Tag: pr

3 Ways to Profit from Customer Relation Management Software on Day 1 - Story From: Sell, Sell, Sell!

November 17th, 2010, Comments Off

CRM or Customer Relation Management Software is a broad category of business automation technology that can mean many things to different sized businesses. For instance, for a global corporation with a 500 person call center, Customer Relation Management Software means a system that allows the person you talk to when calling for customer service to [...]

Get Rewarded with Zoho Recruit’s Affiliate Program - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 17th, 2010, Comments Off

We are excited to announce Zoho Recruit’s new Affiliate Program! Refer friends, colleagues, clients, etc., to Zoho Recruit and get rewarded.

Becoming a Zoho Recruit Affiliate is fast and easy. All you have to do is just fill up Zoho Recruit’s Affiliate form and submit. After submitting the form, a promotional code will be given to you, through which your referrals can sign up and purchase Zoho Recruit. Once your referral makes a purchase, you will get an instant commission of 50% credited to your account.

Check out the Zoho Affiliate program for other services too.

US Midterm Elections – Zoho in Action - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 16th, 2010, Comments Off

Here’s something interesting we wanted to share – the little role
that Zoho played in the recently concluded US midterm elections.

Dan Centinello, a Campaign Manager, chose Zoho for live
analysis & reporting of data on the election day. He stored
over 4 million records (rows) of voters’ information in a Zoho Reports
table. And for editing of these records, a Zoho Creator app’s form
interface was used. The Zoho Creator app also had a mobile interface
form for entering data. The records were looked up (read) and edited
upon by around a hundred people simultaneously. The whole Zoho set up
served as the backbone for viewing in real time, the stats of all voters as they voted.

Says Dan,

The worrisome part about implementing such an unprecedented and
aggressive operation is that many things can go wrong unexpectedly. We
planned for the worst and made changes if something went wrong with the
other 11 elements of our operation; however, one facet that we knew we
had no room for error was on the technological side. This was a critical component – we needed to store millions
of records that would be continuously updated by over 100 users.
Ultimately, Zoho Reports was the only system I could trust to flawlessly
support the aggressive technology we were implementing.

Here’s what the ‘war room’ that Dan set up looked like:

With around a hundred people
continuing to enter/edit data through out the day, live & dynamic
dashboards from Zoho Reports were being projected on the overhead screen
to see the current position of how the various regions, demographics
were doing.

A dashboard from Zoho Reports, consisting of pie charts & user filters, projected on the war room’s screen.

Hope you liked how Zoho’s apps were put to good use by a tech enthusiast. Dan was so convinced by Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports that
he has now chosen to use our services like Zoho Projects, Zoho
Discussions etc. Thanks again to Dan for choosing Zoho.

Like Dan, if
you need a robust and scalable system for data entry/storage, analysis and reporting, do check out Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports.

Humor on the cloud: Meditation - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 14th, 2010, Comments Off

User Filters in Zoho Reports - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 12th, 2010, Comments Off


Zoho Reports has had design mode filters from the beginning.  And we have had some dynamic filtering capability in the form of

legend filtering
. We have further enhanced this dynamic filtering capability now through the introduction of

User Filters
.

Say, you have sales data spanning across years
and you want to create a report for monthly sales in 2009 alone. You
can plot monthly sales against months and define a design mode filter for the year 2009. But what if you want to build more flexibility to the report and would like to have the report’s users (viewers) choose any particular year’s sales to be viewed? Or for that matter choose the region, product category. This exactly is what is achieved with the newly introduced User Filters.

The embedded report below contains user filters for year, product category & region.




How To Create User Filters


The slide show below shows how to create and edit user filters for a typical sales report.


We now support text and date values in user filters. We will soon be extending this support to numerical values. Hope you like this newly introduced feature. Try the new User Filters in

Zoho Reports
now. Your feedback comments are most welcome.

Announcing Zoho Support: Web-based Help Desk Software, Ticket Management and Self-Service Portal - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 10th, 2010, Comments Off

Today we’re excited to introduce the newest arrival to the Zoho family:

Zoho Support

.  Brick by brick, we’re building Zoho into the one-stop shop you need to run your business on the cloud!

Zoho Support is a web-based help desk software that allows organizations to easily manage and respond to an ever growing number of customer support inquiries that arrive via different channels (phone, e-mail, web). In the era of real-time communication and instant-everything, customers expect a prompt answer to their questions. With its innovative web interface, Zoho Support allows technicians to prioritize customer tickets, quickly find the appropriate response and get back to the customer as soon as possible.

Sometimes, the quickest way for customers to get support is through the self-service route. Zoho Support includes features that allow members of the support organization to easily publish solutions to known issues in a customer portal, so customers will solve their issue even before they contact your staff. In the customer portal, customers are also able to submit and track tickets.

In a nutshell, Zoho Support consists of the following modules (or tabs):


  • Requests

    . The requests tab helps technicians prioritize the support requests that are coming in from customers. There are multiple ways in which the support request can be sliced & diced – for example: those requests that are assigned to me, or those requests that are unread. A support manager might want to see which requests are overdue and need to be addressed immediately. Sometimes it’s impossible to programmatically determine (i.e. through an e-mail or a form) if a request is high-priority or who it should be assigned to. The requests module also helps organizations triage these support requests so they can be quickly routed to the appropriate team for solution.

  • Accounts & Contacts

    . Accounts and contacts provide a view into the support operation through a customer perspective. Most importantly, organizations can define, track and enforce specific SLAs (service level agreements) they may have agreed to with their customers. No two support requests are even created equal, even two that look exactly the same could have a different priority depending on the SLA that was promised to each individual customer. 

  • Reports & Dashboards

    . Reports and dashboards provide a quick view into how your support organization is doing. You can quickly get a wealth of data that will allow you to take the best decisions for your business and your customers. For example – what products are getting the most support requests? What incidents are happening the most often? What support group (or rep) has the slowest response time? 

  • Tasks

    . The task module provides simplified view into what a support rep needs to do – either external activities (like get back to a customer with a particular solution or diagnosis) or even an internal one (like research or try a new approach). These allows everyone in the support team to keep their work organized and allows the support manager to get a quick glance into what everyone on his team is working on.

  • Solutions Database

    . The solutions module allows support reps to create and publish (either internally or externally) solutions to the most common customer problems, so that next time they get a similar case, the don’t have to re-invent the wheel. When a solution is published externally, it is automatically available in the customer portal, so that customers are able to find it easily.

  • Workflow, API and much more.

     Automate tasks, assignments, alerts with the workflow rules; integrate with your other systems via the API; maintain details of your catalog (skus, release dates, support windows). E-mail reply templates… and there’s more. There’s a lot of good stuff in here.

And, as you would expect, Zoho Support is already integrated with

Zoho CRM

. So you can go from selling to supporting easily and smoothly. We also integrate

Zoho Chat

– so your support agents can quickly find the answer they’re looking for, not only in the solutions database, but also from their colleagues over IM while they are on the phone with a customer. As you may know by now, we’re big on making all of our products tightly integrated with each other. There are a (Read more...)

Zoho@Zoho: This is how we simplified our recruitment process - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 9th, 2010, Comments Off




Hiring a candidate is not merely about filling a vacancy; Never about finding yet another one to do the job. It is more about picking the passion and craftsmanship from a galaxy of talents out there. This involves a lot of work from the hirer, both before and after recruitment. It is not a good idea to automate the interview process entirely. The procedure post-recruitment was one area we could try simplifying. What summed up to about a week of activity for three departments in the organization, now takes couple of hours before everything falls in place. With this

New Employee application

, here is how we go about choosing the system and software, approve the same and create a user profile for the new-comer, easily.
Once the HR team picks the right person, all the personal details of that candidate are updated in our internal human-resource management tool;

Zoho People

. Access is granted to the new employee, so that he can update his personal details himself. As for the user profile name, employee preference is considered. It is then verified for availability, and if it is already taken, alternatives are provided.
The next process of importance is the resource allocation for the chosen candidate; Hardware and software resources. Now, this is highly unique. Resources can never be the same for everyone. For instance, all a technical writer requires is a basic piece of hardware which is sufficient to access an

online text editor

, while on the contrary, a designer or an animator requires sophisticated software such as a Graphics suite, extended graphics adapter and high-end hardware. Care is taken beforehand in allocating these software requirements, so that no further time is spent in improvising. Resource allocation is left to the manager for approval. They, depending on the role of the candidate, pick the components required and approve it. The requests for user profile creation and resources are then forwarded to the Sysadmin team, who would make them available. They use a separate application for that; the IT Asset Request application. The purposefulness and the indispensability of this

Zoho Creator



application deserves to be talked about in a dedicated post, so that will have to wait.

As you see, each new recruitment keeps the HR, Managers and the Sysadmin teams busy enough. The information they work on is one and the same, so there is no need for duplication. What we needed was a central repository to hold all the data, for the teams to access them from. We should admit, complexity level of this application was much higher than

the previous ones

showcased here. What makes it so mighty is not the functionality alone. It is also because the IT Asset Request and the New Comer Application are closely integrated to handle a single scenario. But, if you overlook the hassle we went through in building it, you’d most certainly admire the orderliness it has added to the recruitment process.

Check it out! 
Our HR department asked us if this app can welcome the new comer with a big smile. We politely said – “Will be available in our next update. Kindly bear with us till such time” ;)

Humor on the cloud: Evolution - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 7th, 2010, Comments Off



Can Management Customers be Targeted More Effectively Using a CRM? - Story From: Sell, Sell, Sell!

November 7th, 2010, Comments Off

We all know that different customers demand different sales approaches. Can management customers be targeted more effectively using a CRM to enforce and automate the correct sales approach?

Webinar: Using Google Apps? Add Zoho CRM and boost your sales - Story From: Zoho Blogs

November 5th, 2010, Comments Off

If you are using Google Apps, this is for you. 

Our friends at Google invited us to a live webinar next week to showcase what Zoho CRM for Google Apps can do for you. As you may know, we’ve been constantly improving our Zoho CRM For Google Apps to have more and more useful integration that make it easier for you to manage your leads, contacts and sales. 

So, if you have not tried Zoho CRM for Google Apps yet, we invite you to join us next Tuesday, November 9th at 10am Pacific Time. Here’s the link you can subscribe with: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=571321675&sourceid=ptnr


See you there!

Rodrigo

Feed

http://www.web-basedcrmsoftware.net/crmsoftwareblognow / pr