by twieberneit | May 23, 2023 | Blog, Sponsored |
During Zoho’s signature event Zoholics in Austin, the company announced the availability of Ulaa, the new Zoho web browser. Of course, Ulaa does have a meaning. It is a Tamil word that means journey or path. Tamil is the language spoken in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, where Zoho’s HQ is situated. Similar to Safari or Internet Explorer it signifies that the web is about discovery. Ulaa is a privacy orientated webbrowser that is based on Google’s Chromium engine. It has been built specifically to help users protect their online privacy by offering capabilities to block tracking and website surveillance. According to a study by YouGov, this is something that two thirds of consumers want, as they feel that tech companies have too much control over their personal data. The 2022 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report Special Release – Online Creeping even found that globally, 85 percent of internet users want to do more to protect their privacy, while 80 percent say that they are concerned about data privacy. Almost 70 percent say that they are more alarmed than ever. So, there is clearly a case for privacy-oriented browsers, also one more browser, as there are already some existing ones, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, even Safari. We had the chance to talk to Tejas Gadhia, Zoho evangelist in charge of Ulaa about the rationale behind Zoho developing a web browser and what the future will bring. You can watch the full interview here. Why did Zoho build a browser? According to Tejas, there hasn’t been much innovation in the browser market lately. Some browsers came, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, and went (TOR, anybody?),...
by twieberneit | May 11, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 4, 2023, Zoho held its Zoholics conference in Austin, TX which included a media and analyst track in addition to the customer track. After all, Zoholics is a customer event. During this event, about 80 participants of the former track had ample opportunity to learn about and discuss the latest news at Zoho. We also had the opportunity to listen to – and question – a panel of customers who gave candid answers about their journey with Zoho and challenges they faced. Of course there was plenty of room for mingling and networking with Zoho executives and, of course, with analysts and customers. In addition to the breaks between the tracks, there was a pre-evening reception, a dinner on the event day and a casual brunch at the Zoho farm just outside of Austin. As usual for Zoho, the sessions were less about feeding us with PowerPoint (or Zoho Show, to be precise. Why would Zoho not use a Zoho product?) but about giving good information and a genuine interest in getting feedback. This was evident not only during the sessions but also by the customer panel and an open Q and A with representatives of the Zoho leadership team. Of course, the customers were reference customers. Still, they openly admitted challenges. In one case e.g., it became evident that Zoho’s HR software has scope for improvement, another example was users preferring MS Teams to Zoho Cliq. The sessions covered four grand themes: The release of Ulaa, a privacy orientated browser Zoho’s upmarket momentum A kick-start set of solutions to help solopreneurs and very small businesses to...
by Marshall Lager | May 7, 2023 | Blog, News |
Zoho hosted its usual Analyst Day to coincide with the annual Zoholics event in Austin TX. You’ll likely have seen the announcements already, as well as some analysis of them; I’d like to focus on one set. Zoho has opened up beta access to a set of apps that are specifically targeted to serve solopreneurs, small business owners in the making, freelancers, and similar individuals. Briefly, these apps include: Zoho Start, which guides individuals through the process of launching a business; Zoho Publish, a visibility tool to access listing services, maps, and feedback sites; Zoho Tables, a hybrid spreadsheet/app combining ease of use with team access; and Zoho Solo, a mobile-only set of essential CRM and other business tools for solopreneurs. On the one hand, this is very smart. The majority of solo/small businesses worldwide have a smartphone or tablet as their only computer, driven by the commonality of solopreneurs around the world, both in the developed and developing worlds. The figures Zoho quoted to us included 5 million new business launches in the US annually, more than 33 million existing small businesses, and 70 million people who consider themselves freelancers. By catering to this audience with apps and services that support them specifically, Zoho taps into a huge market that is not otherwise well served. On the other hand, this approach is self-limiting. While we’re talking about majorities, the vast, vast majority of potential users will never grow beyond a one-person, one-device business, nor will they want to. The ones that do grow still aren’t likely to reach a level of revenue that will require a more extensive...
by twieberneit | Apr 25, 2023 | Blog, Sponsored |
The following article is an excerpt of a White Paper by Customerization’s Kira Tchernikovsky. Kira is the co-founder and CMO of this Canadian consulting company that focuses on helping SMBs stand out through superior business automation. You can download the full white paper here. Customer experience (CX) is how a customer feels about a company over time. Creating great CX is about positive emotions, building trust, and leaving a lasting impression with customers. Orchestrating excellent customer experience is essential for building brand loyalty and increasing customer retention. It’s also becoming increasingly important as more and more clients. B2C and B2B, choose to do business with companies who personalize interactions and prioritize customer satisfaction. While larger businesses have the resources to invest in Customer Experience (CX), small businesses (and by small we mean <200 employees) face unique challenges in providing an outstanding CX. Here are a few common challenges for small businesses: Limited resources: Small businesses have limited financial resources and less employees to dedicate to a comprehensive customer experience solution. This makes it difficult to compete with larger businesses that have more resources to invest in customer experience initiatives. Lack of expertise: Small businesses may not have in-house expertise in areas such as customer experience design, research, and analytics. Therefore, it is not easy for SMEs to develop and implement an effective customer experience strategy. Limited data and insights: Small businesses may have limited access to customer data and insights, which in its turn, prevents them from objectively understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points. How can they then build effective customer interactions and experiences? Limited technology resources: Small...
by twieberneit | Apr 14, 2023 | Blog |
Generative AI is here to stay. It is not only a hype that probably gets worse before it gets better. And we clearly still are in a hype, as the following chart showing the search interest for ChatGPT between October 1, 2022 and April 12, 2023 from Google Trends shows. Similarly, the Gartner Group sees Generative AI technology approaching the peak of inflated expectations in its 2022 hype cycle for artificial intelligence. To be sure, we see only the tip of the iceberg when looking at voice, text or image based services that we all know and use. The Gartner Group also foresees many industrial use cases reaching from drug and chip design to the design of parts to overall solutions. You think that these scenarios lie far in the future? Read this Nature article from 2021 and think again. And in contrast to some of the other hypes that we have seen in the past few years, there are actual use cases that support the technology’s survival of the trough of disillusionment. As there are viable use cases, unlike “Metaverse”, Blockchain or NFTs have shown, generative AI is not a solution in search of its problem. Apart from OpenAI’s GPT and Dalle-E models that surely caught everybody’s attention in the past weeks and months, there are a good number of large language models that are just less known. A brief research that I recently conducted, unearthed more than 50 models that got published over the past few years. For their paper A Survey of Large Language Models that focuses on “review[ing] the recent advances of LLMs by introducing...
by twieberneit | Mar 21, 2023 | Blog, Case Study |
During the truly remarkable (pun definitely intended) TrulyZoho event I, of course had the chance to talk to some customers. One of these customers was Amit Rai of Tata Fiber, an Indian ISP. As the name suggests, Tata Fiber provides internet services through fiber. The company was founded in 2016 and started commercial rollout in 2018, so is a kind of start-up. Amit is the Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber, but also led their digital projects and is now heading business development for the company. He happily agreed to a conversation about the relationship between Zoho and Tata. The following article is based on the conversation with Amit. TL&DR If you do not want to read and prefer a video, you can also listen in to the conversation. The original problem at hand We started in 2019 with HR management, in particular with Zoho people, as a solution in this functional area was needed. The implementation gave us confidence in Zoho and our implementation partner. From there on we implemented additional Zoho apps. We started on the call center as the agents needed to work with and toggling between a multitude of screens when working with a customer to resolve issues. The agents in parallel needed to talk to the customer, making sense. Of course, the quality of the conversations suffered from this and the conversations got longer. Longer conversations are a cost to us. Why Zoho? The original implementation gave us a good confidence in Zoho. This was not only because of the product but also because of the responses from the Zoho organization and the implementation team, the...
