by twieberneit | May 11, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus, its suite of marketing solutions. You can read the complete press release here. The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities. Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information. “Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. “The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.“ With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership. Early customers show themselves impressed with the breadth of the functionality as well as the support for the end-to-end support that is offered by the platform. Says...
by twieberneit | Dec 23, 2020 | Blog, Sponsored |
Since February or March of Anno Domini 2020, the Corona pandemic is making the headlines and is driving digital transformation, or at least the digitalization of businesses. For sure, this crisis has forced and is continuing to force many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. This has accelerated an already ongoing fundamental change of the way people work. It has also had an impact on work culture. People can no more just drop by a colleague to ask a question, but need to pick up a phone. Meetings do not happen in the meeting room around the corner anymore but by utilizing technology – virtual meeting rooms – voice and video. Salespeople can no more travel to their customers for face-to-face meetings. Instead they were forced to adopt and master virtual meetings, something they didn’t believe they could possibly do in 2019. It seemed far too alien. Many of us have learned that this change is rather an opportunity than a threat. We needed to, and did adapt, on a business- and a personal level. In doing so, we realized that many things that we thought of “will never work” actually work quite well. This adaption happened and happens in three distinct steps. We first used any available technology, just to keep the lights on. Then we started to put processes around them to become more effective and now we are looking at improving efficiencies. These efficiencies, that we look for, will be achieved by the harmonization and reduction of the number of the used tools and their deep integration into each other and essential business...
by twieberneit | Nov 26, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Today various media outlets broke the news that Salesforce is in advanced talks with Slack Technologies about a possible acquisition. The news had two effects: Slack stock went up nearly 40 per cent during trading hours while Salesforce stock loses out by 5 percent, which basically says that Salesforce investors are not so convinced about this acquisition being a good thing, whereas Slack investors clearly are. Slack and Salesforce share an integration, which is listed on appexchange since 2019. There have been speculations on Slack being a good target for Salesforce that date back till August 2016, basically ever since the integration between Salesforce and Slack got announced. The Bigger Picture There are several aspects to this news. Salesforce already has Chatter, a tool that often gets negative feedback. The company also owns Quip, which is essentially a solution for the collaborative creation of documents and spreadsheets. And Salesforce has created work.com, as a solution to increase business resiliency and to improve collaborative work. On a larger scale, and accelerated by the Covid crisis, the need for fast and efficient communication and collaboration of distributed work forces and their customers, using various means of communication is there. Actually, it has been there for quite some time, as the emergence of solutions from Slack to Teams, Zoom, etc. proves. E-mail is still very important, but only a part of this communication, which includes near instant chat, voice and video communications as well as collaborative work on documents – inside and outside an organization. Another part is, that this communication needs to be tied to business processes and enable...
by twieberneit | Nov 23, 2020 | Analysis, Blog, Sponsored |
The News Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability. It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio. Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users. Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities. Main benefits of Intercall include: Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the...
by twieberneit | Sep 13, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 10, 2020 Zoho announced Zoho Workplace, a new cloud based product bundle that is targeted at making a workforce more effective and efficient by bundling collaboration, productivity, and communication tools into one integrated set. As a part of this release Zoho enriched the applications that are part of Zoho Workplace with additional capabilities, following the vision of driving better business outcomes easier. Zoho Workplace consists of nine tightly integrated applications that are built on a common data model and that share a common dashboard and AI based enterprise search. The bundle is “centered around a full-featured business mail and office suite”. The nine applications Zoho Workplace consists of, are: Mail for business e-mail Cliq, as a messaging system Meeting for online conferencing Connect, a social intranet solution Writer for word processing Show for collaborative presenting Sheet for spreadsheets Workdrive as the cloud based document management system ShowTime for online training and/or webinars. Zoho did a study together with Beagle Research on what the main issues with current collaboration and productivity tools are. Results of this study include that applications that employees work with are “not intuitive and difficult to integrate”. Additional findings include that businesses often use different technology stacks which hampers productivity. Instead, they want “unified solutions that streamline complex processes”. Zoho Workplace is addressing this and as a result has seen a rapid adoption, “now supporting 2 million organizations, with 15 million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft”. The Bigger Picture...
