Zoho enhances its Zoho Analytics and CRM Plus Platform

Zoho has announced the release of Zoho Analytics, its most advanced self-service business intelligence and analytics platform yet. The new release unleashes the power of data blending and artificial intelligence, enabling organizations to analyze massive amounts of data in a much more efficient way and derive cross-functional business insights.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho, says, "At Zoho, we know what’s important for Sales, Marketing, Support, HR and Finance functions, as we ourselves offer business applications in each of these categories. With this deep understanding of business requirements, we have crafted dashboards that decision-makers and executives can use out-of-the-box from within Zoho Analytics, a unique analytics solution in the self-service BI market. Now, organizations can leverage AI-powered technologies via Zoho Analytics, to correlate data that traditionally resided in departmental silos, into meaningful metrics that span across business functions. For example, being able to determine the impact of marketing spend on new sales."

Zoho has also unveiled the next generation of Zoho CRM Plus, its all-in-one customer experience platform that empowers Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Operations to work as one. Now, Zoho customers have complete visibility of their customers across departments rather than partial views. Fuelled by Zia, Zoho's AI-powered assistant, and the enhanced Zoho Analytics, Zoho's business intelligence and reporting platform, Zoho CRM Plus helps businesses deliver superior customer experiences, by allowing users to deeply understand customer sentiments, delight customers across channels, and adeptly prescribe actions to keep customers content throughout their journey – all from one place.

The power of Zia and Zoho Analytics across this new Customer Experience Platform, coupled with significant updates to Zoho Desk, Zoho Social, and SalesIQ, businesses can now simply unify all customer-facing teams on a single interface and leverage real-time, contextual intelligence pulled from the front- and back-office, across all customer touch points, in just a single action. The platform sets a new standard for seamless omni-channel customer engagement, sentiment collection and analysis, and prescriptive actions across departments to increase the bottom line.

Summary of New Capabilities

Auto-Blending: Zoho Analytics blends data automatically from multiple sources into reports and dashboards, letting users correlate business metrics across these sources. This allows a CXO to get end-to-end insights across multiple departments like marketing, sales, support, finance and others, all at one place, without having to switch applications. Zoho Analytics not only blends data coming from different Zoho apps, but also data from third-party apps.

Ask Zia: Zia, Zoho's intelligent assistant based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, is now part of Zoho Analytics.

Zia can auto-blend data and understand questions that span across business apps. Zia comes up with multiple suggestions as possible answers, from which users can choose the relevant report.

Forecasting: Zoho Analytics debuts Predictive Analytics with new forecasting capabilities. Users can now predict future trends accurately based on their past data.

New Connectors: Zoho Analytics enriches its third-party integrations with six new connectors for popular business apps, expanding the number of connectors to over 100. Each of these connectors comes with more than 100 pre-built domain-specific reports and KPI dashboards that users can benefit from right away.

For social media agencies: Facebook Pages, Twitter handles, and Twitter competitive analytics

For marketing agencies: Bing Ads and Facebook Ads analytics

For HR leaders: Zoho People analytics

Enhanced Visualization: Zoho Analytics includes a major overhaul to its visualization options. In addition to the existing 40+ chart types, Zoho Analytics has added Geo-map charts to help visualize location data. Dark-themed dashboards, flexible dashboard layouts, heat maps, and dial gauges have also been added as new visualization options.

On-premise: In addition to the existing cloud version, Zoho Analytics introduces a new installable on-premise edition to offer deployment choices to users. The on-premise edition will help medium and large enterprises analyze their data stored in-house. This edition is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

Putting Zia at the centre of customer experience –

● Customer sentiments are automatically available to service agents as they receive incoming tickets. Based on prior knowledge, Zia also suggests responses to customers on behalf of support representatives.

● Sales teams are equipped with real-time insight such as the best time to call a prospect or likelihood to close a deal when they follow a stream of actions. Zia analyses marketing and sales activities and predicts chances of deal closures. Zia also monitors that trend against actual business health and predicts anomalies, so teams can stay ahead of potential problems. Using Ask Zia, teams can access insight from the past, present, and future with a simple voice command or text message.

● Zia Voice is now available as an SDK, allowing companies to provide Zia functionality to their customers. Businesses can now easily program AI-enabled conversation assistants to service customers using a conversation assistant.

● The combined powers of Desk, CRM, SalesIQ, and Zia enable businesses to provide the right solution to customer problems at the right time, while also helping sales and support agents be more productive and informed. ‌

Process automation to improve cross-functional business collaboration –

● Customer-facing teams can now manage processes like sales discounts and product returns involving multiple internal stakeholders, without losing track of accountability.

● The Customer Experience Platform automatically indicates and helps manage bottlenecks that delay deal closures and impede case resolutions, thereby reducing friction in the customer experience.

● Every stakeholder involved in the process has the appropriate context from all the previous stages, thereby making tactical decisions more straightforward.

● Employees from marketing, sales, and support functions can use process-management capabilities in Desk and CRM to simplify complex processes, work together, and exceed customer expectations.

Real-time insights built for decision-making

● With the unified Customer Experience Platform, the C-Suite can weigh decisions based on insight across the organization – from marketing, sales, and support to finances and HR in the back-end. Interactive, in-depth dashboards provide dissectible views of impact for every potential business decision.

● Zoho Analytics provides an AI-driven assistant and an extensive range of data connectors making descriptive, and predictive insight, easily accessible across teams. It features 300+ pre-built reports and dashboards that provide real-time data on the various aspects of your business' health. Additionally, users can build their own reports and dashboards to suit specific needs.

● Powered by Zoho Analytics, businesses can now calculate and track important and complex business metrics, such as deal stage velocity and campaign correlation. For instance, using Ask Zia, a top executive can derive a correlation between marketing spend, the number of support tickets received, and the corresponding impact these two have on sales, and what decisions need to be taken to increase sales.

Flawless omni-channel support

● Customers can receive help on one channel with context from all other channels previously used. Whether it is on social, phone, chat, email, or text, service agents will receive notifications and support history on one common interface and settings, instead of across multiple tools and browsers.

● Businesses can easily resolve issues that span multiple internal teams, whether it's a sales or a support conversation.

● Businesses can grasp an accurate pulse of customer sentiments by easily executing surveys at various touch points along the customer journey. This targeted, qualitative insight will allow teams to more deeply understand customer perspectives and fine-tune how they respond to inquiries and needs.

● The seamless integration between Social, SalesIQ, Desk, CRM, and Survey allows for running a single thread of customer conversation that's contextual and easily shared across all customer-facing teams.

Pricing and Availability Zoho Analytics –

The new release of Zoho Analytics is launched in conjunction with the introduction of Zoho's new Customer Experience Platform, a unified suite that allows Sales, Marketing, Support, and Operations to work as one team on one interface. Powered by Analytics and Zia, the platform sets a new standard for omni-channel customer engagement and real-time insight across departments to keep customers satisfied throughout their experience.

Zoho Analytics is available in plans starting from Rs.1,000 per month. Zoho Analytics is also part of Zoho One, the company's all-in-one suite of applications for running an entire business.

Pricing and Availability Zoho CRM Plus –

Zoho CRM Plus is available for Rs.3,000/user/month.