Zoho One Expands Offerings for Small Businesses

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Small Business Operations

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Zoho One is adding 5 new apps, 3 new services, 3 updated services, and 7 major platform enhancements.

“We’re very excited about what’s included in the updates,” said Taylor Backman, Zoho One senior evangelist/customer advocate. “It’s a unified offering using different technology, for a personalized experience.”

Zoho One, known as the operating system for businesses, makes it possible for all business activities – sales, marketing, HR, operations and more – to be integrated for a unified experience. Businesses can also customize Zoho One as needed.

Zoho One is a one-stop for everything product; there’s a reason it’s the most popular of Zoho offerings with more than 40,000 happy customers.

New Zoho Apps

Zoho Lens

This is a remote assistance tool that uses augmented reality (AR). Using the Lens app on a mobile device, the user can interact with another person who is looking at the same image via the Lens app. As the user moves the phone over the object, the other person can draw on the view image and make annotations, using VoIP and text chat.

For example, if a plumbing/heating technician is using the Lens app to show an image of a broken furnace, another person can view the same image and draw a circle around an area to be checked and also offer suggestions on steps to take to fix it.

Zoho Learn

All businesses create a system so that employees can learn the aspects of their jobs. Learn gives businesses a place to house all that knowledge and make it accessible to company workers through a learning management tool that enables interactive training programs and assessments. This gives companies an online centralized tool for company information, training programs, and more.

Zoho Team Inbox

When a group of people are working on a project or idea, all can view emails related to that. There’s no need for “cc’s” or “reply all”, and the shared email inbox eliminates any task duplications so that email conversations are streamlined into one central location.

Zoho DataPrep

Using DataPrep, a client can integrate data before entering the info into Zoho One. For example, data can be retrieved from Excel or similar platforms. All the data can be gathered before pulled into Zoho One whether the user is preparing data from third-party apps. The data preparation tool uses machine learning to help users cleanse, integrate, and catalog data for accurate insights.

Zoho Commerce

Zoho Commerce will now be included in Zoho One to help businesses build their online shops by including tools for building a website, processing payments, managing shipping, marketing their brand and more. It also integrates with third party payment gateways.

New Zoho Services

Zoho Work Graph

This back-end service automatically maps out connections within the business between users, processes, and systems by using signals to determine a work graph specific to the individual for a personalized work experience.

Zoho Mobile App Management

From within Zoho One, businesses can now manage all of their user’s devices such as setting policies, app permissions, provisioning, locking devices remotely, and more to allow for more flexible work environments.

“This will allow businesses to scale and manage operations more effectively in unpredictable climates,” Backman said.

Zoho Org Dictionary

This service allows organizations to create dictionaries specific to their companies. “For example, organizations might have products, acronyms or phrases that are specific to them, and the dictionary will understand it as such without marking it as wrong,” explains Backman.

Backman then used an acronym special to Zoho as an example. “We use the acronym DRI, which stands for directly responsible individual and for us, our organization dictionary will recognize what that means”, he said.

Updated Zoho Services

Zoho Analytics

Zoho has added 1500+ pre-built analytics reports and dashboards, as well as embedded and conversational analytics to help businesses gain real-time insights into their organization for stronger decision making.

Improved Search With Zoho Zia

Zoho’s unified search, which uses Zoho’s AI-powered assistant, Zia, now can deliver insights and can create reports using “natural language” searches.

In other words, searches in language that reflect exactly what the user seeks – such as “show me documents shared by Scott.”

For example, using “ask Zia” the user can type, “Show me revenue.” Delving deeper into the data, the user can use the new Zia conversational interface and say, “show me by month” or “look at as a bar chart.”

Zoho Platform Enhancements

Platform Enhancements are aimed at streamlining user experiences, especially driving improved remote collaboration and faster decision making.

The new unified dashboards, console, and UI allow business users to see all of their apps, dashboards, and more in one centralized location including calendars and navigation.

The unified calendar with easy Click system is an example of a platform enhancement. Employees can simply “click” for remote work check in and check out, breaks and lunches.

“You can also see who’s at work and who’s away,” Backman said. “A manager can see the employees and see what they have coming up.”
Customizable, pre-built widgets have also been added to create more visibility across the business, so that users can drill down further into information all from a single place.

The new Zoho One gives businesses added apps, functionality, and services needed to create deeper collaboration, drill down further into data, and adapt quickly to changing work climates so that organizations can be more productive and be better positioned for growth.

So if it’s a one-stop product you seek, give Zoho One a try and customize it to your needs.

This article, “Zoho One Expands Offerings for Small Businesses” was first published on Small Business Trends