This week, Zoho announced several improvements to its unified Zoho One platform. New features include a brand-new management dashboard as well as improved search features and enhancements to Zia, the company's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant. These new features come one year after Zoho One's initial launch, and are designed to further achieve the platform's goal of delivering all of Zoho's dozens of applications under one piece of software.
When Zoho One was announced last year, the company promoted it as an "operating system [OS] for business." While that isn't technically true (it's not actually an OS after all), the idea has some footing in terms of the deep customization and management abilities you get with the system's admin console. When you consider the fact that Zoho offers dozens of separate apps, it only makes sense that the company would try to offer them on a unified platform at some point.
The company also announced a new events management app called Zoho Backstage, which will let users create, promote, and manage events. It will be available both on the Zoho One platform and separately.
New Dashboard and Search
Whether you want to manage your customer relationships with Zoho CRM or track your product with Zoho Inventory, the company offers a wealth of different apps, and you can have them all within one solution thanks to Zoho One. These tools are all the more effective, however, when you can pull up analytics about your team at a moment's notice. To help you understand your fleet better, Zoho is launching the Zoho One Dashboard tab for Zoho One, which is available now.
In basic terms, the new Zono One Dashboard offers visualized reports, which gather data from all of your Zoho apps. If you have used a data visualization tool such as Google Analytics before, then you are probably used to the idea of viewing reports based on data gathered by the system. Zoho's individual apps, such as Zoho Reports, let you see all kinds of data about your business, your competitors, and your customers through their own dashboard features. When you consider the fact that the average Zoho One customer is using around 16 different apps in the platform, the benefits of pulling data from all of those sources certainly has promise. If Zoho One's dashboards work as well as on the individual platforms, then the Zoho One Dashboard could be quite useful for customers.
"We are building these reports completely out of the box for Zoho One," said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. "Our extensive network of apps allows us to gather a better web of data from those sources, and we are able to serve all sorts of industries."
Vegesna told us that there will be canned reports for sales, marketing, and finance purposes. "They won't have to worry about using the dashboard," he said. "They just need to use their apps, and that data will be gathered and will blend across channels."
In a similar vein, the company also announced the immediate availability of Zoho One Search, which lets users search across all of their apps with just one query. When we sat down with Vegesna, he explained that customers will be able to customize the search module's layout so they can tailor it to their needs.
"Basically, what we found was that customers were spending about 20 percent of their time searching for information across all of their apps," he said. "Being able to search all apps at once will save a tremendous amount of time and effort."
Improved AI Assistant
In 2016, Zoho added the aforementioned AI assistant Zia to its customer relationship management (CRM) tool. When it first launched, Zia was designed to detect anomalies, suggest workflows, and give salespeople advice on the best opportunities with which to reach out to prospects. Today, the company announced that not only is Zia coming to Zoho One, but it also added quite a bit of power to it. Zia will now gather information across your different Zoho apps, and will be able to answer questions via text or chat via the Ask Zia module.
"If you are working in Zoho One, you could ask Zia in a chat window, 'What is the trend of revenue per employee?' and it will show you a chart with exactly that," Vegesna said. "In this case, that data comes from the CRM system as well as the HR system. Doing this is finally possible with Zoho. And it can work with lots of different types of organizations."
If you don't find Zia helpful in your company's operations, the company offers a developer tool, which lets you build your Zia skills. This is similar to what Amazon offers with its Alexa skills. The new and improved Zia functionality is available now.
Events Management With Zoho Backstage
While most of the announcements were for Zoho One, the company also announced Zoho Backstage, an events management tool that is available both separately and within its so-called "OS." Zoho Backstage is designed to help you create, market, manage, and analyze your events within one app.
Zoho Backstage is available for free within the Zoho One platform. If you want it separately, then you can either sign up for the Professional version, which begins at $99 per month. You can also pay $299 to use the platform for a single event.
If you have ever used Eventbrite to organize an event, then you'll find Zoho Backstage familiar. You will be able to design the invites and build agendas right from the platform. It will also help you design email templates for marketing emails leading up to the event. You can use it to distribute tickets thanks to Eventbrite integration and gather feedback after the events. According to Vegesna, you will even be able to upload and share presentations to the platform so that you can share it among attendees. Attendees will be able to view and join presentations as they happen.
After you invite people, Zoho Backstage will track RSVP and registration data during the event. This ability to track attendees in real time is designed to help businesses conduct better meetings. After the event, you can set the software to send out surveys to attendees and gather valuable insights for next time.
"So far, we have tested Zoho Backstage with 30 events," Vagesna said. "We really think this is going to make business events much more useful, and we are looking forward to launching the service to the public."