experience teams join them to discuss clients’ needs.

Teams discuss what customers need this new application to do. They discuss what it should look like and how it should operate. Finally, they talk about how long it will take to develop and what teams will need to be involved.

Share on Wiki

Now, you need to build a knowledge base. The Wiki feature within Projects Plus allows you to share research and ideas with all the teams working on the project – and with clients if need be.

It allows for shared knowledge and quick feedback so all parties remain on the same page.

Roll Up Your Sleeves with Tasks and Milestones

You’ve done some brainstorming, completed some research and gotten feedback from clients. You know which way you’re headed.

Your team now begins the research and development process on Tasks and Milestones. Go ahead and break your project down. Assign tasks to the appropriate teams and set deadlines.

Use Timesheet to Boost Productivity

Anyone who works on projects knows setting deadlines does not guarantee success. Perhaps one team takes too long on their part of the project holding others back. Perhaps another team gets bogged down in research and needs some nudging.

Using the Timesheets feature in Zoho Projects Plus allows you to track progress, look for ways to increase efficiency and eliminate bottlenecks.

Log and Resolve Problems with BugTracker

Bugs remain an unfortunate reality in software development. Maybe your new software stalls in the middle of the loan approval process. Maybe it approves loans without going through the proper steps. Either problem upsets clients and sends your team back to the drawing board.

But with the Bug Tracker feature in Zoho Products Plus, you log every glitch, every hic cup. You make sure all are resolved before your shiny new application rolls out to clients.

Zia is also a Part of the Mix

All of these features, and more, work hand in hand with Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia. Bring documentation for a task into Projects Plus for your team to discuss and Zia will summarize it and rephrase it for better understanding.

“But that’s a very small way to use it,” says Elizabeth.

So what’s a bigger way? Well, if you bring all your data for the task into Projects Plus, analytics dashboards are created. You then use Zia to pull data across these dashboards. Then sit back and watch the AI create insights you can use. You can also ask Zia questions about the project which it can answer using the data you’ve added in.

Zoho Leaves Competitors in the Dust

Not many other software tools in the space currently offer the range of features available through Zoho Projects Plus – without combining several applications. The platform also includes Zoho’s trademark privacy and security features.

Zoho also offers integration with a boatload of outside apps including Google’s Sheets, Drive, Calendar, Chrome and Analytics, a number of Microsoft applications and much, much more.

Zoho offers flexible pay as you go pricing for Projects Plus starting at $15 per user per month, annually. For more on the pricing plan look here.

Conclusion

The focus on data driven decisions now dominates the world of project management – and with good reason.

Teams using data in the process from ideation to project completion see an increase in efficiency and are quicker to identify bottlenecks.

The introduction of AI features allows teams to get a more holistic view of projects by pulling together data from many sources.

Zoho’s Projects Plus leads the charge in this new campaign. And businesses reap the rewards of this innovation in better efficiency and better results.

Learn more about Zoho Projects Plus and the whole Zoho ecosystem today!

This article, "Zoho Projects Plus Changes the Game in Project Management" was first published on Small Business Trends

Zoho Cliq changes the way teams communicate and work together even at great distances. 

“Zoho Cliq is a part of the Unified Communication and Collaboration stack. It basically helps teams work together more efficiently by integrating all your communication and collaboration needs into one platform,” explains Shanthana Lakshmi S, Senior Marketing Analyst for Zoho Cliq.

How Technology Forces Changes in Communications and Collaboration

One big change involves how close in proximity team members need to be in physical space. Take a look at this example.

You come into the office on a Monday morning. You hoped to chat with Phil about a new hire but see he is in a huddle with two other co-workers.

You take a minute to chat with Shiela in HR about the new hire instead. Then you notice a department head meeting scheduled for 3 p.m., so you start organizing your presentation until Phil gets free.

Nothing about this scenario seems unusual for any office on any Monday morning anywhere in the world.

Except that you work in the guest room of your apartment in New York City while Phil lives in Buenos Aires and his two co-workers reside in Portland, Ore. and Sacramento, Calif. Shiela from HR works from your company’s regional office in Columbus, Ohio and the department heads you plan to present to this afternoon are scattered across the globe from Australia, to South Asia to Toronto, Can.

Obviously the new communications and collaboration revolution defies the old understanding of what working together even means. And Zoho’s communications and collaboration software continues to broaden this defintion.

Cliq Pushes The Limits of Team Collaboration

Zoho launched Cliq in 2017, and today the company says a substantial percentage of its users work remotely. The service includes both instant messaging, a market projected to reach $75 billion by 2025, and internal communication, a market set to break $1.78 billion by 2027. The global pandemic only increased this demand, especially for messaging.

The Cliq dashboard creates an overview giving you the feeling of working in an office instead of what you are really doing. That is sitting at a laptop maybe hundreds or even thousands of miles from the rest of your team. (See below.)

At a glance, you see availability of team members and an overview of meetings. Cliq also gives you the ability to schedule new meetings with your team. But more than just calendar management, it allows you to make calls and attend meetings right on the software with audio and video. This puts Cliq light years ahead of simple internal messaging or scheduling software which offer only some of these functions, not all.

Zoho Cliq Offers Messaging with Something Extra

The impressive Zoho Cliq messaging dashboard (below) offers an ongoing flow of communications with your team keeping you constantly in touch.

This represents way more than a simple messaging app with a list of contacts!

Features include DMs, groups and channels. So you can send messages to individuals. Or you can send messages to groups or channels you’ve created. You can even time your messages so they reach the proper people (or team members) at the proper time. 

With messaging, you can text one on one with your sales manager or head of marketing or create a channel for both departments so everyone can get involved in the conversation.

File sharing means you can quickly share slides for an upcoming meeting. A writing assistant brings AI into the picture helping you quickly craft a message to the staff without sitting and musing about it first.

Voice and video messaging allow you to give your team interactions a more personal tone. 

Multi-chat view lets you keep track of all these conversations at once. A message reaction feature lets you react to a team member’s comments or shared files without typing out a comment – or to respond to a specific comment directly underneath.

Rich message formats let you and your team bump up the look of your message from just straight text. This helps when you need to highlight information with your team that you don’t want them to miss!

And yes, you even get a task management view, so you can keep track of projects and their due dates – and offer progress reports. 

“Whether you’re chatting one on one or with a group or with a particular channel for a team – also you’re sharing files or expressing ideas – every interaction should feel effortless,” says Shanthana Lakshmi S.

Zoho Cliq Makes Virtual Meetings a Breeze

Now look at the calls and meetings features Zoho Cliq offers. The solution allows you to join one on one calls or meetings instantly. But, wait! That’s not all!

If you jump on a call at the office near the end of the day and you’re ready to leave, simply transfer the call (or meeting) to your smartphone or smartwatch. Finish the call or meeting on your way home without the need to disconnect.

Calls and meetings aren’t limited to your internal team either. Say you want to invite external users. 

Maybe you and your sales manager need to chat with an existing client. Or maybe you need to give a presentation to a prospective client or partner. Whatever the reason, Zoho Cliq allows you to easily invite guest users into calls or meetings.

The meeting feature also syncs with your calendar making it easy to keep track of scheduled meetings and calls – and never miss one.

Zoho Cliq also adds another nifty little feature if you need to skip a meeting due to a scheduling conflict. It provides a transcript, summary and list of action points which sum up what was discussed. This allows you to read what transpired at your leisure and bring yourself up to speed about what was discussed.

Hold the Phone! Zoho Cliq Provides This Service Too

There happens to be another hugely important communications detail Zoho Cliq can take off your plate. 

Yes, Zoho Cliq also offers phone service inside the platform. Use Zoho Voice, the company’s native service, for your support teams and for incoming calls without need for traditional PBX systems. 

If you prefer, use RingCentral or other similar services instead. Zoho Cliq allows integration of these services into its software too.

Zoho Cliq Unifies Communications and Collaboration for Teams

With Cliq, Zoho aims to unify communications and collaboration for teams. What began as Zoho Chat, an instant messaging tool, in 2007, has grown into an all-in-one collaboration hub combining messaging, meetings, automation and more recently AI and enterprise grade features. The tool also includes Networks, an external collaboration feature. (More on this later.)

“With every update, every innovation and every consumer insight, Cliq has grown, not just in features, but in impact,” Shanthana Lakshmi S explains.  “Today it’s more than just a chat platform. It’s where teams brainstorm, collaborate, and build together.” 

Cliq addresses some longtime pain points faced by collaborating teams. Of course, team collaboration (and even remote teams) are nothing new to the business environment.

But numerous challenges remain. The need for a variety of tools causes communications to take place across multiple platforms. Likewise, productivity tools remain scattered. For example, you might use one platform for communications, another for calendars and reminders and yet another for notebooks.

In the end, workflows remain chaotic and disorganized, conversations are scattered, decisions become delayed and productivity suffers. And none of this begins to address security concerns.

By contrast, Zoho Cliq introduces a very different idea. Imagine instead a scenario where all the tools you use and all the people you talk to are in one place and workflows are automated.  

The result becomes a solution to simplify, streamline and bring your team together – no matter where they are in the world.

For example, you might be the CEO of an ecommerce business with a marketing department that brings in traffic to your online store via social media, email campaigns and content marketing. That content marketing comes mainly in the form of a blog and guest posts on other websites.

Your order processing team works from an office in Boise, Idaho. Employees ship your products to customers from a warehouse in Atlanta, Ga. Your social media is handled by a virtual assistant from the Philippines. Blog posts are written by a freelancer just outside London, U.K. And your email marketing is handled by a marketer in Philadelphia, Pa.

They talk to each other and share information via instant messaging, voice, video and file sharing. You hold weekly meetings with each of them via an online calendar you all share.

And you do it all whether you happen to be at your kitchen table in your apartment in Seattle, Wash. or lying on the beach in Honduras.

Sound too good to be true? Just look at what other teams are already doing with Zoho Cliq!

Imagine What Your Team Could Do

Check out what this business organization does with Zoho Cliq. One of Zoho’s customers in the healthcare industry with locations throughout the U.S. used Cliq to transform company wide and departmental announcements.

In particular, an automated customized alert system makes sure critical updates reach staff in a timely fashion. This allows the company to share the best, most updated information for treatment of patients.

Many businesses in the healthcare sector already use Zoho Cliq to improve collaboration and communications for better patient care.

Just imagine easier consultations between physicians, better access to patient information and critical information updates about new treatments.

Of course, other businesses benefit from these communications tools as well, not just those in the healthcare industry.

For example, a U.K.- based outsourcing provider uses Zoho Cliq to streamline communications between management and employees.

Zoho’s phone system also helps customer facing teams respond to calls efficiently while letting apps handle more mundane customer service tasks.

Use Live Events and Networks

Zoho Cliq also provides some other functions that shouldn’t be overlooked. Take Live Events.

Not too long ago industry events required booking hotels and conference centers and having all your participants climb aboard airplanes bound for a single remote location.

This process made events costly – think of the catering bill alone! – and time consuming for your company and attendees. The same holds true for corporate retreats or anything similar that allows you to bring your team together.

And frankly this cost and complexity put such events beyond the reach of companies without the financial and logistical resources to pull them off.

Enter Zoho Cliq’s Live Events feature. It allows anyone to host large scale virtual events where teams can see keynote speakers and interact just like at an in-person event. And all this happens by logging on with a laptop or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.

There are more features too. For example, Zoho Cliq’s Networks allows you to corral your external collaborators into separate groups. These groups might include your clients, your partners and your vendors. You can interact with each Network individually without giving them access to your company’s full online resources. This feature is an example of Zoho’s wider dedication to security too.

Final Thoughts

Freeing teams from the tyranny of proximity means a level of autonomy businesses have rarely experienced before. At the same time, collaboration and communication continue to evolve. This ties teams and even individual team members scattered across the world more closely than ever before.

For huge enterprises, this sea change represents a totally different way of doing business. For smaller organizations, the shift is even more seismic.

It enables small businesses and start-up entrepreneurs to access resources and build teams anywhere in the world.  

Zoho Cliq allows teams to connect with text, file sharing, one-on-one calls and meetings from anywhere in the world. And all you need is a laptop or mobile device and internet connection.

Team members access Cliq either directly or from almost any other Zoho app they happen to be using through a simple “mini bar.” Native integrations already exist with apps like Zoho Project, Zoho Voice, Zoho Notebook, and Zoho People. Find other extensions in the Zoho Marketplace.

Get Zoho Cliq in a free version or professional and enterprise versions for $1.80 per user per month and $3.60 per user per month respectively. See details here. The app also comes with the Zoho One, Zoho Workplace, CRM Plus, Marketing Plus, and People Plus suites. Learn more about Zoho Cliq here.

This article, "Zoho Cliq Leads a Communications and Collaborations Revolution" was first published on Small Business Trends

A new software cuts through the complexity small businesses and entrepreneurs face when wrestling with their payrolls.

Zoho announced the launch of Zoho Payroll in the US Dec. 12 following similar launches in India in 2019 and the United Arab Emirates in 2023.

“One important reason as to why we are even trying to solve payroll,” explains Christopher Joseph, Head of Marketing, Zoho Payroll. “The fundamental problem remains the same. Simply put, there are too many compliance challenges that continue to evolve. Each operation within payroll has an excessive number of moving components, significantly complicating the process.”

Zoho Platform Makes Payroll Setup Easy Peasy

Say you own a small local chain of family restaurants. You need to manage a full wait staff for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That ignores the kitchen staff, bussing staff etc.

Besides this, you need to evolve your menu, develop new dishes, and experiment with specials to bring in diners. You also worry about marketing and how to keep developing new ideas to expand your customer base.

You seem to have a lot on your plate (pun intended!) Now add running payroll, dealing with state and federal withholding and managing 401Ks and other benefits.

Zoho Payroll makes the whole setup easy. Begin on the first page with some basic information about your organization. (see below)

You start with the name of your organization followed by location. If your business is located inside the continental United States, for example, you select this from the available options. So far, Zoho Payroll only offers services in three countries: India, UAE and the U.S.

Next, you must include the industry in which your business operates. Say you run a small construction company with less than 10 employees. Or perhaps you operate a marketing company with even fewer workers.

Select the appropriate industry from the pulldown menu to fit the industry in which your business operates.

You also need to provide the company’s legal structure. This includes whether your business is a sole proprietorship, partnership, Limited Liability Company, Corporation or S-Corporation.

If your company does business by a name other than the official name of your organization, you also need to provide this information too.

For example, say your business is incorporated under the name JR Consulting LLC but runs a website called The Consulting Team. You would want to add this second business name under which you do business here.

Finally, to complete the first page of setup, you need to provide a business address.

Even if you operate multiple locations, as in the family restaurant example above, here you need to provide the address, city, state and zip code where your business has its headquarters.

This becomes important when figuring out the local and state tax withholding responsibilities for your business. It translates to how much in local and state taxes you will need to withhold and pay on your employees’ behalf in addition to federal withholdings.

As you see, initial setup takes minutes. Then move on to the more in depth reporting necessary to set up payroll and get started.

Add Your Work Locations

You already entered your business address above. But say you have a chain of cafes, a chain or auto repair shops or a chain of hair salons throughout your state or region.

You will need to add the location of each under the section labeled work locations. (see below)

Fortunately, Zoho Payroll grows with your business. As you see above, the software makes it easy to add more locations or edit details about existing locations as your business expands.

Add Your State and Federal Tax Information

Allow Zoho to calculate withholdings and any other important costs or payments by adding your tax information.

Zoho Payroll makes this simple. You add your federal employer identification number. Then add any state unemployment insurance or worker’s compensation information relevant for your business.

Zoho Payroll allows you to authorize the tax reporting agent responsible for paying the taxes on your business’s behalf.

Here you also configure other details like the frequency of federal tax deposits and federal unemployment tax deposits.

Customize Salary Information on the Salary Components Page

One of the most intimidating aspects of running payroll must surely be keeping track of regular pay versus overtime, doubletime, bonuses and commissions.

You also must keep track of information relevant for severance pay and payments for unused paid vacation if these apply to your business.

Luckily, Zoho Payroll’s Salary Components page allows you to customize from pre-configured options to fit the needs of your business.

Setup Your Payroll Schedule

You may plan to pay your employees every week, every two weeks, twice a month, monthly or quarterly.

Each business needs to decide what payment schedule works best given cash flow and other considerations.

Once you decide on a schedule however, you simply automate most of the rest of the process. Zoho Payroll offers some help here.

Use Payroll to set up your pay schedule. Choose when payments will be sent out to employees.

For example, if you choose to pay employees monthly, you might default to the last day of the month as payday. Or choose the day of the month you would prefer payments be sent out.

Zoho Payroll Helps with Tax Payments, W-4 Forms and a Whole Lot More

Zoho Payroll also allows you to spend more time on your business. And it helps you spend less time on the compliance issues that sometimes make you want to tear your hair out.

You started your small business to build a financial future for you and your family. You wanted to create a product or service you believe in. And you thrive on providing that product or service to your customers.

But as your business grows, you spend less and less time doing those things.

More employees means the ability to scale your business for greater success.

But it also means spending more time managing federal and state tax forms, 401(k) deductions, taxes for Section 125 insurance plans, flexible spending accounts and health saving accounts.

Unfortunately, from time to time you also need to provide wage garnishments when required. Changing regulations make compliance a full time job for many small businesses.

For example, an estimated 4000 plus tax regulation changes impacting small business payroll occurred in the last decade alone.

“To put that into perspective, it means that we have more than one change happening for the entire decade every day,” said Joseph. “I mean, that’s just too much for anybody to keep track of.”

Fortunately, Zoho Payroll’s Compliance by Design integrates all these changes so a small business owner doesn’t need to remember them all.

So focus on creating that new software package your clients will love or stocking that new clothing line that will have customers beating down your door.

And allow Zoho Payroll to keep track of the latest payroll tax regulation Washington D.C. rolls out.

Zoho’s Payroll Software Makes Onboarding Easy

In the beginning, you focus on attracting customers and generating cash flow. But over time, you need to start hiring.

Whether they serve coffee in your cafe, load products at your warehouse or build websites for your web design clients, these employees need to be onboarded.

As a small business owner, you signed on to create great products and services for your customers not to work in the HR department.

Fortunately, Zoho Payroll (see below) makes it easy.

Just add the new employee’s name, first date of work, employee ID, work email, mobile number, designation (what’s their job at your business) and work address. (This address would usually be your business’s headquarters.)

Then add “employee type. This means whether the employee is classified as salaried or Paid by the hour, for example.

Then fill in the federal, state and any other tax information. And finally include the employee’s payment setup. (Will they be getting a check or direct deposit?)

With Zoho Payroll’s simple onboarding, you can add a new employee with a couple of keystrokes on a handful of web forms.

Sounds better than wading through pages of paperwork, right?

Zoho Allows You To Work ON Your Business not IN It

Entrepreneurs need to be visionaries. For this, they must escape the day to day grind of operations long enough to do big things.

A restaurateur needs time to rework the menu and maybe your restaurant’s decor and theme. Perhaps you need more plant-based dishes. Or maybe the dining area needs a more minimalist look.

The owner of a construction firm needs time to work on that one important bid that will take your company from residential renovations to that first big commercial project.

The owner of a logistics business needs time to discover how to make warehouse operations run more smoothly or cut down the number of miles put on trucks by streamlining deliveries. This proves difficult when you spend all your time sending out W-4 and other forms, writing checks or sending out direct deposits.

Zoho Payroll automates these functions and more. The software helps run payroll and send out forms. It also creates reports of all withholdings, tax payments and payroll payments – just in case federal or state agencies have questions. (See below)

But maybe most importantly, Zoho Payroll keeps track of all new taxes and regulations that might impact your payroll compliance.

So you can concentrate on your new menu, that all-important contracting project or how to make your organization run more smoothly. Stop worrying about state and federal regulations. Focus on making your business better.

Zoho Gives Your Employees a Great Experience Too

Evidence suggests happy employees are more productive. This Oxford University study proves the point.

It found happy employees are 13% more productive. That represents a great competitive advantage.

Zoho helps create happier employees by creating software to improve their experience as well. When it comes to payroll, this means providing a level of transparency.

The Zoho Payroll employee portal allows employees to take a look at detailed information with each payslip. (see below)

They see net pay, withheld taxes, benefit payments and deductions (if applicable.) But each payslip summary also allows them to keep track of the amount of sick days and vacation days they’ve taken. It also shows them how many they still have available.

We mentioned earlier how Zoho Payroll offers a reporting function keeping records of all payments to employees, withholding and other information.

You can make some of this information easily accessible to employees too. For example, Zoho Payroll makes it easy for employees to download an entire year of pay slips or request from the system administrator any other information they need.

Zoho Offers a Price Just Right for Small Business

Clearly, Zoho Payroll offers businesses many benefits. You get the ability to quickly and easily customize your payroll the way you want it.

You also gain the ability to onboard employees effortlessly as your business expands.

The software allows you to automate large parts of the payroll process. And perhaps most critically, Zoho Payroll keeps track of withholdings for taxes and benefits. It also keeps up with relevant federal and state regulations related to payroll. And it makes it simple for your business to comply.

So now small business owners need to ask the question. Can I afford a software that does all these things?

Zoho Payroll seems like a great fit for a multimillion dollar aerospace or software company. But for a chain of gas stations headquartered in Topeka, Kansas, this software sounds expensive. Get ready for a surprise. Zoho Payroll proves surprisingly affordable.

The software starts at $39 a month with $6 per month additional cost per employee. Compare this to what you might spend hiring a team to manage all this for you, and the value becomes clear.

Zoho Payroll in a Nutshell

In the end, small businesses need to pay their employees in a timely manner. And state and federal governments create lots of additional regulations that make this process even more complicated.

Fortunately, Zoho Payroll makes setting things up a breeze. With a few online forms, you supply basic business information, employee identification number, unemployment and worker’s compensation information.

Then customize salary information and pay schedule and you are good to go.

Zoho Payroll allows you to manage W-4 forms for each employee plus 401(k) and insurance payments, tax withholding and more. It also provides stellar reporting that allows you to visualize the process at a glance.

Zoho Payroll makes adding new employees to the process easy. It allows you to work on your business not in it (as an ad hoc member of the HR department.)

The software also gives employees a great experience allowing them to see their net pay, withholdings, available sick days and vacation days in an employee portal.

Finally, the software is affordable. So you need not be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to use it.

Get more information on Zoho Payroll in the U.S. and how to use it here.

Images from Zoho

This article, "Zoho Payroll Manages Major Headache for Small Businesses" was first published on Small Business Trends

Better yet, imagine a single IT department in Austin, the Silicon Valley or Singapore. Then imagine this IT department updating software and troubleshooting technical problems all over the world.

Scale this down to a single IT entrepreneur. With the right technology, he or she runs an IT service from a spare room or a small office in Sarasota, Florida, Detroit, Michigan or Saskatchewan. But this single IT professional working alone fills the technical needs of businesses with offices in New York, London and Buenos Aires.

Guess what? This technology already exists. And it gives your small business an edge creating new opportunities you might never have thought possible.

Read on for a closer look at Zoho Assist. Learn more about the remote access software changing the game in IT and beyond.

How it Works

First, Zoho Assist was launched in 2009. So the software boasts 15 years of success as a remote access tool for businesses.

The technology includes three basic components: remote support, unattended access and the self service portal . First, we explore these components in greater depth to discover how they work together to improve small business productivity.

Remote Support

Think of remote support as the core functionality of this beneficial software.

“Say an IT admin gets a call from the organization’s internal employee with a technical issue,” says Steffi J, Product Marketer for Zoho Assist. “The technician can initiate a remote support sessionwith the employee and start troubleshooting right away.”

Forget the old days when a tech problem meant the IT person visiting an employee’s cubicle taking up both peoples’ time until the issue was solved.

And of course any other employees with trouble in the meantime needed to wait their turn or tie up another IT person in the department.

With remote support, an IT administrator just fields multiple problems at once from his or her own computer.

Plus your IT department in Cincinnati now handles tech problems at offices in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Kansas City without needing to be there.

Oh, and think about our hypothetical one man or one woman IT team. We’re talking here about an IT professional who decides to go it alone. He or she sets up a small business providing IT services – and not just to businesses in his own backyard.

With remote support, this solopreneur solves computer and network problems for clients across the state, across the country or around the world.

“There are many individual IT users who serve as a one-person IT team, managing everything on their own” said Ambrish V, Product Marketer for Zoho Assist.

The software even includes a billing feature for these small IT businesses to invoice their clients.

Unattended Access

With a typical remote access session, an employee or client needs to be present at their computer while an IT administrator accesses his or her device.

But Zoho Assist offers other features allowing the IT team to update software and provide other maintenance. And it allows them to do these updates even when employees step away from their computers.

“Say the same IT admin wants to run a security patch or a software update. The IT admin can access the unattended devices under the organizationto run the software update with zero downtime,” says Steffi J.

Pretty cool, huh?

So this means a maintenance cycle can be run after hours or at night by a remote IT team. It also means your team doesn’t need to sit around waiting for a software update during peak work hours.

Just make sure your IT department pre-installs the unattended access agent  on all your devices.

This ensures you are good to go.

A Look at the self service portal

The self service portal functions as the heart and soul of Zoho Assist. It reduces wait times for customers – or employees.

It does this by creating an ingenious system to alert the IT team and address problems as they arise.

Say you have a team member with a big problem. Let’s call him Fred! Fred works in sales. He experiences trouble with the team’s video conferencing software.

Fred knows a big call with a potential client is coming up and needs the video conferencing software working pronto.

Enter Zoho Assist’s self service portal.

Fred sends a request through the self-service portal.

This request comes  in the form of a URL which an IT admin can either pick up themselves or assign to another technician.

The self-service portal allows the IT department to provide quick remote assistance and resolve problems quickly.

So Fred’s video conferencing software works great when he calls that potential client to clinch the sale.

Why Zoho Assist Works for SMBs

Zoho Assist empowers IT teams and others to help employees or customers remotely. This allows technicians in Seattle, for example, to help employees or clients in, say, Philadelphia or Atlanta in real time.

But understand this doesn’t mean the software is only used by enterprise clients.

In fact, more than half  of Zoho Assist users employ fewer than 100 people making it clear the software is a small business favorite.

So what makes Zoho Assist so popular with SMBs?

Numerous reasons spring to mind.

Ease of Use

Small businesses ask great versatility of their employees and teams. You find employees at SMBs often wearing multiple hats.

So expect the person in charge of helping other team members with technical problems to have other things on his or her plate.

Zoho Assist offers quick, intuitive setup with no steep learning curve.

And Zoho created a simple interface for easy navigation.

Small businesses need software that simply works. They lack the resources to assemble a team simply to figure out installation of a new software.

And a small IT team or single IT technician running a small IT services business needs to focus on closing deals, helping customers and providing great service.

So forget hours, days or even weeks spent trying to figure out the software they need to provide that service.

Implementation and Adoption in a Flash

SMBs need a quick roll out. Most rely on steady cash flow. They lack the reserves of larger enterprise businesses.

So they require new software to be installed quickly. They need to avoid any hault in operations that might interrupt their revenue stream.

To call deployment of Zoho Assist fast seems like an understatement. The software deploys in minutes.

And remember about that short learning curve? That means team members pick the software up with limited training.

This equals more productive work time for your team and less time learning a new system.

Works Across Microsoft Windows, Android, MacOS and More

Talk about format agnostic.

If you already use Zoho Assist but plan to switch from Microsoft Windows to MacOS, for example, no worries.

The software works the same over these platforms and more.

Say you are an entrepreneur just starting out. You wait to decide on Zoho Assist because you think you need to make a decision on your other technology first.

For example, you need to decide between Microsoft Windows and Linux for your operating system. If you choose Microsoft Windows, you plan to go with Android on mobile devices.

Go ahead and lock in Zoho Assist for your remote support system. It works with all of these.

But also consider it probably works with the systems of your customers too.

Take another hypothetical scenario. Elaine owns an IT service business that troubleshoots technical issues for small clients and three or four large clients all over town.

Each time a client calls, Elaine’s technicians need to brave midday traffic to visit that client in person.

This reduces productivity at Elaine’s company because of time lost with employees out of the office either crossing town to see clients or in their offices fixing problems.

Elaine hears of a remote support solution. It allows her technicians to stay in the office and troubleshoot remotely, sometimes helping multiple clients at once.

But Elaine worries. Two of her larger clients use MacOS, two more use Microsoft Windows. And smaller clients use everything from Raspberry Pi to Chromebook to Linux.

She needs a remote access software that can work with all of these.

Fortunately, Zoho Assist does just that and allows each of her technicians to take calls from multiple clients at once.

Adheres to Zoho’s Privacy Philosophy

Regular Zoho customers already know the company’s commitment to privacy.

But when you plan to work remotely over multiple networks or access a customer’s computer system, privacy becomes doubly important.

Zoho Assist provides end-to-end encryption on all its 8.82 million remote sessions and 7.12 million unattended sessions (for security patches, updates etc.)

This means each of these sessions is secure and businesses need not worry about internal data or the data of their clients.

Zoho Assist also complies with all privacy regulations for data protection. So proudly give your client these assurances too.

Mobile App, Session Recording, AI Chat and More

All the features of Zoho Assist come in a mobile application on Android and iOS too. This allows your team to offer remote support on the go as well.

Other features include session recording so that you can review support sessions at a later time.

AI powered chat also helps speed up communications between technician and customer. Communications can also be stored for later audit.

Multi-authentication security and branding tools to personalize your support software round out some additional features.

Integrations

Zoho Assist integrates internally with other Zoho apps including SalesIQ, CRM, Flow Desk, Bookings, Mail and more.

Externally, the tool integrates with Zendesk, Slack, LiveChat, Freshdesk and more.

Exciting Live Camera Augmented Reality Assistance

IT support remains one of Zoho Assist’s “bread and butter” markets, says Ambrish V, Product Marketer for Zoho.

Still, other exciting uses, including features like live camera AR, tantalize with their possibilities.

The live camera AR feature allows technicians in one location to view technology or equipment in another. They then diagnose a problem or recommend solutions using arrows on a grid superimposed over the video to do so.

For example, a major tractor and farm equipment dealer in India uses the technology to help clients. When they experience a problem with a piece of machinery, farmers prefer being talked through a fix.

“Rather than having an external technician coming in and doing the mechanic work, they prefer getting the tools out and working on their own tractors and engines and fixing it for themselves,” said Ambrish V.

So technicians are able to use the Zoho AR feature, called Lens, to first diagnose the problem and then show the farmer – using Augmented Reality – exactly how to make the repair.

Imagine how you might use such a feature in your small business.

Leading the Way in Work-From-Home

Clients In the banking sector use Zoho Assist in yet another way.

Here unattended access allows IT professionals located offsite to do regular updates and repairs when necessary. This parallels some of the uses in the IT sector.

But these businesses also use unattended access to allow employees to access their computers while working from home. So these businesses use the technology to make mobile working easier.

Similarly, Zoho clients in the education sector use unattended access to allow students to work remotely with proprietary software.This gives students the opportunity to test and use software previously only available on campus from the privacy of their own homes.

Finally, Ambrish V discusses a radio disc jockey who used Zoho Assist to run regular broadcasts from home using the software installed at his station.

While working from home, the radio jockey connected to the device at the station, listened to each track using a remote audio feature and kept the program running using only a remote device and a home computer.

Testimonials

Businesses already using Zoho Assist happily share how the tool has changed their businesses for the better.

Rose City Tech, headquartered in the Portland, Oregon metro area, manages IT for restaurants and office spaces throughout the Pacific Northwest.

“Zoho Assist makes it super simple for us to manage and troubleshoot devices remotely, increasing our productivity and efficiency across multiple locations,” CEO Colin Fracasso-Boone explains.

Meanwhile, The Greatship Group owns four oil rigs and 19 offshore vessels in the Arabian Sea. The company uses Zoho Assist’s unattended access feature allowing technicians to perform needed software updates and security patches. Technicians perform the upgrades to the ships’ computer systems from a remote location without need for downtime.

Use Zoho Assist in Your Business

Think about how to use this powerful tool in your business.

Maybe you offshored your IT to India or the Philippines. With Zoho Assist, your IT team acquires the ability to work from anywhere.

They respond quickly to your employees’ calls and troubleshoot issues from thousands of miles away. They even update your software when your employees are away from their computers.

Maybe you rent office space but like to work from home from time to time. Or maybe you want to be able to retrieve data at any time day or night without going in.

Today Zoho Assist allows you to access your office computer with a laptop or mobile device whenever you wish. This means you can access your computer at the office even when home for the day or on a weekend getaway.

Finally, maybe your business helps clients and customers make repairs to their cell phones or computers. Now this service becomes easy to deliver – even over hundreds or thousands of miles. Use Zoho Lens and its virtual reality tool to show clients exactly how to fix their devices.

For all these uses and more, Zoho Assist proves a good fit for small businesses. Click here to learn more.

This article, "Zoho Assist Transforms your IT Services and More" was first published on Small Business Trends

Zoho just launched its newest update to Zoho Analytics. The platform continues to increase its user base with an estimated 17,000+ customers currently.

“Today we offer a very comprehensive business analytics platform,” explains Clarence Rozario, director of product management for Zoho Analytics.

But why does your business need this tool? 

Imagine seeing all the data your business collects in one place at the blink of an eye.

You already own this data, of course. You look at it daily scattered across countless dashboards: Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, QuickBooks and more.

Small businesses need a way to blend all this data and create meaningful insights.

Otherwise, it remains fractured like pieces of a puzzle with no clear idea what the finished picture should be.

The Importance of Analytics in Business

Data analytics plays a critical role in business these days.

It tells us what products and services resonate with customers. It shows us which marketing plans are working – and which should be kicked to the curb.

It reveals trends about the money we’re making, the money we’re spending and what money brings in the best return.

Sometimes, it even allows us to peer into the future. It predicts where trends may lead and how to benefit from this knowledge.

Never doubt the importance of this data analytics to your business’s very survival.

Remember, your competitors already use this technology. Here are some stats:

An estimated 91.9% of businesses that invested in analytics in 2023 got measurable benefit.

What’s more, 3 in 5 of them used analytics that year to innovate in their business.

And 56% planned to increase their investment in analytics in 2024.

Read the writing on the wall. Without analytics to guide you and help you compete, your business could suffer.

Behind the Scenes with Zoho Analytics

Pull back the curtain and get a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes at Zoho Analytics.

The tool is broken down into three primary blocks, says Rozario.

First, take a look at the data preparation and management component of the software.

This component brings data from a variety of sources, say, a marketing platform like HubSpot, an email service like Mailchimp and an accounting program like Zero.

But wait! 

Remember these platforms collect very different kinds of data. Think of data from a marketing platform and data from an accounting platform as quite literally apples and oranges.

So blending this data together and coming up with useful insights to help you plot your business’s next move requires some help.

In the next step, Zoho Analytics helps cleanse this data, says Rozario. As a result, it creates high quality data more useful to businesses “downstream.”

Business Intelligence Self Serve

But after this process gets completed, we see the real magic happening.

Armed with data from all over your business, Zoho Analytics starts combining this information in weird and wonderful ways.

With a few clicks, you start asking questions. And like the Oracle of Delphi, Zoho Analytics responds. 

That response comes in the form of reports, dashboards, KPIs and metrics. Zoho Analytics’ Business Intelligence Self Service component helps business owners build these to analyze their data.

The service allows you to see this data in a whole new way. Powerful insights drawn from these reports fuel innovation and inspire pivots.

Integration BI in Your Application

Maybe you want to embed analytics in a custom app or website.

Zoho Analytics provides this option too.

For example, suppose you are creating a customization on your CRM platform. 

Certainly, with customer relationship management software you possess a unique opportunity. Collect huge amounts of data on your customers. This gives you a tremendous competitive advantage.

But to use that advantage well, you need a tool capable of collecting that data and slicing and dicing it to create reports and graphs.

You need a way to see all that data at a glance so those meaningful insights become easier for you and your team to spot.

Zoho Analytics makes it easier to import reports and dashboards into your customer application.

Now you possess both the data and the tools to make it meaningful.

Rozario says businesses and developers are already embedding Zoho Analytics into  their customer built websites and apps.

Don’t be left behind!

Meeting Data Challenges 

All of this sounds great! But what pain points exist in your business – or any business, for that matter – that analytics helps you solve?

It’s great to talk about analytics and business intelligence. But as a small business owner, you need to be pragmatic.

You need to justify every cost. So now we look at the challenges these tools help you meet.

Diverse Data at the Speed of Light

Remember the old saying. You don’t know what you don’t know.

But with your business, that lack of knowledge stands a good chance of putting you behind the competition.

Rozario points to a study suggesting the data collected by businesses doubles every year.

Does that make you nervous? It should!

If this happens in your business, your competitors must experience the same. But if they use the exponentially growing amount of data from their customers and you don’t, you won’t stay in business very long.

And the data your applications collect also grows in diversity. Rozario points out many small businesses use between 50 and 100 applications.

That represents a huge variety of different kinds of data. 

Pull those different kinds of data from marketing applications, accounting applications, CRM applications and more together. They likely contain insights to take your business to the next level.

But blending those different types of data together in a meaningful way seems daunting.

Herding Cats and Making Meaning

Corralling all this unstructured data reminds us of the expression about herding cats.

Cats often prove to be notoriously independent animals so the expression “like herding cats” denotes a very difficult task.

Data management and governance becomes another challenge small businesses face.

Collecting data proves to be just part of the task. Businesses need high quality data with which to build dashboards and reports.

Few insights arise from viewing data collected from 50 to 100 different apps and running the gamut from real time streams to semi-structured data to unstructured data.

Filling the Vortex Of Need

Not only that, but businesses expect more out of their data than ever before.

In short, this isn’t your father’s analytics!

Once you placated a marketing team with historical data. It showed how their campaigns performed last year. Maybe it showed how those campaigns performed year over year.

Today, your marketing manager demands to know why that great email campaign fell flat. 

He or she wants a glimpse at the future. What will grab customers’ attention in 2025? 

We want our next marketing campaign to be a smashing success. Tell us exactly what changes to make to ensure that happens.

Today’s analytics needs to fill all these needs and more. 

You face more than a disgruntled team if you fail to provide solutions.

You may end up closing your doors for good!

Keeping Things Versatile – but Simple

Everybody in your business wants something different from your analytics tool.

The financial officer wants to look at cost trends and compare them with return on investment. No one wants to pay for tools and strategies that don’t make money.

Meanwhile, the head of marketing wants to figure out what worked last year – and what might bring more brand awareness and eventually more sales in the year to come.

Finally, the HR person wants to figure out how to speed up recruiting and hiring and how to make onboarding more efficient.

Each of these people need different data that provides deep insight. But none want to get a data science degree to be able to use the company’s analytics platform to get it.

Keeping Up with the Times

Finally, no one needs software that’s out of date as soon as you deploy it.

People wait in line for the latest smartphone for a reason. But when you rely on data to keep your business afloat, the most up to date analytics platform becomes more than a fashion statement.

Technology moves at incredible speed. And, as we’ve seen, the amount of data needed to keep your business ahead of the curve grows exponentially.

This makes choosing your analytics platform – like choosing the rest of your technology – a considerable challenge.

Adding AI to the Analytics Mix

To meet these challenges, Zoho’s next generation of analytics software incorporates a smarter solution.

Zoho adds artificial intelligence to its latest self-serve business intelligence platform.

But the new AI integration proves to be much more than a trendy move at a time when the technology has created an enormous buzz.

Artificial intelligence imbues Zoho’s platform with new life and the ability to evolve with the needs of your business.

The tool’s most important feature turns out to be ease of use.

“Anyone can start analyzing data with our platform,” Rozario insists. 

“You do not have to be an IT person. You do not have to be a developer. You do not have to be a data scientist.” he adds.

The tag line for the newly released version says it all: “The Analytics Platform for All.”

More About the New Version of Zoho Analytics

So we know the new version of Zoho Analytics adds artificial intelligence to the mix.

And we know you need no special credentials, like an IT or data science degree to start gaining insights from the new platform.

But if you’re like many entrepreneurs and small business owners, you want specifics about what to expect with this new tool.

Look at what the new Zoho Analytics platform offers.

Meeting Around the Data Hub

Maybe you occupy the role of CEO at your business. You need to prepare a report for investors on key milestones met and surpassed. 

Maybe you work in the sales team and need to create marketing materials for clients. 

Maybe you act as financial manager and need to look at trends for next year’s budget.

In all cases, head over to the new Zoho Analytics’ powerful data hub. Here you find high quality data for reports, dashboards and more.

Accelerating Adoption

You know that coworker who constantly comes to you for help retrieving data?

We won’t say they’re afraid of technology. They just seem reluctant to learn the tools needed to gather the information they need to be more effective.

Well, Zoho Analytics makes the bold promise they will convert even these holdouts with new generative AI infused analytics.

The technology aims to make adoption easier for all your employees, regardless of technical background.

OK, This Gets a Little Technical

At the same time, Zoho ambitiously seeks to create a platform small businesses can customize for their needs.

Enter the new Zoho Analytics’ DSML Studio. DSML stands for Directory Services Markup Language. But don’t freak out! 

This bit simply gives you the option to bring in a developer – or a technically talented member of your team. Then use the DSML studio to customize Zoho’s analytics platform to suit your exact needs.

Stretching Zoho Analytics to Meet Your Needs

In the end, the features of the new platform allow adoption by just about anyone on your team.

But at the same time, it allows customization to stretch the platform. So you find great flexibility to create analytics tools you need to reach the top and stay there.

If You Already Have Analytics?

Maybe you think, wait a minute! Don’t my QuickBooks, Salesforce, Constant Contact and other third party software platforms collect their own data already? 

They all show this data to me on individual dashboards.

Why do I need to buy another software package to collect data all over again?

Ah. But these services all remain separate. They offer no way to blend their data together. So what you miss is the 360 degree view!

As Rozario explains, these platforms have their own limitations as to the depth they can offer.

Not only that, but he adds, “When you start using more applications, then the data that is coming from multiple applications has to be analyzed together.”

So How Do You Get Started?

Get ready for the great news. If you already subscribe to Zoho One or Zoho’s CRM or marketing bundles, you already have access to Zoho Analytics – including this new version.

But don’t worry! It is also sold as a separate service. To learn more, click here for the details. 

This article, "Zoho Analytics Blends Data For Epic Insights" was first published on Small Business Trends

How to Build a Website Using Zoho Sites

An estimated 81% of consumers check out businesses online before choosing to buy from them. And 99% use the web to learn about local businesses.

So obviously, if you operate a small business, you need an online presence.

Fortunately, products like Zoho Sites make building a website for your business easy and affordable. Zoho introduced an update to Zoho Sites in May. 

“Our mission has been to make outstanding web design accessible to businesses,” says Ranjitha G, a member of the Zoho Sites marketing team. 

“All kinds, irrespective of their background,” she adds. 

This last part is important. The prospect of designing a website may fill some small business owners with dread.

After all, a quick search suggests hiring a web designer to create a website for your business might cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

Numbers like this give any small business owner or startup entrepreneur sticker shock.

And trying to do it alone seems daunting as well. Without knowledge of HTML, hosting or site security, getting your business online creates serious challenges.

Zoho Sites provides one simple solution. Starting for as little as $5, the service offers simple drag and drop design, baked in hosting and security and integration with other Zoho products.

Take a peek under the hood.

Powerful Platform for Business

First, Zoho Sites offers a robust all-in-one platform with everything you need to build your business website.

Get web building tools, domain and hosting from the same provider. This includes Zoho’s well-known security to keep your site and data safe.

Many web building software packages require you to look elsewhere for hosting, domain registration and certainly security.

This means a lot more decisions to make – and possible delays – while setting up your website.

Zoho Sites by comparison offers all these features in one place.

Sophisticated Tools for Marketing

The website you build with Zoho Sites includes marketing tools as part of the package.

Many platforms offer the tools to build an impressive looking website. But your business also needs a way to use that website to attract prospects and nurture leads.

With other platforms, that requires looking for additional plugins and third party tools.

This means more time spent working on your website instead of making sales and building a customer base.

Fortunately, Zoho Sites offers something better. The platform includes all the apps, surveys and forms necessary to attract and convert prospects into leads.

Your sales team takes it from there.

Easy Integrations with Other Zoho Apps

But wait a minute! We say Zoho Sites is easy to use – and comes with apps and tools to make website development quick and effortless. But is it?

Take a look at how easy it is to build a site. Then add integrated apps and tools to turn your new website into a marketing machine.

Zoho Sites offers no-code drag and drop tools to build your site. Ranjitha claims it was easy to master despite her minimum experience with code.

Now you want to attract potential customers, identify their needs and generate sales. 

Zoho allows you to:

• Use Zoho CRM to capture prospects and convert them into leads.
• Use Zoho Campaigns to nurture your leads.
• Use Zoho Marketing automation to convert leads.
• Use Zoho PageSense to optimize conversion.
• And more.

Getting all these features often requires small businesses to cobble together a variety of different third party apps, tools and software.

But Zoho Sites puts them all at your fingertips.

Administrative Features Baked In

We saw how Zoho also offers hosting and security services for your site.

The company possesses a well-known obsession with privacy. So relax in the knowledge this same commitment gets applied to your website, your data and the data of your customers.

But also understand the huge burden this removes from your business. You need not spend time searching for a reliable domain registrar, hosting or security services for your website.

Again, this means less time working on your website and more time converting prospects into leads and leads into customers.

But the administrative features of Zoho Sites offer another perk too.

Zoho allows Access Control over your content. This means creating limited access content, member portals and other exclusive features on your website.

It also facilitates the ability to create subscription or paywall options when integrating with Zoho Billing (using Zoho Flow), the member portal and access control can help you create a paywall, offering yet another business model.

Part of Popular Zoho One Package

You get Zoho Sites as part of the massive Zoho One package. 

This business software bundle includes such applications as:

• Bigin, Zoho’s simple small business CRM
• Bookings, for appointment scheduling
• Zoho Social, a social media marketing app
• Zoho Survey, a feature allowing businesses to gain customer feedback
• Zoho Commerce, the company’s ecommerce platform
• Zoho Thrive, an affiliate and customer loyalty program
• And much more.

But Zoho also offers its site building tool à la carte starting at only $5.

Zoho Sites offers plans beginning at five pages, five forms and 500 MB of storage with more pages and storage available for larger websites or blogs.

So Easy It Almost Builds Itself

Some small business owners become intimidated about building a website. As we mentioned, entrepreneurs want to spend their time building their business instead.

This means working on marketing, customer relationships and sales – not trying to figure out web design, hosting and security issues.

For example, many entrepreneurs shy away from web development requiring specialized knowledge of HTML or coding.

After all, this takes time away from what your business is supposed to be about.

But Zoho Sites requires no such specialized knowledge.

In fact, Ranjitha G, part of the Zoho Sites marketing team, boasts she received only minimal coding experience in school. And she used none of it while familiarizing herself with Zoho Sites.

“If I can do it I think anyone can,” Ranjitha explained.

Open the website builder and you are asked to choose the name of your business and your industry. Zoho Sites then asks you to choose a template. 

Zoho Sites guides you through the website builder with a product tour, helping you explore and understand its features so you can confidently create your website.

While Zoho Sites offers web design made easy for the non-technical, other options exist. 

Do you employ a web development team or possess some extra coding chops? Then the website builder allows some tweaking with HTML and CSS to get your site just right.

Zoho Sites By The Numbers

Choose Zoho Sites to build your small business presence online and you won’t be alone.

The site builder hosts more than 200,000 websites (including some built on its free version.) It also hosts more than 50,000 domains.

Analytics and SEO

Building a website gives your business a good start online. But you need to know how many people are visiting. You also need to improve your site’s visibility with search engines like Google.

So Zoho Sites also provides traffic reports and SEO reports to see how you’re doing and help you improve.

Why Zoho Sites?

As a small business owner, you possess plenty of options when it comes to site building tools.

Why should Zoho Sites make the top of your list?

Think about these benefits of using Zoho Sites to create your web presence before deciding on another option.

Zoho Sites gets your website up quicker. This means your website starts bringing in prospects, converting leads and helping you make sales faster. 

Zoho Sites offers web building, hosting, domain and security all from one company. The platform also offers integrated apps. 

Using another tool may force you to take more time finding the other services you need from third party providers. This slows your time to market and delays you from making those all important sales.

Zoho streamlines your billing with no extra costs. You’ll pay just one bill to run your site. And plans start for as little as $5. 

Though you may need a more expensive plan depending on the size of your site, you won’t face additional billing from third party providers. Zoho Sites charges nothing extra for plugins, templates or other services.

Zoho offers integrated apps. These include Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns and more. 

With Zoho Sites, you get more than just an attractive destination on the Web. These apps and others help you bring in prospects, convert leads and more.  

They turn your website from a simple web presence to a marketing and money making vehicle for your business.

You get data privacy and security as part of the deal. These days even small businesses need to worry about data security and privacy for your customers.

With many other web development tools, you need to find a separate vendor to do all this. Many web development platforms simply don’t provide these services.

With Zoho, there’s no shopping elsewhere. The services are all included.

Did we mention support? Think of Zoho not just as your software company. They serve as your IT department too.

Reach out to the Zoho support team if you have a problem. Or consult the huge number of help documents available. 

Inside Zoho Sites, you also find in app help. Little question marks in the website builder prompt you to click and get your questions answered. 

Chocolate and Orange Combination

Other apps integrate well with Zoho Sites.

“Like a bit of a chocolate and orange combination, I would say,” Ranjitha explains.

For consultants who need to meet with their clients, Zoho Bookings makes things simple.

Your client simply chooses an available date and time with the software. You need no additional scheduling service to run your business.

Providing live chat on your website increases engagement and decreases bounce rate. But many website platforms require you to find a provider elsewhere.

Instead, Zoho Sites integrates with Zoho SalesIQ providing live chat with your web building service.

Finally, collecting customer information helps you identify leads and nurture them. Zoho Forms allows you to embed forms into your website for just this purpose.

Zoho Sites also integrates with a number of third party sites. These include: Mailchimp, Vimeo, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Analytics, X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Bing and LinkedIn.

A Few Usage Scenarios

Finally Ranjitha shares a few usage scenarios to illustrate how Zoho Sites helps small businesses build websites.

Ivan looks to test a new business idea online. He lacks technical skills and turns to Zoho Sites for help. 

Ivan finds the ready made templates, drag and drop design features, visual editor and more a godsend. He uses them to get his website up fast and starts testing his business idea with customers.

Pryia wants to grow her community. She uses Zoho Sites in a completely different way.

First she uses tools within the platform to add additional contributors. This allows her to add team members who help manage content on her site. 

Then she takes advantage of Zoho Sites’ social media integration using social buttons to easily share her content. Finally she uses Zoho Sites’ optimization tools to increase her site’s visibility with the search engines. This helps more potential community members find and join her community.

Ryan runs a successful media consulting business. But he believes opportunities may exist in the Middle East for his consulting business too.

Ryan uses Zoho Sites’s Google Cloud Translation integration to translate his Web content into Arabic. This allows him to have a site in English and in Arabic moving forward.

Em runs a realty business. He wants to create a site where he can add new listings and remove old ones quickly with minimal effort.

He uses Zoho Sites’ Dynamic Content feature to pull data from an external source of listings ensuring his content remains fresh. 

Customer Feedback

Customers seem happy with the platform and what it can provide.

“Zoho Sites gave me a tool to help me deploy my website in less than 60 days,” says Madhu K. Guthikonda, founder of Ux Tech. “Our website traffic has grown by 30% year-on-year with Zoho Sites.”

Already Have a Website?

Maybe you already built a website for your business. Having used another tool, perhaps you find yourself frustrated.

You don’t like the look of your website. You hired a web developer but despite paying out you don’t feel you got the website that properly reflects your business.

You paid too much and are still paying – for third party apps and services providing data security, hosting, newsletter publishing, CRM and more.

Or your website looks good but really isn’t bringing in sales – or even developing leads your sales team can contact,

Fortunately, Zoho created a team that can help. Just contact them and they can easily help migrate your existing site from WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace or other providers to Zoho Sites.

This article, "Zoho Sites Offers Easy Route to Business Website" was first published on Small Business Trends