Business-wide AI, Analytics and Search Demonstrate the Power of Building Services on a Pre-Integrated Operating System

Today Zoho announced major updates to Zoho One, its flagship suite of applications designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. Launched in July 2017, this all-in-one solution includes apps that run sales and marketing, finance and HR, operations and business intelligence. One year later, Zoho One is enabling a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization: Zia—Zoho’s AI—can now respond to user queries by combining information from multiple apps; Zoho One’s new Analytics delivers a deeper, more contextual picture of business operations by blending data from apps across the suite; and a new unified Search feature can execute across multiple applications, bringing back richer results that significantly reduce the time and effort needed to find the right data.

The company also announced Zoho One adoption numbers for its first year on the market: more than 12,000 business worldwide—with 40 percent from the US—have become Zoho One customers. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. The company has added four new apps to Zoho One in the past year—Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense and Zoho Flow—and today, they are introducing Zoho Backstage (link), an end-to-end event management software, which is being added to the suite at no additional cost.

“The adoption of Zoho One has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to continue this momentum into its second year. The stats clearly show that customers will use multiple apps from a single suite, if those apps work together more deeply than a patchwork of products from different vendors,” said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho. “We see customers combining data from different Zoho and third-party apps—like email campaigns, CRM, customer support, and invoicing—to generate new insights and make better decisions. Zoho One has already replaced more than 600 different products, and that number will only grow as we release even more new apps.”

New Capabilities Added to Zoho One 

Analytics: The new Zoho One Analytics tab provides analytics across Zoho’s suite of transactional business apps. Business owners, CXOs and managers can now track KPIs and trends all from one place, helping them to make more informed decisions. Users can create their own custom reports and dashboards to blend data from different business apps and do cross-functional analytics. For example, a marketer could combine data from Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns to see how many leads were created from a particular campaign and how much they cost. Currently, there are over 500 pre-built reports and dashboards available across applications. Users can also import data stored in third-party applications and analyze it along with the data from Zoho’s internal apps.

Zia for Zoho One: Zia, the AI-powered assistant first introduced by Zoho CRM in 2016, is being extended to Zoho One. Zia for Zoho One functions across various applications, pulling data from different departments to provide the right contextual information. Using simple commands, Zia can handle complex queries. Pulling information from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, Zia can tell users how many customers in the sales pipeline have an open support ticket. Similarly, Zia can generate a chart that displays revenue-per-employee trends for the last five years by fetching figures from the accounting app and the human resource management app. Zoho also plans to open up the Zia Voice Platform for Zoho One users, allowing them to extend Zia with custom skill sets built to address their unique needs.

Zia Search: On average, knowledge workers spend 30% of their workday searching for information, according to an IDC research paper. The new Zia Search lets users search across all their Zoho apps instantly, dramatically improving information access within the organization. Zia Search was built from the ground up with an understanding of each application’s domain, design and authorization rules, making it possible to display a more relevant, richer set of results. Zia Search also offers a results preview as well as contextual actions so users can utilize their results without having to leave the search window.

Mobile app: The Zoho One mobile app—for both iOS and Android devices—allows organization administrators and service administrators to onboard new employees, provision applications, manage permissions, set security policies, create groups and more, all from their mobile devices. With this app, admins can even take care of time-sensitive requests, like resetting a password, when they are away from their computers.

Zoho Concierge: Launched last year along with Zoho One, the Zoho Concierge is a free service available exclusively to Zoho One customers. Since its inception, this dedicated 24/7 team has helped more than 6,500 customers by mapping their business processes and advising them on how best to optimize Zoho One for their particular needs.

“Zia for Zoho One, the new Analytics tab, and Zia Search are organization-wide tools designed to give our customers deeper understanding of their businesses,” said Vegesna, “This kind of unified data ecosystem is only possible because all of Zoho’s 40+ applications have been built from scratch, over the last two decades, on the same technology base.”

Statements 

“Zoho One has brought our company closer together. What started out as a North America implementation for 50 users and ended up being a global roll-out for more than 500 employees. Not only do we rely on Zoho One for all intra-company communications, we find ourselves executing more efficiently due to the shared data and analytics we now have across departments and offices. Whether it is through Projects, CRM, Reports, or Connect, all of us have one single source of customer data and work more effectively as one team to serve our distributors and end-users. We’ll continue to explore applications on Zoho One—this is just the beginning of further system expansion we can achieve as a Zoho customer.” – Amanda Dolan, Head of CRM, Purolite

“Businesses are now looking for more integration and automation to simplify workloads for users, make quicker and more informed decisions, and deliver better experiences to customers. And they are gravitating towards vendors who can deliver that combination. To already have more than 12,000 businesses using Zoho One within its first year, ranging from one to 20,000 users, proves the value proposition of Zoho’s integrated platform appeals to companies of all sizes. With so many apps integrated together, Zoho One not only makes it easier for businesses to work more efficiently, but having this integrated data structure allows Zoho to leverage its AI and machine learning technologies to provide users a more diverse and complete data set. This has the potential to combine productivity gains with more impactful customer insights, giving businesses a competitive advantage.” – Brent Leary, Partner, CRM Essentials

“The retail landscape is evolving rapidly and has increasingly become dominated by major online players. As the largest retailer in New Zealand, with more than 200 locations across the globe, it is crucial for us to stay ahead of the landscape changes and be as agile as possible. The breadth of apps within Zoho One has allowed our more than 12,000 employees to work more seamlessly as one team and gives us the ability to communicate real-time across teams and offices. Having data on one platform has also streamlined how we service customers and has unleashed incredible energy within our company. Our response times have been reduced significantly, from days to where we are now able to resolve customer issues in real-time. Zoho One is truly the Operating System for any business!” – Timothy Kasbe, Chief Information and Digital Office, The Warehouse Group

“As a fast-growing solar company in the Northeast, we needed a comprehensive but consolidated solution that not only suited our current needs but our future requirements as well.  Customer satisfaction is our priority, thus it is critical for both sales and operations to access real-time customer status within a single platform. From lead acquisition to installation management, through the final billing, having all our platforms joined in Zoho One helps us track every interaction throughout the customer journey. This has allowed us to work with our customers more efficiently. Having various operational departments all able to work within a single platform has also saved us significant time as Zoho One makes information sharing across apps and channels seamless. We weren’t able to accomplish this prior to Zoho One due to disconnected platforms and the many redundancies that were present with different users, logins, and basic credentials. Our business has grown rapidly, and the ability to scale our operations and adapt to industry changes as efficiently as we have would not have been possible without Zoho One.” – Ben Sopczyk, Director of Marketing, Apex Solar Company

Pricing and Availability

Zoho One is available for $30 per employee per month. Businesses must purchase a license for every employee in their organization to get this pricing. Zoho One is currently available worldwide, in multiple languages. Users can sign up for a 30-day trial version of Zoho One at zoho.com/one.

Zia for Zoho One and the mobile app are not currently available. The Analytics feature will be rolled out in phases, whereas Zia Search is available immediately at search.zoho.com.