Category: Zoho

This is a guest post by iQuoteXpress (IQX).

Guided selling may sound like a buzzword, but we proactively assure you—with every paradigm shift in our heart—that it’s not.

Surprisingly, guided selling is exactly what it sounds like: tools, technology, or even just techniques that guide a buyer or seller to the perfect purchase or sale.

B2C guided selling  

In a nutshell, B2C guided selling is The E-Commerce Experience: the software guides the consumer towards products that fit any data the seller may have on them.

Then, the entire purchase is guided to both ensure the customer’s satisfaction and optimize the seller’s revenue. For example, guiding a shopper to an ideal upsell or cross-sell is a win-win: maybe they didn’t know those flowers would look majestic in a porcelain vase (win for them!) that concurrently drives average order value up by 20% (win for the seller!).

Most e-commerce websites are, in fact, guided selling machines (think of every step Amazon shows you on your path to the cart). We simply take guided selling for granted in the online B2C experience. It’s in B2B where guided selling “jumps ship” and presents the right steps for the seller instead of the buyer.

B2B guided selling (where CRM and CPQ flourish)  

The steps to automate for B2C guided selling simply don’t apply to the B2B world. B2B customers are typically looking for a long-term strategic fit (via a purchase of business technology) rather than to satisfy a short-term need. Sellers must contend with longer sales cycles, more specific requirements, requests for proposals (RFPs), RFP replies, sales proposals, meetings, follow-ups, and so on. It’s simply not a fit for e-commerce styled guided selling.

However, there is a fit for guided selling in the B2B space, and you are in the right place for it. It’s using the lead capturing and relationship building tools of your Zoho CRM system with the deal-closing tools of a configure, price, quote solution (CPQ), such as iQuoteXpress.

In this definition of guided selling, it’s not the purchaser who is being guided, but the seller. All a B2B sales rep needs to nurture a lead into an opportunity is presented in CRM. A rep is guided by tasks and forecasts, and presented with next steps at every turn. These components of the guided selling process in B2B are taken to even greater heights when you add lead nurturing and targeting tools.

Once the rep reaches a point where the prospect is ready for a sales quote, the CPQ system guides them from “RFP reply” to “closed deal.”

Built-in to the CPQ system are professionally designed sales proposals that a rep only needs to populate with products and pricing. And how do they know which products and pricing to use? The system guides them to the right ones with a dynamic product and pricing configuration engine that only presents optimal offers.

Following the guided creation and delivery of the perfect proposal, the CPQ system then guides the rep through the next steps. This is a “nurturing process” not unlike moving a prospect from Lead to Opportunity, except in this case you’re moving a quote from “sent” to “signed”.

To sum up, in B2B, guided selling is as much a platform as a process. Yes, you could simply write down on an index card the steps you want a rep to take to close deals. Or you could build a system that has every guided selling step baked in.

 Try iQuoteXpress for Zoho CRM

Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace.

The number of apps used by the average business is skyrocketing now due to the ongoing transformation of our digital work culture and rapid rise in remote work. Today, most companies rely on at least a dozen applications to manage their day-to-day operations and keep their business up and running.

Zoho Vault, Zoho’s password management application, helps businesses securely store, share, and manage passwords from anywhere. Users can simply log in to their Vault once and access all their favorite apps from there in a single click. However, in this current backdrop of safety-mandated work from home, we understand it is important for businesses to gain real-time insights on what is happening in their IT environment to keep cybercriminals at bay.

Vault already offers comprehensive audit trails and live reports to help IT teams easily track user activities. Today, we are happy to introduce integrations with many popular SIEM tools, including Loggly, Logz, Rapid7, Sematext, Sumo Logic, and Timber.

What is SIEM?

A Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution is a set of tools and services that offers a holistic view of a company’s information security. With a SIEM solution, companies can:

• Collect security logs from numerous sources, such as routers, databases, web servers, firewalls, servers, and business apps
• Correlate log data from different sources to gain insights
• Configure if-then rules based on log data to automatically trigger security workflows
• Set up instant alerts to IT administrators on important security issues
• Conduct in-depth auditing and AI-based threat-intelligence

How Zoho Vault’s SIEM integrations can help you

With this integration, IT administrators can:

• Push all password-related logs from Zoho Vault to their SIEM service
• Correlate user activities from different sources, compare them with password-based actions, and gain security insights
• Automate security workflows based on pre-defined conditions
• Help IT administrators get a clear picture of potential threats and secure the company’s confidential data
• Receive instant or periodic notifications on malicious insiders and cybercriminals
• Easily comply with regulatory mandates such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, FISMA, GDPR, SOX, and ISO 27001

How do I start using Zoho Vault’s SIEM integration?

This integration is immediately available for all Zoho Vault Enterprise Edition users. We have comprehensive help documentation to configure this SIEM integration.

 We also are giving a free webinar session covering this integration on June 30, 2020. You can register for the session here: https://meeting.zoho.com/meeting/register?sessionId=1051508231

If you are currently not a Zoho Vault user, you can head over to zoho.com/vault and sign up for a free 14-day Enterprise trial. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to write to us at support(at)zohovault(dot)com, or leave a comment below.

Businesses are constantly evolving and there’s always a need for tools that can scale along with them. Given the business world’s diverse structure of teams, team sizes, and management styles, customization is an integral requirement of any project management tool. That’s what we aim to achieve with Zoho Sprints. We took our customization features and raised them to a whole new standard. You can now create custom roles, profiles, and user groups to define user privileges for your team.

Roles and Profiles

A role refers to the role or designation of a person within a team, whereas a profile dictates the access permissions they have. A role is fixed at the organization level, but your profile can change depending on the project you’re working on. You could be a “Senior developer” in Project A and the “Technical Lead” in Project B. However, your role at the organization level would remain “Senior Software Development Associate.” With this feature, you can get very flexible about the access privileges each member has across projects.

Zoho Sprints has three default roles (Admin, Manager, Member) and five default profiles (Team Owner, Admin, Guest admin, Project owner, Manager, Member) available with predefined permissions. Learn more about how you can clone an existing profile to create your own.

You can also customize profiles in extensive detail, deciding what access a user does and does not have in each module. For medium and large teams who work on multiple projects, establishing separate profiles and access privileges for each project can declutter your experience and security guidelines. Learn more about the different permission sets in Zoho Sprints.

User Groups: One @mention to call them all

Ever wished that you could tag an entire team in a comment or a status instead of tagging them individually? We hear you. With Sprints, you can create a group of profiles and give it a name. Each time you tag the group, all of its members are notified automatically. This feature comes in handy when you aren’t addressing a functional team, but rather a group of people (from different teams) who are working on a project. Learn more about how you can create your own user groups and the different ways you can use them.

While working on our big release of roles, profiles, and user groups, we also decided to introduce a few smaller features. Here’s a quick summary:

Predict cycle time

The sprint process time report shows the cumulative amount of time your work items spend under each status and also calculates the average time a work item spent under each. This can be used to predict the cycle time of a new work item and identify bottlenecks.

Reordering work items within a status

You can now rearrange work items under a status from the default chronological order. A lot of our users have requested this and we’re glad to be rolling it out.

New swimlanes added

We’ve added three new swimlane criteria to our Scrum board. You can now view swimlanes based on item type, tags, and release name.

Quick note: Sprints users who have integrated with other Zoho products need to update their app for our latest release. We’ve also made changes to our API, so please check our API guide to learn more.

These new features are available now: give them a shot today! We’d love to hear how they work for you.

If you’d like a more hands-on demo of all our new features, please register here for our free webinar scheduled for July 2, 2020.

 

Every business function is governed by a set of rules, and payroll is not an exception. If you’ve been actively doing payroll in India, you would have definitely come across the term statutory compliance. In this guide, we will learn about the statutory rules that govern payroll in India so you get a clear understanding of how to stay compliant. We will be covering:

Let’s get started with the basics.

What is statutory compliance in payroll?

Statutory compliance refers to the legal framework put in place by the central or state government to regulate business operations. In this case, it’s the framework surrounding payroll.

Why is statutory compliance important?

Every country has its set of payroll laws, and for business owners operating in that country, compliance is a must. Maintaining a spotless compliance record can benefit your business in many ways. It can facilitate business expansion within the country because you create trust with the government. It also shows that you know how to treat your employees well by adhering to labor laws.

In cases of non-compliance, there is a lot at stake for the businesses, such as monetary penalties and a tarnished brand reputation.

Therefore, dealing with statutory compliance requires companies to be well-versed with the labor regulations in the country of operation.

What constitutes statutory compliance in India?

Depending on the industry and type of business, there are many labor laws that an organization has to comply with. For example, in order to protect the social security industrial workers, there’s the Shops and Establishments Act and the Factories Act. For easy understanding, we’ll classify the statutory compliances under five broad categories: statutories for social security, employee wages, labor laws, tax liabilities, and benefits.

Statutories on employee wages

Payment of Wages Act, 1936

The Payment of Wages Act ensures that employees from various industries are paid on time by having penalties for wages paid late by a month.

According to this rule, employees should be paid before the 7th of every month for organizations with less than 1,000 employees. If the organization has more than 1,000 employees, they need to be paid by the 10th of every month.

This is not applicable for people earning salaries of more than ₹10,000 every month. The preferred mode of salary payments under the act is cash or cheque. Bank transfers are allowed only after consent from employees. The rules and regulations vary from state to state.

Minimum Wages Act, 1948

The Minimum Wages Act is a central legislation designed to prevent the exploitation of labour by fixing a minimum wage rate.

The minimum wage varies from state to state or sector to sector since provincial governments also have a say in this.

Some of the most common factors considered before fixing minimum wages include the cost of living, wage period (hourly, weekly, or monthly), and job type.

Payment of Bonus Act, 1965

The practice of paying a bonus in India appears to have originated during the First World War when certain textile mills granted 10% of wages as a war bonus to their workers in 1917.

The Payment of Bonus Act provides an annual bonus to employees in certain establishments, including factories and organizations that employ more than 20 people. Under the act, a bonus is calculated based on an employee’s salary and the profits of the organization.

Employees that have completed 30 working days and have earned ₹21,000 per month or less (basic + DA, excluding other allowances) are eligible for receiving the bonus from their respective organization.

Statutories on Industrial relations

Employee State Insurance Act, 1948

This act aims to help employees overcome unforeseen circumstances, including medical emergencies, maternity leave, or disability situations related to the workplace. For each paycheck, the employer contributes 3.25% and the employee contributes 0.75%. ESI is mandatory for employers who have employees working in a non-seasonal factory with more than 10 employees, but only for employees who are earning less than ₹21,000 per paycheck.

Because ESI is applied only to employees who earn less than ₹21000, you should always check the appraisal cycle to confirm that the employee has not surpassed ₹21,000. Once the employee earns more than ₹21,000, the contributions towards ESI should continue until the end of the contribution cycle. Each contribution cycle lasts six months, from April to September or October to March.

For example, if an employee is earning ₹20,000 in the month of June, and starts to earn ₹22,000 from July post-appraisal, the deduction towards ESI should still continue until September. Starting in October, they need not contribute to ESI.

Employees Provident Fund Act, 1952

The Employee Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Act is one of the biggest social welfare contributions for an employee. As part of this, both the employer and the employee contribute 12% of basic pay and dearness allowance (DA) to the employee’s retirement chest.

Under Section 80C of the Indian Income Tax Act, an employee’s contribution towards their PF account is deemed eligible for tax exemption, which results in higher take-home pay for employees.

Organizations that have 20 employees or more have to comply with this regulation.

Contribution split

Statutory	Employer	Employee
Provident Fund (PF)	12%	3.67%
Employee Pension Fund	NA	8.33%

Employers who are not adhering to this compliance regulation face severe fines or, in extreme scenarios, imprisonment. (Add an example of non-compliance).

Labour Welfare Fund Act, 1965

The Labour Welfare Fund (LWF) focuses on the welfare of employees working in specific industries. It provides facilities to laborers in order to improve their working conditions, provide social security, and raise their standard of living.

The statutory contributions for LWF are managed by individual state authorities. The state labour welfare board determines the amount and frequency of the contribution, and it differs from state to state. In some states, the contribution is made annually (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu). In other states, the contributions happen every six months (Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra).

Since these laws change from state to state, here is a list of all the states that do and do not fall under LWF.

States where LWF is applicable 

• Tamil Nadu

• Andhra Pradesh

• Goa

• Karnataka

• Kerala

• Punjab

• Chandigarh

• Gujarat

• Madhya Pradesh

• Chattisgarh

• Haryana

• Delhi

• West Bengal

• Maharashtra

• Telangana

• Odisha

States where LWF is not applicable

Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972

Along with EPF, gratuity is one of the biggest factors of an employees’ welfare, and it’s one of the most important statutory regulations for organizations. Gratuity is given by the employer to their employee for the services rendered by him during employment. An employee is applicable to receive gratuity only if they’ve completed a minimum of 5 years of service within an organization.

There is no set percentage stipulated by law for the amount of gratuity an employee is supposed to receive. The employer can use a formula-based approach where gratuity payable depends on two factors.

For calculating gratuity, the Payment of Gratuity Act has divided non-government employees into two categories: employees that are covered under the act and those that aren’t.

Gratuity calculation for employees covered under the act

Formula

Gratuity = (15 * Last drawn salary * tenure of working) / 26

Last drawn salary includes basic pay, dearness allowance, and sales commissions.

Example: Let’s assume the employee’s last drawn salary is ₹70,000, and the employee has worked with the company for 20 years and 8 months. The formula to calculate gratuity will be: (15 * 70,000 * 21) / 26

We are considering the tenure of working to be 21 years because the employee has already worked for more than 6 months into their 21st year of employment. If the employee had worked for 20 years and 5 months, then only 20 years would be considered.

Gratuity calculation for employees not covered under the act

Formula

Gratuity = (15 * Last drawn salary * tenure of working) / 30

Last drawn salary includes basic pay, dearness allowance, and sales commissions.

Example: Let’s assume the employee’s last drawn salary is ₹70,000, and the employee has worked with the company for 20 years and 8 months. The formula to calculate gratuity will be: (15 * 70,000 * 20) / 30

We are considering the tenure of working to be 20 years because, in this scenario, only the number of completed years is taken into consideration.

Statutories on Tax liabilities

TDS (Tax Deducted at Source)

This is one of the most important statutory regulations that every organization has to adhere to. It was introduced to collect tax from the source of an individual’s income. TDS is applicable on various income types such as salaries, interest, and commission.

Every employee is taxed at a different tax rate depending on their salary. With the latest union budget announcements, employees in India can choose between two different tax regimes.

Here’s the classification of tax slabs for employees, based on which the TDS is computed.

Old tax-regime

Income Tax Slab	Tax Rate
Up to ₹2.5L	No tax
₹2.5L to ₹5L	5% *
₹5L to ₹10L	₹12,500 + 20% of total income exceeding ₹5L
Above ₹10L	₹1,12,500 + 30% of total income exceeding ₹10L

New tax-regime

Income Tax Slab for FY 2020-21	New Tax Rate
Up to ₹2.5L	No tax
₹2.5L to ₹5L	5% *
₹5L to ₹7.5L	10%
₹7.5L to ₹10L	15%
₹10L to ₹12.5L	20%
₹12.5L to ₹15L	25%
Above ₹15L	30%

Statutories on benefits

Maternity Benefits Act, 1961

This act protects the employment of women during the time of her maternity and grants her full paid absence from work. This act is applicable for all organizations that have more than 10 employees. It’s also one of the most important statutory regulations that the organizations have to follow.

For a female employee to be eligible for the benefit, they must have been working as an employee in an establishment for a period of at least 80 days within the past 12 months. Payment during the leave period is based on the average daily wage for actual absence.

This act applies to organizations, including factories, mines, plantations, government establishments, shops and establishments under the relevant applicable legislation, or any other establishment dictated by the Central Government.

Maternity benefits according to the latest amendment include the following:

Statutories to ensure social security

Shops and Establishments Act

Similar to statutory compliances like ESI and LWF, the Shops and Establishments Act was introduced to regulate the employment conditions of workers in shops and establishments.

This can include fair work hours, proper rest intervals, allowances for overtime, holidays, and more.

Every organization has to be registered under this act, and the registration needs to be completed within 30 days of the commencement of business.

Shops and Establishments laws vary from state to state. A successfully registered business license lasts for 5 years, after which the business has to renew it. Annual returns have to be filed for this act under Form U before January 31st.

Equal Remuneration Act, 1976

The Equal Remuneration Act provides for the payment of equal remuneration to male and female workers for the same work and prevents discrimination against women in the matter of employment, recruitment, and for matters connected to both. This Act applies to virtually every organization.

The way forward

We’re sure it wasn’t easy to get through this guide, even though we’ve only highlighted the basic information that businesses need to be aware of. Now, imagine if you have to manage all these compliance requirements manually or through outdated systems?

Statutory compliance can make or break a company’s reputation. There’s tons of rules and regulations involved, and these have to be adhered to perfectly, every time. Some are modified by the Central or State government, as well. Historically, payroll administrators did this manually. Today, there are systems that can help reduce the burden on payroll teams. With cloud-based payroll software, you can put statutory compliance on auto-pilot mode and always keep a spotless compliance record.

 

Megan Zolnierowicz is the Director of Marketing at Spark Hire. Spark Hire is a cloud-based video interviewing platform for HR departments and staffing professionals with options for one-way pre-recorded interviews or live interviews. With industry experience spanning nearly 10 years, Megan is a pioneer of digital marketing and advertising.

Here’s our fifth edition of Expert Corner with the focus on the best practices of hiring remotely, written insightfully by Megan Zolnieowicz.

When it comes to hiring, everyone needs a plan. But with the rise of remote work during this ongoing crisis, nobody really planned for this extreme. Luckily, it’s possible to source, screen, interview, and hire employees with virtual recruitment. With the right tools and processes coupled with good communication between team members, you can keep your hiring process moving without hassle. 

For a virtual recruitment process to succeed, follow these steps:

1. Create an Ideal Candidate Profile

The time and effort that a virtual recruitment process takes is no more than your normal recruitment process, but it’s important to remember to work as efficiently and effectively as you can. One of the biggest components to this is to be targeted in your virtual recruitment efforts.  

Effectively targeting your recruiting efforts involves building an “ideal candidate profile.” This means you’ll need to consider what makes a candidate successful in your open role. An Ideal Candidate Profile includes the motivations and skills needed for the job, but it can also expand to include hobbies, interests, and other characteristics that indicate a good fit for the role.

These other characteristics might indicate a candidate’s preference for working with a team vs. independently, personal drive, or a cultural fit. Create an idea of what sort of professional groups your candidate might join, where they might live, or where they might spend their time. These details will help with the next steps of the process.

2. Outline the process

During the job hunt, uncertainty is a state of being for your candidates. One of the best ways to help them feel more secure is to publish your hiring process either on your careers page or in an automatic email response when candidates complete an application. Outlining the process allows candidates to better understand where they are and what’s next. Then, they can take the initiative to prepare more appropriately, and they won’t anxiously follow up on the “status of their application” nearly as much as they may have otherwise. This allows you and your team to spend more time reviewing applicants, interviewing, providing feedback, and hiring.

3. Write an attractive job post

It’s most likely that your candidates will come from online. So this part of the virtual recruitment process isn’t very different from your normal operations. You’ll need to collaborate with the hiring manager to create a job post that details the most pertinent and necessary skills required for the position. This serves the organization very well because you must articulate what you’re looking for in a candidates once you move on to screening and interviewing.

For candidates, you’ll need to use the ICP from step 1 to describe the job and its required skills in ways that appeal to the person. Consider what their motivations might be and how they’d prefer to work. This enables your job ad to resonate with the candidates you’re looking for, attracting them to your open position and organization.

4. Announce the opening and post on relevant job boards  

With your job post drafted, your next objective is to attract applicants. This means announcing the opening on your careers page, social media, and job boards. The question of which job boards and what social media to use can again be answered by your ICP. Where do your ideal candidates like to hang out? Are they sporty adventurous types who are likely to post their frequent travels on Instagram? Are they a business professional who will scour LinkedIn for new opportunities?

Use these questions and the ideas you’ve gathered in your ideal candidate profile to determine if sites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, BuiltIn, and other job boards will help you reach the best candidates where they’re looking for employment.

5. Use an ATS  

Once candidates apply for your positions, where do those applications go? It’s crucial to compile your applicants within an organized system. For a successful virtual recruiting process, you’ll want to stop using spreadsheets, email, and paper resume files and start working with a cloud-based applicant tracking system. This is a software that organizes your applicants based on where they stand in your recruiting process. When you find one that is cloud-based, you, your colleagues, and your hiring managers can access applications and candidate data from anywhere, giving you the flexibility your virtual recruiting process will demand.

6. Use one-way video interviews  

Up until this point, it’s incredibly easy to maintain a virtual recruitment process. But the screening step is where some organizations have their first in-person interview. You could use a phone call, but you won’t gain nearly as many insights as you would with an in-person interview. Instead, consider a happy medium: one-way video interviewing. One-way video interviews are an asynchronous system where you set up your interview questions ahead of time, send them to candidates, and they answer your questions on their own time on video. This alternative allows you to preview candidates and how they conduct themselves while granting these candidates deeper insight into your company and its culture through intro and outro videos and video questions.

7. Solicit feedback from colleagues and hiring managers  

After you’ve received responses to your one-way video interviews, you’ll have to stretch your communication muscles with colleagues and hiring managers. Send them a shortlist of candidates you think would fit best for the open role. Have them fill out a candidate scorecard through a document sharing application or even a digital form. This way, you can easily compile their feedback and choose who should move on to the next step of the process.

8. Complete a live video interview  

The shortlisted candidates who advance to the next stage should progress to a live video interview with your virtual recruitment process. Depending on the structure of your organization, this two-way video interview may be with the hiring manager or a member of your team. Either way, be sure they stick to insightful and critical interview questions. You can even add additional feedback during this interview by inviting other decision-makers to watch the recorded interview.

9. Conduct a background check and check references  

There are a plethora of services which can provide you with background checks virtually. Additionally, you’ll want to check a candidate’s references. Do this virtually by creating a quick question list for references and deliver them either through a quick phone call or even an email.

10. Make an offer!  

Last, you’ll want to send an offer letter to the final candidate. One great way to make this more impactful for candidates is to create a congratulatory video message from the potential employee’s future boss. Illustrate what stood out about the candidate and why the team is excited for them to join.  

With these ten steps, you’ll be able to create a personalized, efficient, virtual recruitment strategy. Furthermore, you’ll be able to continue with it when back in the office!

An interesting interview with Andrew Bourne, Business Development Manager, Zoho Africa on ‘How to sustain business in challenging times’

Andrew shared his valuable insights on how businesses can equip themselves and how Zoho tools make it that much easier. 

Vanathy: Hey everybody good morning, welcome to the very first episode of Zoho Live! In this episode today we’re going to talk about, ‘How to sustain business during challenging times’ and we have Andrew Bourne here with us. Andrew is our Business Development Head for Zoho in South Africa. So welcome to Zoho Live Andrew!

Andrew: Thank you.

Vanathy: Andrew the first and foremost thought in every entrepreneurs head at this point is, ‘How do I keep up with my business to keep it afloat?‘ So, where would you like them to begin with.

Andrew: I think if I talk from South Africa’s point of view, need to first and foremost maybe if they need to seek financial assistance. So either it be bank finance or any of the government’s some support initiatives that have been opened up to them, potentially looking at the unemployment fund to assist with start salaries. And then I think the next most important thing is to lean up your business expenses, is to do cost optimization—have a look and see what cost can be cut and to look at complete technology solutions just to help the business run more efficiently.

Vanathy: With that thought in mind Andrew, what are some of the specific challenges facing business owners, especially on the lines of sales and business development, and what do you think what according to you are some of the best ways to address those challenges.

Andrew: I think going forward now, obviously technology is going to play a huge role and digital transformation has now been accelerated due to this COVID-19 crisis, and companies are going to have to look at tech solutions to allow their staff to work from home. So to look at like digital checklist to process mapping workflows, blueprints, and really looking for a cost-effective technology during this time where you know revenues are low, and you know the companies that will survive this crisis will be the ones that really lean up their expenses and look to the right types of technology to grow their business going forward.

Vanathy: And I also think that it is a common characteristic for businesses to turn their head towards marketing only when their sales go down. But it’s definitely not going to help to spam customers’ inbox in desperate hopes to get leads, you know. So tell us a bit about some of the marketing strategies that will resonate well with people at times like this.

Andrew: I think yeah you don’t want to be you know sending out you know text campaigns, it’s gonna be I mean it’s only going to be a brand more of a brand exposure exercise than lead generation. There’s going to be a lot of text email campaigns going out there, and I think any more campaigns on social media is more of a brand exclosure exercise and the lead generation exercise. The next step in the sales process is most important which is closing that deal and I think companies now need to focus on generating video content to educate their customers about what they’re selling their product or their services. They need to create presentations, digital presentations that they can easily send to customers, potential customers to get them to obviously buy into into the product. And I think another vitally important thing is testimonials. Customer testimonials—to get customer testimonials, get video testimonials, written testimonials, have a website, have a live chat on your website— Zoho’s SalesIQ is a great application to use for that. And to really offer a full tech support system so that when a customer is looking and evaluating your product or service they can go and they can Google and they can look at your website and they can see what other people, what their customer experience has been.

I guess the next thing is a lot of potential customers will go to social media where they ask friends about your product or your service, or they’ll ask which plumber should I use or which you know which kind of telephone system should I use, and that’s where customer experience is the most important—because you want their friends, you want their connections on social media to plant your business because they had such a good experience. So, it’s really important that you focus on your customer experience and as well as your staff experience because your staff experience will impact the customers experience, so you want to work on your company culture to make sure that your staff are very very happy and they are focused on making sure the customer experience is great ,and in the customer then in return then promote your brand to their friends when their friends reach out for recommendations.

Vanathy: Absolutely Andrew, I agree with you one hundred percent. Customer experience is a key area that everybody should focus on, which will ultimately result in customer retention. And I also like how you talked about the staff experience of a company reflecting in their customer experience. Those are such interesting points, and also Andrew I think a lot of businesses these days are transforming themselves to fit better in this situation in order to stay relevant, you know. So for example apps that use to deliver food apps we use to order food from are now delivering groceries, and apps that focus on physical fitness are now talking about mindfulness and mental health. Our own local drivers are partnering with communities nearby to run some errands for them. So according to you at what point should a business consider putting on their multiple hats in order to stay relevant.

Andrew: I think first and foremost a company must revisit their SWOT analysis and a SWOT analysis should be alarmed document, and companies should revisit it on a frequent basis to go and address their strengths, their weaknesses, and to your setting opportunities or threats, and also look at forecasting, I mean the fashion industry has been doing it for years where they forecast where is the fashion trend going. I think all businesses need to forecast where their industry is going, where are their opportunities. We’ve seen a lot of with some clothing manufacturers that are now manufacturing masks and obviously the companies that jumped onto that opportunity early enough have now and reaped the benefits of being first to market. And I think yeah it’s very important for companies to do a proper forecasting and to address those opportunities.

Vanathy: And what would be some of the tell tale signs Andrew. When exactly can a business know ‘This is it, now is the time to change’, instead of waiting for weeks in a row and sort of waiting for the clouds to clear.

Andrew: I think you want to test it out in bits and pieces, I mean if you look at the example of the say the video industry or the movie industry it went from a video store we rent your DVD, that we’ve done to the Apple Store where you could go and buy the DVDs and rent them on the Apple Store, and eventually then you get your Apple TV Plus and Netflix. So if you know a video store owner way back in the day if they had seen the future and they had got that opportunity and gone to market first ,they probably would have been in a better position to compete with where the industry is going. So I think it’s all about just assessing the industry and seeing and doing market research, and also addressing your staff and doing group conversations around the opportunities, and getting other people’s opinions really do help in making that decision as to when is the time right.

Vanathy: That’s good advice Andrew, thanks for sharing it with us. And one important thing I also wanted to talk to you about was, all set and done the strength and the resilience of a company ultimately depends on its employees. So what are some of the qualities that companies could benefit from their employees especially when they are working remotely.

Andrew: So the first and foremost is employees that are embracing technology and employees that are using their own initiative to improve the running of the business. I think that is just vital that you have employees that are focused on building the business and also employees that are willing to work in teams. And I think one thing that I’ve seen in many businesses was where they appoint one person as what they call the culture captain, someone who’s going to take the company culture and that company culture can be reassessed and improved. But to really champion yet that specific part of the business and make sure that all the other staff members are working together helping the business grow, I think it’s important that they use technology but just do like a coffee chat with your team, do fun exercises using video chat video conferencing, bring everyone together get their ideas and really try and kind of put a element of you know each staff member must help the company grow. And I think the most valuable of members will be the ones that put an initiative to put forward ideas and to really work hard at growing the business.

Vanathy: Amazing, Andrew we’ve been discussing some serious topic so far, so I want to sort of take a pause and switch gears to discussing about this whole remote work side of things. Your an athlete yourself who is quarantined, so how are you taking care of your physical wellness and your mental wellness, and if there are any remote work etiquette that has worked best for you in all these years, please do share it with our viewers.

Andrew: I think if I look at these kind of tips for remote working is to get used to video conferencing, to any try and deal with your suppliers or your stakeholders in your business and get them to use the video conferencing options that are out there. We have Zoho Meeting we also have internal communication with Zoho Cliq and it’s important to see someone’s expression on their face, you can judge their tone and it’s a lot better to have a video chat than to just have an audio chat, so I think embracing the video chat is one thing. As far as I would say a physical health, I’m a discovery member so I have to keep up with my points, so I make sure that I get my heart rate up—I do skipping, I’ve got some home exercise equipment that I use to kind of keep fit and healthy—and then you know just I think try and make sure that you have downtime working from home. Sometimes you can get really attached to your laptop and attached to your word but it’s best to make a block book in your schedule, another time that is downtime—you close your laptop, you take on a book or you play a card game, or you know a board game with a family member and I think it’s important to just have have a dedicated downtime.

Vanathy: Also one of the things we all were concerned with when we started to work remotely was, teams won’t function properly if they are not sitting next to each other, performance would go down and their productivity would go down and those kind of things, when in fact, the opposite has happened. A lot of industry leaders and leadership staff from different companies have in fact confirmed that the productivity of their employees and their teams have only spiked after this remote work revolution. So what are your thoughts on that and why do you think that is happening.

Andrew: I’ve heard from many many clients and customers that productivity has gone up. And I think we know we spent I mean being in lockdown we’re forced to focus on the tasks at hand, there is no distractions like maybe walking to I mean you could you know walk to the kitchen but there’s no other staff members you know distracting me there, or having to go out for lunch meeting. I think we spend a lot of time in some jobs, spend time on the road, and I think now with technology people are finding themselves way more productive because they’re having to focus at the task at hand and getting it done, and meeting is a click away or a phone call away and I think that’s what is making people a lot more productive

Vanathy: Oh yeah absolutely, I agree. And now that a lot of businesses are increasingly adopting to this remote work culture there are also concerns about what applications should I use, which technology should I go after—not just the communication and collaboration side of things, but also to choose applications that will help with their sales and customer relations and marketing side of things. So when a business goes out to choose it’s technology provider what are some of the things that they have to be mindful about.

Andrew: Okay so one thing I have found and I’ve spoken to many South African businesses and also businesses in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and in Kenya—it’s important to try and get a complete technology solution and not to try and patch a whole bunch of different technologies together. If you can’t find one service provider that will you know provide you with many of the applications that you need, those applications will work more in sync than having to go and patch another service provider’s application to another and I think it’s also more cost effective that way. So I think Zoho obviously, you know we work for Zoho and we were passionate about the products, and I’m also a business owner and before I joined Zoho I run a business. So I saw the value in Zoho products and applications. And we implemented it now, we use their 20 applications of Zoho that we used in that business and those applications connect perfectly and allow us to be a lot more productive. So it’s important to attach your application together but really I think it’s since the applications from a technology quality point of view and also cost point of view.

Vanathy: Andrew I never knew you were a Zoho customer before you became an employee, that’s an interesting piece of information! Do you want to tell us more about that.

Andrew: Yes, I’ve been using Zoho for more than three years in my business and it allowed me to actually have staff work from home, so I was able to then reduce the the brick-and-mortar office space which was was obviously a big expense and also parking bays by another expense for a business, and parking bays sometimes don’t get used when you’ve got a big sales compliment. Parking bays are only used maybe on you know for a quarter of the day so we’ve decided to then take sales stuff and put them to work from home and we needed proper technology to do that ,but we also needed technology that we could customize for the South African market and that’s where Zoho came in. It was really cost cost-effective we could really customize and mold it to our business and our business needs, and yeah the experience was great and it still is. We’re still customers the business still runs, I’m just not involved, I’m full-time on Zoho now.

Vanathy: That is really amazing Andrew, thank you so much for your time and thanks for sharing such valuable insights with us.

The global labour market has been experiencing challenges as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The severity of the impact is massive, and business owners are struggling to pay their employees in these uncertain times. In an attempt to support these organizations, the UK Government stepped in with a temporary relief initiative named the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

With this blog, we’ll answer some of the basic questions about the scheme and extend our support with a free calculator that helps you estimate what grant amount you may be eligible for.

Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS)

The scheme allows employers in the UK to furlough workers on 80 percent of their regular pay. Businesses can apply for a grant that covers 80% of their employees’ monthly wages, up to £2,500 a month, plus their associated Employer National Insurance contributions and pension contributions on that subsidized furlough pay.

According to the HMRC, 6.3 million Jobs have been temporarily laid off by 800,000 companies. As of May 3rd, the HMRC has shelled out £8bn in support of these businesses. This unemployment benefit has been vital in keeping small businesses afloat and preventing a steeper rise in unemployment. This scheme will continue in its current form until the end of July.

Update:

On 12 May, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the CJRS scheme will be extended until the end of October. There will be more flexibility so employers will be able to bring their furloughed employees back to work part-time and contribute to paying employees’ wages while still receiving support from the scheme. We’ll keep this space updated for any further announcements on the scheme.

Applicability

Businesses that have furloughed employees on their payroll can apply for this grant. Once employees are designated as furloughed, employers pay the normal wages and then submit the information to the HMRC to apply for reimbursements. In order to get the grant amount, an employee must be furloughed for at least three consecutive weeks.

Eligibility

You can only submit claims for furloughed employees who were employed as of 19 March 2020 and who were on your PAYE payroll on or before 19 March 2020. This means an RTI submission regarding payment to that employee must have been made on or before 19 March 2020. Here’s a more complete breakdown of eligibility by date:

Employee was employed with you as of this date	Date RTI submission regarding payment was made to HMRC	Eligible for CJRS
28 February 2020	On or before 28 February 2020	Yes
28 February 2020	On or before 19 March 2020	Yes
28 February 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No
19 March 2020	On or before 19 March 2020	Yes
19 March 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No
On or after 20 March 2020	On or after 20 March 2020	No

Our calculator

The grant amount calculation is a complex process. You must factor your pay period, claim period, gross pay for your employees, insurance contributions, pension contributions, and more. We’ve come up with a free calculator to help you get a quick estimate of how much you can claim for each employee for the selected pay period. We hope this will help you plan for the future and push through these tough times. We’re also keeping this blog updated on the latest announcements from the HMRC, so keep an eye out for any new information.

Beginnings matter, and for small businesses they mean everything. Every humble beginning comes with its own set of diverse challenges, and every small business needs software that helps them grow faster. As a bootstrapped business from day one, Zoho understands this struggle better than any other vendor in the market. Since its inception, Zoho has been an active supporter of the small business community by offering extremely affordable, feature-rich software to help SMBs run their day-to-day business operations smoothly. Today’s announcement is another definitive step in this direction.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Bigin, our new pipeline-centric CRM that is built and priced for the needs of small and micro businesses. Bigin comes at an important time when businesses are going through a sudden, forced digital transformation to ensure business continuity. We believe this new addition will enable millions of small businesses to move their operations online and start seeing improved customer relationships.

Why Bigin?

Even though there are more than 600 CRM vendors in the market, most small businesses are still stuck with spreadsheets. So many new CRM players entered the market in the last decade promising to fill this gap with a simple solution for small businesses. However, they all fell short of their promise, leaving small businesses to settle for less when they actually needed more.

At Zoho, we clearly saw the problems in small businesses relying on dozens and dozens of spreadsheets to manage customer activities instead of investing in a CRM. Our decades of experience in building successful customer relationship products have shown us that small businesses need a CRM solution exclusively built for them.

Bigin was born out of that vision.

How does Bigin help small businesses?

Bigin is the only CRM in the market that offers the 3 things that small businesses actually look for in a CRM:

• Great ease of use

• The right feature set

• Affordable pricing

Bigin brings spreadsheet-like simplicity to CRM so that anyone can use the tool. You don’t need prior knowledge of CRM, or have to spend additional resources to actually make your software work. While working on the new product, we also noticed that small businesses were being taken for a ride by vendors who removed essential CRM features from their basic plans but still called it the right choice for small businesses. We wanted that to change. With features like multiple pipelines, built-in telephony, and workflow automation, Bigin contains just the right feature set to help small businesses run a full-scale customer-facing process inside their CRM. And most importantly, we wanted to offer all of this at the right price.

Bigin is the most affordable CRM system in the market right now, priced at $7 per month, per user, when billed annually.

What are some of the highlights of Bigin?

Multiple pipelines for customer operations: With the option to create multiple pipelines with fully customizable stages, Bigin empowers small businesses to run their distinct customer operations inside CRM. Bigin’s pipeline view allows users to see their customer information in the most visually engaging way, and extend it to the entire customer journey.  

Set up in 30 minutes or less: Bigin is simple and practical. It allows businesses to set up and start using the product in under 30 minutes with effortless on-boarding and guided set up. Users can start using the CRM right away without the need for product tutorials or any additional support.

Built-in telephony: Making and receiving calls anytime, anywhere is made possible through Bigin’s built-in telephony. Bigin also lets users choose from a range of popular telephony providers in the Zoho Phonebridge marketplace. With integrated telephony, Bigin gives you all the information you need to have well-informed calls with customers and prospects.

Workflow automation: Bigin’s easy-to-create automated workflows help users drastically cut down on the time wasted on repetitive manual tasks. All you have to do is pick a routine task, create a simple workflow in minutes, and let Bigin do all the hard work.

Real-time notifications and analytics: Real-time notifications from prospects are delivered inside the CRM so that sales reps can take meaningful actions to improve the chances of closing the deal. Bigin’s out-of-the-box analytics dashboards with charts and KPIs empower businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Fully mobile: You don’t need to be at your desk to be in touch with customers. Manage emails, stay updated with your pipeline, and access key business information in real time with our mobile apps for iOS and Android.

We launched a version of Bigin for early access this January and have been receiving lots of good feedback from the early adopters. They love Bigin’s combination of ease-of-use, features, and pricing in one solution.

Here are some of the testimonials that we received from our early adopters.

“I am super impressed with Bigin. I was looking for a simpler lead management and automation tool and I have finally arrived at the right platform after trying multiple tools in the last few years. It has completely transformed the sales process and I regularly recommend Bigin to my contacts.”

Vikas Kakkar, Founder & CEO, HireXP  

“We were so impressed by Bigin’s ‘perfect fit’ for small organizations that we have now consolidated all information about our clients and projects in Bigin. It’s impressive to see that such an affordable product helps in managing duplication of records, customizing fields specific to our processes, providing dashboards to manage the performance of emails, and even linking up with the Twitter accounts of our clients.”

Luison Lassala, General Manager, Bedrock Success Consulting

“I want to sincerely thank the entire Bigin Team for developing this excellent platform for SMBs who are keen on getting rid of excel. My primary requirement was exactly the same, but Bigin has offered so much more. It has increased the overall productivity of my sales team, and I have already recommended Bigin to friends in different sectors.”

Dhruvesh Lakhani, Founder Director, Investacc Insurance Brokers Pvt. Ltd.

We’ve also used this time to tweak and improve our offering before the public release. We are thankful to the early adopters for their invaluable feedback and suggestions.

Bigin is now available in 28 languages and is also part of Zoho’s revolutionary suite of 45+ business apps, Zoho One.

How is Bigin different from Zoho CRM? 

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM solution focused exclusively on small and micro businesses, who are typically not ready for an elaborate, end-to-end CRM. It is also an ideal fit for freelancers and individuals who want to manage their personal business pipelines online. By comparison, Zoho CRM is focused on growing businesses of all sizes who are looking to utilize the larger CRM platform for their advanced business needs.

Are you ready to Bigin?

We invite all small businesses to try our new CRM solution. True to its name, Bigin is just the start of the journey and we have even bigger plans for the future. We want to serve the small business community to the fullest.

#JustBigin today and get instant product access by signing up for our free 15-day trial.

In our new normal of remote work, we are witnessing a complete transformation in the way we collaborate and conduct meetings. Whether for in-person or online meetings, however, note-taking has always remained an important part of the meeting experience.

Now, we see no popular online meeting software that provides a built-in option to take notes while you’re attending a meeting. We either switch tabs back and forth between our note-taking app and the meeting software, or we use a physical notebook to take minutes and note other important discussions.

Today, we’re introducing Meeting Notes to you. This new feature allows you to focus more on the conversation and take quick notes during online meetings. All you need to do is just install Notebook Web Clipper on your browser and do an online meeting.

 

 

Meeting Notes is a part of Notebook’s web clipper, which is available on all major browsers. You can use Meeting Notes to take notes quickly and save it your Zoho Notebook account. If you’ve not logged into your Zoho Notebook account in your browser, you can still use Meeting Notes to take notes and save it as a .txt file on your device.

Zoho Notebook users can choose the relevant notebook and add tags before they save the note. Meeting Notes are compatible only with these online meeting software: Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Zoho Meeting, and Zoho Showtime.

Here’s how you can use Meeting Notes from your browser.

• Install the Notebook web clipper on your browser. Visit here to install Notebook web clipper for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

• Join/Host online meetings from your browser using Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Zoho Meeting, or Zoho Showtime.

• You will see a floating Notebook icon at the bottom left of your screen.

• You can drag the icon to place it anywhere on the screen.

• Click on the icon to open the note editor.

• Type your notes and save it either to your Zoho Notebook account or as a .txt file.

Save time and be more productive with Meeting Notes. If you wish to add an online meeting software to the support list, write to us at [email protected] or leave a comment here.

Creating a strong and unique password for every employee while adding them to your organization’s Zoho People account can be a little challenging. This is mainly because the passwords should be lengthy, unpredictable, and include a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters. Personally identifiable information including the organization’s name or the employee’s name should not be used. Creating such strong passwords, especially when you have to add several users to your Zoho People account at once, can be tiring and time-consuming. However, password security is something that should not be compromised at any cost. According to a Data Breach Investigations Report, 80% of data breaches related to hacking are caused by the lack of strong passwords.

At Zoho People and People Plus, we are constantly exploring different opportunities to make people management as easy and simple as possible for your organization. As part of our efforts, we’re excited to announce our integration with Zoho Vault. It’s a cloud-based password management system that stores, shares, generates, and manages different passwords. Zoho Vault ensures the highest level of confidentiality and security, preventing unauthorized entries.

How can Zoho Vault for Zoho People benefit your organization?

With this integration, you don’t have to go through the pain of creating a unique password for each user when adding them to your organization account. Zoho Vault generates secured passwords automatically while adding or importing users directly. It also allows you to select the complexity of the password by providing strong, moderate, and less strict options. Strong passwords are created using multiple special characters, symbols, and uppercase letters, making them difficult to crack. This goes a long way toward protecting your online accounts and user identity. Auto-generated passwords are rated as one of the most secured passwords.

How can Zoho Vault for Zoho People Plus benefit your organization?

The newest addition to our Zoho People Plus suite, Zoho Vault, can do wonders for your organization. It makes the password management process easy and efficient. You don’t have to worry about hackers as Zoho Vault follows strong password encryption procedures. With this integration, you can:

• Save and manage all your essential passwords from a centralized location

• Access all your passwords, even from your mobile

• Use two-factor authentication to add an extra level of security

• Alert users whenever their password is about to expire

Secure your passwords and keep trespassers at bay by making the most of our Zoho Vault integration. In Zoho People, the integration can be enabled in just a few steps. The complete procedure has been explained clearly in our help doc.  In Zoho People Plus, Zoho Vault is readily available along with the bundle. Take this integration for a spin and let us know what you think!

If you have any questions regarding the integration, feel free to write to us at [email protected].