What’s New in the Zoho Family of Products?

Zoho has one of the most prolific and agile product development teams in the SaaS industry. Zoho adds functionalities and new features to their products at a prodigious pace.  

“We [Zoho] hold fast to the idea that the sales and marketing budget of a tech company shouldn’t outpace its allocation for research and development. So we put 60% of our revenue back into R&D. Most cloud companies routinely spend close to that on sales and marketing.”

The improvements in Zoho applications are driven by the needs of customers.  The CEO and Founder of Zoho monitors customers’ feedback and works with Zoho’s development teams to keep Zoho products fresh and on the technological leading edge. 

Below are some examples of recent enhancements which illustrate the constant progress in Zoho CRM and other Zoho applications:

1. Zoho Unveiled SalesIQ 2.0

SalesIQ 2.0 is an all-in-one customer engagement, live chat, and analytics platform designed for both B2B and B2C businesses. The new SalesIQ platform features:

• Answer Bot—an NLP (natural language processing)-a driven chatbot that uses Zoho’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology – Zia. The Answer Bot can understand common customer queries and answer them using Resource Library in SalesIQ.
• SalesIQ 2.0 has its own screen-sharing feature to assist customers.
• You can bring your favorite apps inside SalesIQ with widgets and forms.
• Zoho SalesIQ – Analytics are now integrated to provide users with extensive reports to analyze traffic, chats, visitors, feedback, and more.

2. The All-New Zoho Expense

Zoho Expense has introduced a freshly revamped user interface along with a host of new features, integrations, and enhancements. The all-new Zoho Expense now focuses more on travel and expense management. Here are the new features in Zoho Expense:

• Role-based access control allows users to customize the entire application based on roles.
• Streamlined travel management with access to travel itineraries travel documents, and flight and hotel bookings feature.
• The brand-new Expense Audit module lets users set up spend limits for the expenses in each category. Admins can even set up mileage expenses. They can identify duplicate expenses, per diem fraud, and suspicious modifications.
• Admins in Zoho Expense can define multi-level, customizable approval workflows for purchase requests.
• Expense now comes with an AI-powered assistant, Zia. It will remind users about pending tasks such as unreported expenses, unsubmitted reports, expense policies, and more.
• Budgeting made simple with the new Expense app. Users can allocate budgets for trips and track actual versus the budget at every stage.
• Manage multiple business locations in Zoho Expense or customize the functionalities to suit your business.
• The tool now integrates with applications for better travel and expense management such as Taxback International, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Directory, Sage One, and Amazon Business.

3. Revamped User Interface in Zoho Meeting

With Zoho Meeting’s Webinar interface, you can broadcast live webinars and record webinar sessions. The new user interface will enhance your webinar experience by:

• Allowing you to conduct live webinars with multiple video feeds
• Automatically scheduling your recurring webinar series
• Allowing you to record the webcam’s video feed, your audio, and shared screen during a webinar.
• Analyzing the performance of your webinars such as poll results and Q&A engagement. You can even export results as CSV or XLS files.

Additionally, Zoho Meeting now provides robust security with industry-standard TLS 1.2 256-bit AES encryption protocols. 

Zoho Meeting now supports 500 or 1,000 attendees and integrates with Microsoft Teams for joining meetings directly from a Teams channel.

4. Zoho Inventory Now Integrates with UPS

Zoho Inventory now integrates directly with the UPS shipping carrier. Inventory supports UPS domestic shipping within the US, EU, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia) regions.

With the integration of Inventory and UPS, you can now charge a third party using their UPS account number when shipments are created in the Inventory app. You can even bill your shipments directly to your customer’s UPS account. You can track packages and check the status of your consignments.

5. Application Updates in Zoho CRM

• Zoho CRM now offers HIPAA compliance features.
• Single sign-on feature available for multiple organizations
• Zia Reasoning introduced in Assignment Rules
• Categorization of Zia notifications
• Use a scheduled action to created records automatically through workflow rules
• Use unique fields in Contacts and Accounts to find similar records

6. New Updates in Zoho Books and Inventory

Both Zoho Books and Inventory shares a handful of updates recently. Zoho’s finance apps now allow you to:

• Record payments while creating an invoice
• Use Retail Premium templates in the Retail category.
• Use Advanced Search in Zoho Books, including Zia Search

Conclusion

The updates described above only scratch the surface. Zoho applications improve with each passing week, month, and year.  Organizations using Zoho continuously gain new functionality and possibly ways to operate smarter, better, and faster.  Organizations that embrace Zoho solutions will gain a competitive advantage through technology. As a Zoho Authorized Partner, First Direct aims to turn Zoho software into a system. Tell us about your specific needs and business objectives. Contact us today.

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