Support customers in LiveDesk, extend the value of Zoho CRM

| By Austin Talbert
0

We heard your requests for LiveDesk to integrate with Zoho CRM, so last week we announced Zoho CRM integration for all paying LiveDesk customers (or those on a current trial of any of the paid plans).

By tag-teaming with the premier CRM solution for small businesses, your LiveDesk gets instant access to the customer data you need while chatting, and your support interactions are logged alongside your other data in your newly-unified customer interaction suite. Leverage the power of LiveDesk and Zoho CRM together, and join the small businesses who are already elevating their team’s customer-supporting skills.

Zorge, who runs English Maestro, a small business providing online language lessons, put it this way:

“As an automation fanatic, I was very enthusiastic to use Zoho LiveDesk in integration with my Zoho CRM to provide live support to my customers.…


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Results: What’s your approach to customer support hiring?

| By Prashanth V K
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At Zoho, we get to talk to several startup founders and small business owners regularly. A good number of times, the topic of hiring and retention comes up in our conversations. We thought it might be a good idea to ask the community at large and understand the broad opinion.

We had asked a question on customer support hiring, via our poll last week. From our own experience, we’ve seen startups with very good process clarity as well as mid-sized businesses that prefer not to have strict processes. So, we were naturally excited to see what results would emerge from that question.

What's your approach to customer support hiring?

About 40% of all respondents said they preferred to hire experienced professionals and empower them suitably.

From a traditional standpoint, this feels like the optimal approach for any company that wants a ‘safe bet’. If you hire experienced customer support professionals, you can trust them to behave reasonably in most of the situations.…


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Our Management Consultants Recommended That We Kill Our Free Email Plan; We’re Increasing It Instead

| By Rodrigo Vaca
5

When it comes to hosted email options for your business, there is not a whole lot to choose from unless you want to compromise on quality. There’s Microsoft’s Office 365. There’s Google Apps. And there’s Zoho Mail. We think Zoho Mail is better, but then again, we’re kind of biased.

And if you’re a small business, your options are even more limited. Until some time ago, Google Apps had a free edition. It started with unlimited users and decreased then gradually until they finally canceled it. Microsoft chose to never give anything away for free (shocker, I know!).

Now, here’s something we haven’t told anyone: When Google Apps Free Edition went the way of the dodo, Zoho Mail registrations shot up through the roof. Want some proof?

Of course, I was just being facetious with the title. We didn’t hire a management consulting firm, because we already know what they would say.…


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New In Zoho Sites: Code snippet, LinkedIn widget and more

| By raagavan
1

We’ve been fortunate to have our feature priorities be continuously questioned by the community. As a result, we are announcing 5 new features that, we believe, would make a difference to most of you who have been repeatedly asking for these.

Third-party widgets and scripts via code snippet
The Embed widget has had an upgrade; in addition to HTML code, you can also insert scripts and code snippets now. Widgets and apps from most third-party vendors demand that you to insert few lines of script into your website. You can add them all now. That includes scripts that work behind the scenes, like tracking and in-page analytics. (See how.)

Custom Page URL
You can now customize the URL of a page. This is important on the SEO front, as it is on the aesthetic front, allowing you to optimize your pages for hot keywords.

LinkedIn Widgets
Previously we introduced widgets for Facebook and Twitter.…


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What the Recent Rise in Loan Approval Means for Your Small Business

| By Austin Ries
0

It’s no secret that the past five years have been anything but kind to small business owners and entrepreneurs across the country. In fact, an unstable economy and variety of other factors have forced a number of small businesses to close their doors while also discouraging others from entering the market.

Fortunately, good news is on the horizon in 2013 thanks to a recent increase in small business loan approvals.

According to the latest Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index, big banks are approving loan requests at the highest rate in over two years, while small banks are giving the green light to over half of all small business loan requests.

Last month, big banks reportedly approved 15.9 percent of small business loan applications, a 35.9 percent increase from February 2012 and the highest rate since Biz2Credit began compiling this information in January 2011. Similarly, small business loan approval rates have increased from 49.9 percent in January 2013 to 50.3 percent last month.…


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Zoho Recruit: Reach Out to Candidates Faster with an SMS

| By Rina
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The biggest challenge in the field of recruitment is to ensure that the job vacancies are filled on time. Talent acquisition is not an easy task, and contacting potential candidates when vacancies appear, following up them for the interviews, etc., can often be frustrating, expensive and a time-consuming experience. In recent years, mobile technology has proven to be a powerful communication tool than email because of its faster reach. That’s why we have been working on a new feature that will help you overcome the obstacles of recruitment and make the process much easier.

We are happy to announce the New Integrated SMS feature in Zoho Recruit, that will help you communicate effectively and efficiently with candidates and contacts during the hiring process.  A single click, and voi-là! You can send text messages to multiple candidates using Zoho Recruit! Not just that!…


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Zoholics 2013: Agenda Published, Early Bird Pricing Ends Mar 31

| By Raju Vegesna
0

In Jan, we announced Zoholics 2013, Zoho’s annual user conference to be held in San Francisco in May (29th-31st). We now published the agenda for the event at the Zoholics Website.

This two and a half day event is packed with over 55 sessions and a great lineup of Speakers including Ray Wang, Brent Leary, Doug Sleeter, Sridhar Vembu and more. The event features three parallel tracks including a dedicated track for Zoho CRM training with around 20 sessions.

The Early Bird pricing, which offers a 33% discount on our Standard ticket, ends Mar 31st. You may want to take advantage of this offer if you are planning to attend the event.

We also rolled out an iPhone app for the Zoholics event. If you are attending the event, we highly recommend you to install this app.

At Zoholics, you will learn how to get more out of your Zoho apps, meet the people behind the products, get to know the future direction of the apps and of course, network with other Zoho users.…


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