Zoho Updates Zoho One With Advanced AI, Analytics and Search Features

Zoho announced major updates to Zoho One, its flagship suite of applications designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. One year after its launch, 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—will soon 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.

Zoho also launched Backstage, an end-to-end event management tool that allows organizers, corporations, and non-profit agencies to plan, promote, and run enterprise events ranging from large-scale meetings to conferences and trade shows.

One year of Zoho One

The company announced Zoho One adoption numbers for its first year on the market: more than 12,000 business worldwide have become Zoho One customers; 36% of Zoho One users are from India. 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 five new apps to Zoho One in the past year—Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage—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 Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corp. "We see customers combining data from different Zoho and third-party apps—like email campaigns, CRM, customer support, and accounting—to generate new insights and make better decisions. Zoho One has already replaced more than 650 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  business apps. Business owners, CXOs and managers can now track KPIs and trends from one tab, 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 CEO or Sales VP can see not just the revenue numbers for different accounts, but also the number of support tickets pending and, the first response and resolution times, all in one place.  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, will be 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. Drawing 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 Zoho Books and Zoho People. Zia for Zoho One will be made available in phases starting this year. Zoho also plans to open up the Zia Platform for Zoho One users, allowing them to extend Zia with custom skill sets built to address their specific 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 an 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 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 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 Dashboard, and Zia Search are organization-wide tools designed to give our customers deeper understanding of their businesses," said Vembu, “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.”

User Comments 

"For an ecosystem player like us, managing tens of projects for hundreds of business requirements to meet the expectations of our stakeholders runs into thousands of requirements that could potentially take as many hours of operating bandwidth and spend. An integrated product suite like Zoho One has truly helped ease our ever-changing requirement list. It has been an enterprise-class product from a world-class player. A big thank you on behalf of the 300+ startups that make up our community," says Jay Krishnan, CEO, T-Hub

"When we started Eunimart, just like any other early stage business, we searched the entire market for any software that could help tie all my different customer facing and internal functions into one seamless flow. Unfortunately, all the different solutions we came across either did not have the breadth of solutions needed for a complex business model like Eunimart, or were built for large businesses and were too expensive for us. Zoho was a lifesaver as our business processes were becoming unmanageable with the growing number of customers. The easily manageable workflows, ability to build custom models and create custom solutions was exactly what we needed. Our internal team, with the help of a Zoho partner, has managed to automate almost all of our business, enabling us to achieve 30% increase in productivity and largely increased customer satisfaction. I am grateful to Zoho One for the large suite of solutions that are built just for startups such as ours. I have recommended a lot of different startups on how to implement Zoho and scale their businesses in a more efficient manner," commented Shayak Mazumder, CEO, Eunimart