Combine AI capabilities with one of the world’s most powerful business software platforms. As a result, businesses of all types and sizes can create new workspaces. This allows teams to integrate native and third-party apps. It also allows employees to easily share data across the organization while maintaining important security features.
Check out the exciting new version of Zoho One. It also lets your team reimagine your business by sharing insights across 50+ applications and third-party apps from Google, Microsoft, Quickbooks, and more.
“Currently, approximately 75,000 customers are using Zoho One,” explains Raju Bejesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho. “These customers are distributed around the world, and the average number of applications they use is approximately 22 to 23, and that number is only increasing. This option is very important across a variety of organizational sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises.”
The new AI-enhanced Zoho One brings together features from over 50 Zoho apps and third-party integrations in a variety of ways.
One layer of integration includes spaces divided into individuals, organizations, and departments. Let’s take a look below at how these are arranged.
get a personal touch
Let’s say you run a coffee roaster based in Seattle that operates nationwide.
Each member of the marketing department needs personal productivity tools. Think about design tools to work on campaign elements and file storage to upload those assets. You may also want a chat feature to discuss your project with other members of your team.
“Sometimes we just want to put our heads down and work…and we need our own space for ourselves, a personal space,” Bejesna adds. “So we created a personal space with relevant tools for you to use.”
Each member of your sales team should have email for lead capture and video call capabilities to follow up with cafes and supermarket chains that might be interested in carrying your coffee.
But instead of jumping in and out of 10 or 20 applications, Zoho One’s new integration offers a magic trick.
Abracadabra and each member create a personal space where they can read and send emails, make phone calls, and store and share files.
All of this happens within a dashboard built to improve your productivity.
As Zoho One strengthens its sales and marketing team, it will soon be able to compete with big brands like Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee.
These individuals need personal space to do their work, but are also looking for ways to quickly share with the rest of the team.
Fortunately, other aspects of Zoho One’s new unified approach meet exactly this need. stay tuned.
Maintain organizational communication
Of course, you also need a way to communicate and collaborate across your organization.
“When you’re in collaboration mode across your organization, you go into the organization space, where there are a lot of tools that can help with different forms of collaboration,” Bejesna added.
Let’s say you own a real estate brokerage in Reading, Pennsylvania. However, regional agencies exist in several counties in the southeastern part of the state.
You need a tool that helps bring these agents together on a regular basis, even if they are spread out over 50 miles apart.
city hall
Organization Spaces allow you to set up town halls no matter where your agents are.
Set up a town hall with a clearly defined duration and agenda. For example, establish a Monday morning session to update agents on the progress of new and existing listings.
Share exciting news about offers received, successful deals closed, and other breakthroughs.
Set up another town hall mid-week and host an Ask Me Anything session for new agents who are probably just learning the ropes.
forum
Forums allow agents to collaborate on projects, get more showings, and ultimately get more sales.
For example, encourage agents in one county to post product listings, photos, asking prices, and other details.
This allows real estate agents in other counties where the perfect buyer might be to set up a listing or request more information about your property with just a few clicks.
Or let’s say a real estate agent has an open house scheduled for this weekend. Forums provide a place to announce events, invite other real estate agents to participate, and potentially bring interested clients.
Other tools
Town halls and forums are both located within Zoho Connect. But don’t get me wrong. Our virtual real estate brokerage business doesn’t have to be siloed within one application.
The new Zoho One seeks to soften the boundaries between apps with a simple dashboard that allows collaborative teams to enable or disable apps at will.
“Even if you’re working with multiple applications, it all feels like one unified interface,” Vegesna points out.
That’s why our Southeastern Pennsylvania real estate company is probably using Zoho Projects to manage real estate staging and real estate sales closings to ensure nothing is left out.
But the company also uses Zoho Social to create campaigns for individual properties and bring in new properties.
“So users can create multiple dashboards to pull data from multiple applications, and the default dashboards we create ourselves pull data from across the operating system,” Vegesna added.
Cool, right?
Improve departmental efficiency
But most importantly, the new Zoho One integration philosophy addresses the biggest challenge of any business challenge: departmental efficiency.
If you overlook this important detail, your business will always end up throwing more money out the window than it takes in at the door.
With the new Zoho One, teams can create dashboards for any department imaginable with the tools they need.
“It’s organized around CRM, HR, support, etc.,” Vegesna begins. “If you want to add these, like help desk overviews, you can pin them or add them and they’ll appear here.”
Imagine the accounts receivable department of a debt collection agency in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working primarily with local hospitals and other health care providers.
Few companies better exemplify the relationship between departmental efficiency and profitability.
Are you failing to track down delinquent accounts, schedule calls to arrange payments, or track and process payments you’ve made? You could quickly find yourself facing the wrath of your clients and even canceling your contract.
Fortunately, various Zoho tools provide the perfect solution.
Use Zoho Billing’s Accounts Receivable Aging Summary to identify delinquent accounts.
Create a ticket system for communication and payment negotiations using Zoho Projects. Then use Zoho Payments to ease your debt repayments.
Zoho Books helps you track your customer deposits and collection costs.
Create a dashboard (or dashboards) to give your team a 40,000-foot view of your collection operations.
This brings into sharper focus any accumulated delinquencies, communication delays, late payments, and excessive costs in the collection process.
“What if we could make all these applications behave like a single application, remove the boundaries between them on data, and make the whole thing behave like a single unified experience where context is king?” Bejesna muses.
Can you see the possibility?
New Zoho One uses Zia to bring Ghost to your machines
Another important change in the new version of Zoho One is the further integration of Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant.
AI is already featured heavily in Zoho’s products. But the new Zoho One has Zia built into almost everything.
“So Zia is kind of sprinkled throughout the operating system,” Vegesna explains.
For example, Zia helps Zoho take Zoho Creator’s famous low-code app building capabilities to a whole new level.
Zoho Creator already makes it easy to create apps with simple drag-and-drop elements. But now you can also prompt Zia to build and install what you want.
Let’s say you need a checklist for your CRM or other tasks for the day.
Or, like in the hypothetical accounts receivable department example above, you want unpaid invoices ordered by the due date. This allows your team to track accounts and determine when they reach delinquency or are late on payments.
Perhaps you just need an easy way to create a meeting schedule for the day or week. According to Zoho, this is just a sample of the widgets that Zia can create.
“You create a widget and connect it directly,” Vegesna explains.
Just as importantly, Zia helps you sift through your reports to gain important insights.
Vegesna added, “For example, in this case, I’m looking at a report. I can zoom in on the report, I can zoom in, I can ask Zia to analyze it, and Zia will give me an overview of that particular report.”
That’s why Zia parses through vast amounts of information to reveal only the important parts of your project.
Let’s say you want the sales figures for your e-commerce site for 2024 and the first half of 2025. Or maybe you want an overview of traffic and engagement from your last social media campaign.
Zia scrutinizes reports from Zoho Commerce, Zoho Social, or other applications and provides the overview you need.
Integration of experience, intelligence and integration
Consider how AI can remove barriers between apps and data and unify experiences.
You no longer need to work for Zoho Service Plus, Zoho People Plus, or Zoho Marketing Plus. You no longer work in sales, finance, or human resources.
Instead, collaborate across applications with the help of AI. Find the data you need, regardless of which department it resides in.
Now let’s consider how Zia works across all applications. By providing widgets and surfaces to summarize data, you can gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening across your business, not just within one small silo.
Think about this integration of intelligence.
Bringing in a third party – to the party
This provides integrated integration.
This integration doesn’t just happen between Zoho applications. The new Zoho One also integrates with third-party applications like QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and HubSpot.
It also enables integration between these third-party applications themselves. So businesses can choose the tools that work best for them, regardless of whether they are in the Zoho ecosystem or not.
Imagine an SEO company located in Silver Springs, Florida. Perhaps you use Zoho Projects to manage your ongoing activities. You’ll likely use tickets for ongoing tasks such as client site optimization, link building, and keyword research activities.
Perhaps you also use Zoho CRM to nurture leads from marketing campaigns and attract new customers.
But when it comes to bookkeeping, I prefer Quickbooks, even though I use Zoho Invoice to invoice clients and Zoho Payments to collect fees.
Fortunately, with the new Zoho One, this is no problem.
“You can also deploy third-party dashboards and enable single sign-on to connect directly,” Vegesna explains. “Once you get the complete overview, the important part is to remove the board concept and boundaries, and not limit it to the dashboard itself.”
Your Florida SEO company probably also uses GoDaddy to host the websites it builds for its clients and to register the domain names that go along with it.
Vegesna further explains how this integration specifically works.
“So to make it very simple, we also partnered with GoDaddy. Within domain integration, all you have to do is log in to GoDaddy and approve changes to some of these records, and we’ll automatically make these changes to your domain with your permission,” he says.
final thoughts
No matter your business needs, the new Zoho One offers over 50 applications to help you achieve your business goals.
What’s more, the new version of Zoho One eliminates the boundaries that once siloed data and app functionality. This allows businesses to create their own dashboards that combine features from the app and seamlessly move data around as needed.
New AI capabilities, including the use of Zoho’s AI assistant Zia across the platform, allow businesses to build widgets to manipulate and summarize data.
Platform upgrades also enable seamless integration with other third-party software outside of the Zoho ecosystem.
This gives businesses the ultimate flexibility to choose the tools they need and integrate them the way they want.
Visit the new Zho One today.
