Charting a Course for Business Excellence with Zoho One and Analytics

Unlock the transformative secrets of top-tier businesses as we explore Zoho's remarkable impact on industry leaders In a candid exchange, you'll hear from Keith Cooper about how Bergen Logistics mastered their customer service and operations by switching to Zoho One, and Christian James will reveal how Sparex Ltd. leveraged Zoho Analytics to revolutionize their data reporting. All the while, Zoho's senior evangelist, peels back the curtain on the collaborative core of Zoho's global operations, showcasing the impressive adaptability and scalability of Zoho's applications that are empowering businesses to reach new heights.

This episode isn't just another tech talk; it's a celebration of innovation and connection, mirroring the very ethos of Zoho Day 24. We're wrapping up this event with a bang, sharing the insights from a week filled with learning and networking among the best in the business. Join us for stories of organic growth, cultural shifts towards customer-driven innovation, and a sneak peek into the future of business tools with features like Zia insights and account-based management. It's an episode packed with actionable wisdom for anyone looking to streamline their operations and foster a culture of growth and efficiency.

Transcript

Zoho Customer Experiences and Collaboration

Speaker 1 0:00

You know all those nice rolling things like that.

Speaker 2 0:04

Okay, I am now rolling, so you don't need to look into the cameras, except if you're doing like an intro, you can look into this camera, but otherwise you're all just talking to each other and I'm just a fool at the wall filming this conversation. So whenever you are ready, please go ahead.

Speaker 1 0:26

Hey everybody, evan Hurstel, here we're at the end of day one of Zoho, day 24, my first Zoho day, and it's been really eye-opening, really illuminating. We're going to have a nice chat about some takeaways, maybe do some introductions first We'll start with the esteemed customers of Zoho here.

Speaker 3 0:44

Fantastic Introduce yourself, Thank you. I'm Keith Cooper. I'm with Bergen Logistics in North Bergen, New Jersey. We're a third-party logistics firm primarily serving the high-end fashion industry. And the vice president of customer experience there.

Speaker 4 0:58

Hi, I'm Christian James. I'm the business intelligence manager at Sparex Ltd. We sell agricultural spare parts globally. We have subsidiaries in 18 different markets. Plus we have our export entity which sells to the remaining countries.

Speaker 5 1:14

Hi, I'm LSB, I'm with Zoho, I'm a senior evangelist and I'm a visitor of Cornwall Ontario.

Speaker 1 1:20

Fantastic. What a diverse list of geographies to start with. It kind of reflects the diverse nature of Zoho. You have teams and people everywhere. Let's maybe start with Zoho. Give us an inside peek into where you fit in the organization, what you do, what's your mission and how do you collaborate with all the colleagues in cross-functions and different applications. It really is a unique organization at Zoho.

Speaker 5 1:42

Great question. I've spent a good part of my 23 years of my professional life here, wow. So now I'm in and out of the company, so that kind of helps. But in general, I think the tools, the technologies that really help us to come together as a company. I wear multiple hats. One of that is I take care of operations in Canada and also pretty closely associated with the products. Typically I lean more on the business intelligence side. I'm an evangelist. I do all these analyst relationships, or I mean spokesperson for the analyst relations and so on for the BI tools. So that's what I do. In terms of the collaboration, the tools definitely help. You drink your own champagne.

Speaker 1 2:28

Oh, totally. Yeah. No, you have so many great applications and devices and services. They all come together in a very packaged kind of way. There's a lot of talk about that seamless integration. Maybe start with some customer perspectives, keith, how do you work with Zoho? What tools do you use, different applications, and tell us about the experience.

Speaker 3 2:51

Very good. We got started with Zoho about five years ago with the CRM solution. We added soon after that Zoho desk for our client services. So now between sales and client services, we had a very concise and a very united package where we would start by creating all the customer data that then the client service team could do the care and feeding. As we went through time, we started developing more and more processes in Zoho. So then we started using Zoho forms and we started using Zoho survey and it became apparent after a while that we're going to need to just bring it all together One ring to rule them all right. So we got under the Zoho One platform and that just has allowed us great access to a number of other applications that we've started using, including analytics and several others. We started with 10 CRM licenses and 50 desk licenses and now we're up to 250 licenses globally on Zoho One. So that's been our trajectory.

Speaker 1 3:55

So it's nothing more fundamental than CRM and nothing more frustrating. In my experience in implementing a CRM and this goes back a bit when I was a practitioner, you know, implementing CRMs, using CRMs as a salesperson what are some of the tricks to getting your CRM, your customer communications, right?

Speaker 3 4:15

Yeah, that's a great question and we looked at the time. We did look at partners and whether or not we were going to have someone come in and do the implementation for us, and what we found is, if you just start opening the package and looking under the hood, you actually can figure out. You know how to do your own valve job, and so we built our own application, we built our own systems, we did a self integration and you always wonder is there something we miss? What should we be doing differently? We ended up bringing a consultant in. Later on he said well, you know, that's pretty much what we would have done. So I think that's one of the advantages Zoho has is that it's so powerful and yet just the average user can roll out solutions for their organization with it.

Speaker 1 5:02

Yeah, it's really powerful when you can do it at a small scale and then just scale up quickly. Kristen, what about you? What is? What were your sort of business objectives Starting out and how did you work with Zoho?

Speaker 4 5:13

Sure. So Zoho has been in the inspirer for seven years. I've been in spirit for six years, so it was all and we just use the analytics tool. It's the only one we've got, so we feel very unique within Zoho. Everyone else seems to have Zoho one and I feel very behind the timings with this, but we're I'm trying to convince our company to get that way, but we just use analytics. But it's a great tool in itself because we do so much with it to help our teams streamline their data and their reporting so we share it to.

Speaker 4 5:40

We started off with 50 licenses for Zoho analytics. Now we're up to 190 and they're all being used and we've got 160 people using it every single day on average, which is fantastic to see, and we streamline their reporting so everything gets automated to them. They get automated emails, alerts, different changes, and we even have not just the sales data, doesn't just go to the sales teams, it's also shared to head office departments and we've also got head office departments on Zoho for their own data sets. So now that they've seen what the wonderful Zoho analytics can do, we've got our finance team on there. We've got it on there. We've got purchasing, product management, supply planning. Every team now has got some form of data within Zoho, and we are now being tasked with streamlining, even more so with regards to what the departments are currently doing, because they're doing so much in Excel. Still, we're taking that away and giving it back to them through Zoho and we're saving so much time by doing it.

Speaker 1 6:38

That's fantastic. And what is your job, what is your personal mission and how does it make your life easier day to day? Because you know, at the end of the day, it's about work life balance and making the stress of the headaches off late.

Speaker 4 6:50

My personal mission is to put smiles on people's faces when they think about numbers, because, if it can, that's me. I love seeing data, but most of the people in my company when they think of number and data as they get a little bit scared and they don't want to deal with it very scared. So when I'm able to show them what Zoho Analytics can do, I love seeing the smiles on their faces which we always get. I had a new introduction from our manufacturer in the QC department and the lady there, as soon as I showed her what Zoho can do, massive smiles got her excited about doing it and it was really good to see. So that's my personal one, but on my contract it says to streamline data flows, to automate processes and to build on top of the solutions that we've already got in place to help the business grow.

Zoho Customer-Driven Culture and Innovation

Speaker 1 7:38

Brilliant. Well, that's a mic drop moment here. It must be very gratifying for you to hear like happy customers how they've implemented solutions, but you get a lot of customer feedback. You're very customer-driven, like all these apps and suites you built based on like a real-world feedback. It's not something you just design on a clean sheet of paper, right?

Speaker 5 7:57

Absolutely. I mean the fact that each product for example, christian talking about feeling left behind, not using Zoho One and how each of our products acts as an anchor to pull the other products, the ability to have organizations to gravitate toward the value that you provide. We just start the single product and then they find it themselves and that's possibly, like you said, it's the most gratifying thing to hear. He started with CRM and desk. Now the whole organization is on Zoho One. So I think the knowledge that the value that we provide we've always believed in it but then nothing gets better validated when customers speak about it. So, yes, absolutely fascinating. I mean there's so many such stories.

Speaker 5 8:43

And then Sparex. I know Sparex in this case because they actually started off in what we call the white label version. So they basically had they used the analytics engine as the engine behind the scene and they had their own analytics application branded with their logos and everything so. And then they converted to becoming using it across the organizations, operationally and so on, and just about every part of their business is connected and how it basically bubbles up insights for them to take action. So I've been well versed with their use cases burden. Again, I'm getting to know more about the use case, but overall, I think the heavy lifting and the easy button that analytics provides in terms of getting the enterprise connected at a level where they're able to see what's happening into it, and it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 9:38

Yeah, it's really fascinating, really powerful. So Zoho Day is all about discovery and, you know, meeting peers and taking away learnings and insights. Anything Keith could share on something maybe you learned today or saw that was of interest or heard from different customers.

Speaker 3 9:55

I always come away from the events and I think, like you, with a profound respect and admiration for the technical nature of the company. You look at some of the other competitors in this space and they seem to be more of a marketing play. And this is a software company being driven by software engineers and people who have a passion for the applications they're creating. So I often say, when I made the decision originally to go with Zoho, I felt it was a good decision. As time goes by, they make me look smarter and smarter by the way that they're progressing.

Speaker 4 10:38

Thank you so you come across as smart, but in my company I come across as the wizard. I've had the BI department described as the magical department. I've literally had somebody who was brought over, a new colleague and they went this is the magic department because they can make the Data good, because our data is notoriously bad to begin, or has been over the years and as we've been cleaning it and using more and more of Zerho with more and more departments, it's got cleaner, it's got much more user-friendly and we're in a massively helpful place with Zoho to help our company.

Speaker 1 11:09

What do you think is next in terms of some of the AI capabilities? You want more insights, more you know, timely, actionable insights and opportunities to leverage that data with all the various tools anything.

Speaker 4 11:21

Yeah, absolutely Well. Zoho has a tool called Zia insights and it's available on each of the data points on a dashboard. You can just click a button. It will provide you with information on what that data is representing Highs, lows, changes, etc. But now also we saw it obviously in Zoho day 24 just a little while ago the the next step to Zia insights, which is the actions and recommendations. So now it can find out what's going on with the data and and recommend what to do next, which is fantastic. And within that, you've even got then links to then make those changes Straight away. So it's fantastic.

Speaker 1 12:01

I'm really looking forward to want to be a data scientist.

Speaker 4 12:04

It's really good. I'm so excited to rolling it out within spet, within my company with in Sparex. That's very cool.

Speaker 1 12:10

And how do you, you know, talk about the culture of it? Because you know we could talk software features functionality all day, but I think what makes so so unique is its culture, and you've been here a while, so you've seen the growth and the collaboration with the team. What's that like from the inside, looking out?

Speaker 5 12:27

it's everybody's very entrepreneurial. Everybody has given the the freedom to think freely and then come up with ideas and then ideas Something. If you have conviction, you are then made to go work on it, own it and run with it. So that's the reason I mean like 50 plus applications and just so-ho.

Speaker 5 12:45

But then there's also the managing division that make another 50 plus products for the Networking industry and over 100 products from a single company, and most of the people who are helping these products have been in the company for 25 years or over. So it's it's, it's, it's the natural what you make all Gravitation to be a part of this company the the ability to Put your hands up and take things on and work on it. I think that's the beauty of this culture Very entrepreneurial, as a lot of people call it, and then we run with it.

Speaker 1 13:21

Yeah, no, run indeed, guys run fast. What are you excited about this year, keith, in particular? Any anything coming up you want to share?

Speaker 3 13:30

account base management.

Speaker 1 13:31

Okay.

Speaker 3 13:32

Yeah, it's huge for us as we're trying to diversify our lead generation channels, and ABM's been around for a few years now. I just it's a new, new acronym for hunting right digital hunting, marketing and Looking and seeing all of the applications that are out there and how Zoho is bringing those in houses Native applications using the current marketing automation stack. It's it couldn't be more timely for us. It's almost as though they're reading my mind and getting ready to deliver to deliver what I need next. I do have the foil hat at home though, so I can get.

Speaker 4 14:16

That comes out next year.

Speaker 1 14:18

What about you? What? What's next this year for you? Any, any personal, professional travel or other industry stuff that you're.

Speaker 4 14:29

So later on this year, as I found out, when I arrived, came to the welcome reception last night and I was cornered by Silas and Clarence to then they asked me Could I attend another event later in the year to do a similar thing? So I haven't even done my first one and they're already asked me to do another one. Don't let them see this video because if they see I've done poorly I won't be invited back. So that's more traveling for me to do.

Speaker 4 14:50

But from a professional standpoint we are. We were continuing our rollout with Zoho across the company. We've now got our warehouse Operations team asking for data looking at how efficient their pickers are and their performance of it. We're also Generated recently what we call a parting query tool where we bring in lots of data from lots of different systems around the company. We put it all in one place so that anybody in the company can look at a certain product and see all of the information what the size of it is, who the supplier is, what the forecast is, is it in stock, what is the different translations for it across our markets and it's all in one place. So we're rolling that out continuously and continuously developing it to make it even better travel for you.

Speaker 1 15:34

You're gonna be heads down heads down stuck in X.

Speaker 4 15:37

It's a doing all.

Speaker 1 15:39

Yeah, doing all well, they're worth basis to be stuck in beautiful UK. What about you guys do so much in terms of education and events and Partnering? You know Zoholex is coming up as well. What, what's, what are you excited about for?

Speaker 5 15:53

excited about the road map that Raju presented earlier. It's, and also the BI we had launching the six-door version. They're the sea that does unify a lot of different pieces of the data practice, be data management, analytics, machine learning, so evolving to a platform that becomes a Unified platform, not just for business users and analysts but also for data scientists to come in and Lay around with the data. That's on the analyst analytics side, and then very interesting things happening with the ABM on the CRM side of it. Then loyalty map, program management is over thrive, and then there's a so for one, the spaces concept, right. All of these are really really Very interesting things for us to kind of put it out there and see what the customers have to say. So we are pretty bullish about it. Yeah, and nothing gets better validated.

Zoho Day Celebration and Networking

Speaker 1 16:44

And I love that you know your tools are suitable for. For me, as a solo practitioner, content creator, analyst, right through to Large organization, that's really phenomenal to see. Well, thanks so much, guys. Back to the Party at Zoho day one last thing, because, as you guys have said one last thing.

Speaker 3 17:02

Today is Zoho day 24. We haven't been here for three and a half weeks, right, it's oh 2024.

Speaker 1 17:15

Yes, it's not a day, it's like two, two and a half days. Yeah, yeah we're the week lots of learning, lots of networking, and so I'll always bring like the best people together, as well as like thank you so Thanks everyone, thanks for watching, thank you Thanks.

Speaker 2 17:31

All right, that's a wrap one take Nice job.