Business communications and collaboration face big changes and a software tool from Zoho leads the way.
Zoho Cliq changes the way teams communicate and work together even at great distances.
“Zoho Cliq is a part of the Unified Communication and Collaboration stack. It basically helps teams work together more efficiently by integrating all your communication and collaboration needs into one platform,” explains Shanthana Lakshmi S, Senior Marketing Analyst for Zoho Cliq.
How Technology Forces Changes in Communications and Collaboration
One big change involves how close in proximity team members need to be in physical space. Take a look at this example.
You come into the office on a Monday morning. You hoped to chat with Phil about a new hire but see he is in a huddle with two other co-workers.
You take a minute to chat with Shiela in HR about the new hire instead. Then you notice a department head meeting scheduled for 3 p.m., so you start organizing your presentation until Phil gets free.
Nothing about this scenario seems unusual for any office on any Monday morning anywhere in the world.
Except that you work in the guest room of your apartment in New York City while Phil lives in Buenos Aires and his two co-workers reside in Portland, Ore. and Sacramento, Calif. Shiela from HR works from your company’s regional office in Columbus, Ohio and the department heads you plan to present to this afternoon are scattered across the globe from Australia, to South Asia to Toronto, Can.
Obviously the new communications and collaboration revolution defies the old understanding of what working together even means. And Zoho’s communications and collaboration software continues to broaden this defintion.
Cliq Pushes The Limits of Team Collaboration
Zoho launched Cliq in 2017, and today the company says a substantial percentage of its users work remotely. The service includes both instant messaging, a market projected to reach $75 billion by 2025, and internal communication, a market set to break $1.78 billion by 2027. The global pandemic only increased this demand, especially for messaging.
The Cliq dashboard creates an overview giving you the feeling of working in an office instead of what you are really doing. That is sitting at a laptop maybe hundreds or even thousands of miles from the rest of your team. (See below.)
At a glance, you see availability of team members and an overview of meetings. Cliq also gives you the ability to schedule new meetings with your team. But more than just calendar management, it allows you to make calls and attend meetings right on the software with audio and video. This puts Cliq light years ahead of simple internal messaging or scheduling software which offer only some of these functions, not all.
Zoho Cliq Offers Messaging with Something Extra
The impressive Zoho Cliq messaging dashboard (below) offers an ongoing flow of communications with your team keeping you constantly in touch.
This represents way more than a simple messaging app with a list of contacts!
Features include DMs, groups and channels. So you can send messages to individuals. Or you can send messages to groups or channels you’ve created. You can even time your messages so they reach the proper people (or team members) at the proper time.
With messaging, you can text one on one with your sales manager or head of marketing or create a channel for both departments so everyone can get involved in the conversation.
File sharing means you can quickly share slides for an upcoming meeting. A writing assistant brings AI into the picture helping you quickly craft a message to the staff without sitting and musing about it first.
Voice and video messaging allow you to give your team interactions a more personal tone.
Multi-chat view lets you keep track of all these conversations at once. A message reaction feature lets you react to a team member’s comments or shared files without typing out a comment – or to respond to a specific comment directly underneath.
Rich message formats let you and your team bump up the look of your message from just straight text. This helps when you need to highlight information with your team that you don’t want them to miss!
And yes, you even get a task management view, so you can keep track of projects and their due dates – and offer progress reports.
“Whether you’re chatting one on one or with a group or with a particular channel for a team – also you’re sharing files or expressing ideas – every interaction should feel effortless,” says Shanthana Lakshmi S.
Zoho Cliq Makes Virtual Meetings a Breeze
Now look at the calls and meetings features Zoho Cliq offers. The solution allows you to join one on one calls or meetings instantly. But, wait! That’s not all!
If you jump on a call at the office near the end of the day and you’re ready to leave, simply transfer the call (or meeting) to your smartphone or smartwatch. Finish the call or meeting on your way home without the need to disconnect.
Calls and meetings aren’t limited to your internal team either. Say you want to invite external users.
Maybe you and your sales manager need to chat with an existing client. Or maybe you need to give a presentation to a prospective client or partner. Whatever the reason, Zoho Cliq allows you to easily invite guest users into calls or meetings.
The meeting feature also syncs with your calendar making it easy to keep track of scheduled meetings and calls – and never miss one.
Zoho Cliq also adds another nifty little feature if you need to skip a meeting due to a scheduling conflict. It provides a transcript, summary and list of action points which sum up what was discussed. This allows you to read what transpired at your leisure and bring yourself up to speed about what was discussed.
Hold the Phone! Zoho Cliq Provides This Service Too
There happens to be another hugely important communications detail Zoho Cliq can take off your plate.
Yes, Zoho Cliq also offers phone service inside the platform. Use Zoho Voice, the company’s native service, for your support teams and for incoming calls without need for traditional PBX systems.
If you prefer, use RingCentral or other similar services instead. Zoho Cliq allows integration of these services into its software too.
Zoho Cliq Unifies Communications and Collaboration for Teams
With Cliq, Zoho aims to unify communications and collaboration for teams. What began as Zoho Chat, an instant messaging tool, in 2007, has grown into an all-in-one collaboration hub combining messaging, meetings, automation and more recently AI and enterprise grade features. The tool also includes Networks, an external collaboration feature. (More on this later.)
“With every update, every innovation and every consumer insight, Cliq has grown, not just in features, but in impact,” Shanthana Lakshmi S explains. “Today it’s more than just a chat platform. It’s where teams brainstorm, collaborate, and build together.”
Cliq addresses some longtime pain points faced by collaborating teams. Of course, team collaboration (and even remote teams) are nothing new to the business environment.
But numerous challenges remain. The need for a variety of tools causes communications to take place across multiple platforms. Likewise, productivity tools remain scattered. For example, you might use one platform for communications, another for calendars and reminders and yet another for notebooks.
In the end, workflows remain chaotic and disorganized, conversations are scattered, decisions become delayed and productivity suffers. And none of this begins to address security concerns.
By contrast, Zoho Cliq introduces a very different idea. Imagine instead a scenario where all the tools you use and all the people you talk to are in one place and workflows are automated.
The result becomes a solution to simplify, streamline and bring your team together – no matter where they are in the world.
For example, you might be the CEO of an ecommerce business with a marketing department that brings in traffic to your online store via social media, email campaigns and content marketing. That content marketing comes mainly in the form of a blog and guest posts on other websites.
Your order processing team works from an office in Boise, Idaho. Employees ship your products to customers from a warehouse in Atlanta, Ga. Your social media is handled by a virtual assistant from the Philippines. Blog posts are written by a freelancer just outside London, U.K. And your email marketing is handled by a marketer in Philadelphia, Pa.
They talk to each other and share information via instant messaging, voice, video and file sharing. You hold weekly meetings with each of them via an online calendar you all share.
And you do it all whether you happen to be at your kitchen table in your apartment in Seattle, Wash. or lying on the beach in Honduras.
Sound too good to be true? Just look at what other teams are already doing with Zoho Cliq!
Imagine What Your Team Could Do
Check out what this business organization does with Zoho Cliq. One of Zoho’s customers in the healthcare industry with locations throughout the U.S. used Cliq to transform company wide and departmental announcements.
In particular, an automated customized alert system makes sure critical updates reach staff in a timely fashion. This allows the company to share the best, most updated information for treatment of patients.
Many businesses in the healthcare sector already use Zoho Cliq to improve collaboration and communications for better patient care.
Just imagine easier consultations between physicians, better access to patient information and critical information updates about new treatments.
Of course, other businesses benefit from these communications tools as well, not just those in the healthcare industry.
For example, a U.K.- based outsourcing provider uses Zoho Cliq to streamline communications between management and employees.
Zoho’s phone system also helps customer facing teams respond to calls efficiently while letting apps handle more mundane customer service tasks.
Use Live Events and Networks
Zoho Cliq also provides some other functions that shouldn’t be overlooked. Take Live Events.
Not too long ago industry events required booking hotels and conference centers and having all your participants climb aboard airplanes bound for a single remote location.
This process made events costly – think of the catering bill alone! – and time consuming for your company and attendees. The same holds true for corporate retreats or anything similar that allows you to bring your team together.
And frankly this cost and complexity put such events beyond the reach of companies without the financial and logistical resources to pull them off.
Enter Zoho Cliq’s Live Events feature. It allows anyone to host large scale virtual events where teams can see keynote speakers and interact just like at an in-person event. And all this happens by logging on with a laptop or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.
There are more features too. For example, Zoho Cliq’s Networks allows you to corral your external collaborators into separate groups. These groups might include your clients, your partners and your vendors. You can interact with each Network individually without giving them access to your company’s full online resources. This feature is an example of Zoho’s wider dedication to security too.
Final Thoughts
Freeing teams from the tyranny of proximity means a level of autonomy businesses have rarely experienced before. At the same time, collaboration and communication continue to evolve. This ties teams and even individual team members scattered across the world more closely than ever before.
For huge enterprises, this sea change represents a totally different way of doing business. For smaller organizations, the shift is even more seismic.
It enables small businesses and start-up entrepreneurs to access resources and build teams anywhere in the world.
Zoho Cliq allows teams to connect with text, file sharing, one-on-one calls and meetings from anywhere in the world. And all you need is a laptop or mobile device and internet connection.
Team members access Cliq either directly or from almost any other Zoho app they happen to be using through a simple “mini bar.” Native integrations already exist with apps like Zoho Project, Zoho Voice, Zoho Notebook, and Zoho People. Find other extensions in the Zoho Marketplace.
Get Zoho Cliq in a free version or professional and enterprise versions for $1.80 per user per month and $3.60 per user per month respectively. See details here. The app also comes with the Zoho One, Zoho Workplace, CRM Plus, Marketing Plus, and People Plus suites. Learn more about Zoho Cliq here.
