By Gregg Troyanowski
Zoho, based in Chennai, India with headquarters in Pleasanton, California, brought artificial intelligence to its enterprise suite in February. They recently announced a significant upgrade to Connect, the team collaboration app designed to give users a centralized virtual space to work and share contact from. The upgrades include new features such as Forums, Boards, and Manuals. This enables teams to manage their work plans and create their own knowledge base. It has been determined that productivity at individual and team level explodes when business users are given social tools in their context.
Zoho, founded in 1996 and rebranded in 2009, offers a suite of online productivity tools and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. It claims 25 million worldwide users, half of which are in the United States. Zoho’s first offering was a word processing app. The first phase focused on office suite, the second phase (2008) CRM, and in 2009-2010 email. The company started with about 500 people, by 2010 reached more than 1000, and now claims to have over 4,000 employees. As a result, a recruitment app, CRM, and email campaigns were developed.
There was one key piece missing as the apps all catered to specific productivity needs but didn’t constitute a cohesive productivity suite. So in 2012 the third phase called contextual integration started. This consisted of integrating all the apps that had been developed. This process of integrating into a single suite took five years. This is where the idea of a business operating system came from and more keep being added depending on needs of business.
The fourth phase with the introduction of the Zia Al into all of its apps began in February Zia is the Al-driven sales assistant for Zoho CRM. Zia can learn from all context about a customer – an email, an inquire, a purchase order. Al is very complicated but with a simple purpose. Zia if fully integrated into theZoho CRM app.
About Gregg Troyanowski
Gregg Troyanowski is president of Promero, Inc. Founded in 2001, Promero is a leading customer care -call center software expert. Promero provides valuable insight to customers when selecting a call center technology platform. Promero supports companies of any size or industry and addresses strategic, operational and technological issues always with the focus of providing a solution that is right for the client’s business. Promero is an authorized managed service hosting provider and reseller of the world’s best in class solutions including Oracle, Aspect, Interactive Intelligence Vocalcom, Five9, CallMiner Speech Analytics, Salesforce, Pipkins, and Riverstar. Promero’s client list includes companies on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list. If your business is considering an application enhancement, replacement or in need of technical support, please contact Promero for a free, no obligation consultation. www.promero.com