Chapter 2: Zia in business

AI in business is beneficial for the employee experience, process automation, customer support, and revenue. It makes sense to enlist the help of technology that can help humans make decisions and get the job done faster with more accuracy. Studies suggest that the worldwide AI market revenue will grow to over 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars by 2030. AI can be incorporated into multiple business functions, like customer service, data analysis, recruiting, and content creation. In the first part of this e-book, we'll take a look at how Zia helps us in our business operations in departments like sales, the business help desk, marketing, administration, HR, and marketing.

Sales

Sales is an indispensable part of our business that goes beyond a client-provider transaction. For us, it is about building a good rapport and truly understanding the customer's business needs. Our product experts from presales and sales teams work closely with our customers to ensure our products address customer pain points. Our customer expectations fuel our growth and encourage us to create a world-class suite of products.

As service providers, it is our responsibility to build an efficient sales process to ensure customer satisfaction. Zia plays a pivotal role throughout the sales cycle at Zoho. Our customer engagement platform uses Zia Skills to build customized chatbots. These chatbots can respond to user questions on the website or on social media. This solution is also integrated with our customer relationship management solution.

Let’s consider a scenario where John Doe from Zylker, a medical firm in the UK, is interested in purchasing our help desk solution. When John contacts us, Zia assigns the lead to the right sales representative based on our organization’s internal policies. In this case, it could be based on factors such as John’s preferred mode of communication, agent availability, and region.

Zylker’s account is assigned to Robin, an agent handling UK accounts. Using Smart Prompt, Zia’s integration with ChatGPT, Robin can write emails to leads and customers. The Smart Prompt feature takes user input to generate relevant content suggestions.

Users have the option to regenerate their response, change the tone (formal/informal/persuasive/friendly), or edit the length of the response. It reduces time and effort, enabling users to focus on more critical tasks and minimize the time spent on repetitive or monotonous tasks.

After their initial discussion, Robin wishes to contact John over a call to gain a deeper understanding of John's requirements. Zia's Best Time to Contact feature helps Robin identify communication availability based on previously attempted activities. Best Time to Contact is influenced by three factors:

Completed calls logged with a duration of over 30 seconds
Calls and emails received from contacts
Business hour details

Based on the given data, Zia suggests the best available time within the organzation's business hours.

Zia also detects mentions of competitors in emails. For instance, when John asks our sales team how we fare against competitor Y, the competitor alert feature notifies the agent and helps them provide the right information. Behind the scenes, this work is already done. The sales team can import a public dataset via Zia for a clear competitor analysis. This also helps team members generate formulas for KPIs and stay on track with their sales goals for the quarter.

Zia can evaluate the conversation thread to recommend a product or bundle that would be best suited for an organization. Zylker's IT ecosystem is large, with a diverse range of assets, and needs to adhere to multiple regulations to protect patient details. Zia recommends the enterprise edition of our IT help desk tool and our network monitoring solution to strengthen John's system. After a through competitor evaluation, John decides to go ahead with the recommendation.

John reviews the agreement and enters his e-signature. However, he also needs three authorities from Zylker to sign off on the purchase. The signing process can be delayed, as it involves reviewing lengthy paperwork. As it's an urgent requirement, John uses Zia to pull up a summary of the contract on Zoho Sign, our digital signature application. The remaining three authorities can review the key details of the agreement instead of spending hours reading through the fine print while John finalizes the deal.

The application also uses a blockchain-based approach for timestamping. Blockchain is a digital ledger of records. Essentially, when a user signs a document, this information is recorded permanently as a "block" carrying a timestamp that cannot be edited. This is a tamper-proof technique to verify the integrity of an agreement.

Business help desk

Customer service and support teams need an intuitive solution that can track and analyze information and improve user interactions. Zia's context-aware capabilities have proved time and again to be a game-changer in our business help desk.

When there's a sudden uptick in the number of incoming tickets, the anomaly detection feature sends out an alert to the team. Zia suggests appropriate categories and tags for each ticket and conducts sentiment analysis to identify any negative words so that agents can prioritize tickets from frustrated customers. When the agent is assigned a ticket, they can consult the knowledge base bot, which retrieves articles and consolidates them to provide an appropriate solution.

Let's say a customer is facing trouble with software installation and requires on-demand remote support. The technician can use our remote access tool to access the customer's device and resolve the issue. Finally, Zia analyzes the entire session activity to create a cumulative session summary. Zia evaluates significant actions taken, chat replies, and solutions provided to summarize the main issue discussed during the session, the solutions carried out, and the resolution of the session.

Finally, an intuitive dashboard displays anomaly prediction, trending tags, and even a sentiment analysis report. This gives leaders the big picture and paves the way for informed decision-making.

Administration

Our backbone, anchor, pillar—call it what you will. There's no way we'd be able to get our job done without the admin team monitoring our day-to-day operations. This team executes a wide range of tasks like hiring vendors for food and security, overseeing construction activities, and maintaining safety and hygiene standards of the workplace, to name a few. They cater to employee needs and boost the employee experience, a vital part of any successful business.

Automated parking management

As our employee headcount went up, so did the number of cars in our parking lots. In order to streamline vehicle movement, the Zlabs team created an AI-integrated system using neural networks. The CCTV cameras are used for both surveillance and for capturing license plate numbers along with entry and exit timings This information is then processed in real time for prediction and forecasting of occupancy. Real-time slot vacancies are transmitted to the screen at the entrance of the multi-level car park. When a vehicle enters the car park, the system identifies the registered user and the barrier is lifted. If the vehicle is unregistered, security staff at the entrance will validate and either allow or deny entry.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is used to detect license plate numbers automatically. For those with short-term memory (like the author of this e-book), Zoho's internal communication tool offers a bot that reminds employees where they parked their vehicle should they forget by the end of their shift.

The system also passes an alert to the admin team when there's unauthorized barricade movement or if someone drives in the opposite direction. This has helped the admin team improve space management and strengthen our security.

Zoho's low-code application builder is predominantly used for our daily operations. Zia's seemingly small part in our processes plays a significant role in enhancing the overall employee experience in the workplace. For instance:

Mail room management

The mail room is always bustling with activity. We have personal mail, marketing merchandise, confidential files, and many packages that are constantly moving in and out of the office. It's tough for a small team to monitor everything. Luckily, Zia can give them a hand. By entering historical data of the number of packages entering and leaving every day, we can derive predictive insights on mail room space usage. This can be used to determine if we need to expand mail room space in the near future.

Setting up new offices

Our increased focus on expanding Zoho's presence worldwide is made possible by setting up spoke offices. Setting up a spoke office at a new location is no small feat. It takes months of planning, coordination of multiple teams, and resources.

The admin team has to stay on top of all tasks like providing IT and non-IT assets, hiring local staff, conducting safety checks, planning the movement of teams from the hub office—the list is endless. Using our project management solution, the team can monitor all activities related to an office inauguration without actually having to be at the location. For instance, Zia can compile a list of pending tasks, view issues under a task, delegate tasks to users, or even schedule events. Everything is planned from the headquarters, and the on-site team can ensure things are moving as scheduled.

Our advanced analytics solution can be integrated with project management for deeper insights. Zia delivers actionable insights like monitoring expenses incurred with each activity, comparing expenses against other locations, and predicting time taken to complete the project. As of May 2023, Zoho has over 30 spoke offices in India.

Material management

In our e-book, "How Zoho became a paper-light enterprise," we discussed the steps we took as an organization to digitize our material management process. The admin team created a low-code application to monitor movement of material and included appropriate approvals and documentation in their workflow. Employees working in admin roles are not as tech savvy as product developers or system administrators and often cannot work with complex tools. They need a simple, easy-to-use, and effective tool. With Zia, admins could modify the application any time without having to rely on our IT team for support.

Let's say our Head of Safety and Security, Samson, wants to include new fields for compliance requirements. He can turn to Zia Help Assistant. With an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine, Zia scans the entire knowledge base and auto-suggests relevant help articles based on the scenario. Zia will also provide contextual icon recommendations. If Samson faces trouble with modifying the app, he can use the Screen Record feature integrated within Zia. He can replicate the issue, blur out any sensitive information, and send it over to the support team for faster resolution, making the entire experience a seamless one.

Feedback assessment

An important part of the employee experience is collecting feedback to modify our internal operations and policies. Employees can submit feedback or concerns on workplace issues via a form. Sentiment analysis can identify negative feedback automatically, categorize those issues, and help the concerned team prioritize these requests.

Candidate shortlisting for HR

ManageEngine receives hundreds of applications on a daily basis for a limited number of vacant positions. It isn't practical for hiring managers or HR to vet each resume manually and shortlist candidates. This is where Zoho's serverless platform plays a role. HR can build a job portal application to evaluate resumes. Candidates are usually shortlisted based on key skills and relevant work experience. To expedite the hiring process, Zia AutoML predicts the suitability of a candidate for a particular role based on predefined parameters. Zia also acts as a recommendation engine to review candidate details and suggests other open positions the candidate might be suitable for. When a new role opens up, HR can use Zia's text analytics capabilities to select preferred skills and filter suitable resumes. Keyword extraction is a text analysis technique that works on the principles of text mining, information retrieval, and NLP. It enables users to identify the subject matter and the gist of the text at a glance, saving valuable time.

Marketing

ManageEngine was one of the first enterprise IT companies to be fully transparent with pricing. While it's common practice in recent years, it was considered a bold move 20 years ago. And that's how we began our journey of responsible marketing practices, now further enhanced by AI.

Our marketing methods may have changed over the years, but demand for and value of our marketing is higher than ever before. The average person has the attention span of five seconds for an advertisement. That means, we have less than five seconds to convey our message. How do we stand out in a market overcrowded with IT applications? How do we grab a consumer's attention? A team comprising of the most creative minds, backed by our conviction in our products, is the key to any successful marketing campaign.

At ManageEngine, each product has a designated marketing team in addition to the central marketing team. Product marketers create website content, comparison documents, and online marketing campaigns to inform our prospects about our offerings and what sets us apart from our competitors. The central marketing team is responsible for coordinating activities between the product teams and increasing our visibility as a brand.

ManageEngine's marketing teams use an in-house writing tool to create content. Zia is a built-in feature of this tool and identifies language, checks content for plagiarism, and lists the sources for each plagiarized sentence. Marketers can also review their writing quality and ease of reading.

You don't have to be Gen-Z to be a social media expert! Zia's integration with OpenAI allows users to create compelling content in our social media management solution. Users can provide a prompt on any topic, say, ITSM, and Zia provides relevant captions or tweets. This also includes hashtag, image, and emoji suggestions. Generative AI has made social media marketing a breeze for our marketing team.

Other functions

Note-making

Users can ask Zia to:

Summarize, create tags, or change the tone of a note.
Create a checklist.
Detect classes of objects from images for image search.
Utilize OCR on images attached to notes, which will be used for search indexing.

HR management

Zia can carry out the following commands:

Complete the leave application process on behalf of employees based on date, leave type, and reason provided by the users.
Fetch the list of upcoming holidays and leave reports.
Deliver a complete list of all pending tasks.
Help employees check in and check out for the day.

Content management

Image annotation or tagging uses the object detection model for indexing and keyword searching. Users can look up content within files easily using Zia Search.