The company attributes this substantial growth to increasing business demand for contextual applications with utmost standards for user privacy as well as rising costs from other collaboration platform providers.

ALSO READ: Zoho, 10 other Hot Companies to Watch in 2022

Since the start of the pandemic, Zoho Workplace adoption has accelerated as businesses of all sizes transitioned to digital-forward, remote work.

“Zoho has always been about persistent long-term execution, and our investment in Zoho Workplace attests to that. As competitors continue to raise prices or eliminate free editions for those who need them most, Workplace continues to serve businesses and professionals with a feature-rich suite that increases productivity while remaining broadly affordable,” said Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corporation” Our ad-free approach and respect towards user privacy will add to the overall experience that our solution provides.”

Unparalleled Growth

Zoho Workplace experienced 34% year-to-year growth in 2021, with more than 40% of new customers making the switch from Google and Microsoft. Growth was strong in all segments, with the SMB customer base increasing 40%, mid-sized by 36%, and enterprises by more than 20%.

In Africa, Workplace saw 59% growth. In Nigeria, the Workplace customer base saw 118% growth in 2021 while overall growth in Africa was 59%.

Demand is largely driven by businesses still facing harsh realities of the pandemic, and its impact on their growth and budget.

Unforeseen hikes in operational costs to support collaboration makes it more difficult for these businesses to recover and thrive. Within days of Google announcing that it would be ending the free edition of Workspace, Zoho’s Workplace platform experienced a 120% increase in migrations from Google-hosted domains.

According to Analyst, Zoho is a unique productivity suite.

“Zoho is unique amongst its productivity suite competitors for not rolling out a cost increase for 2022, nor removing their freemium offerings,” commented Thomas Randall, Senior Research Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. “Other providers have justified price add-ons and increases to reflect the additional value they believe their customers have received over the pandemic for using their tools.

Yet freemium offerings and price consistency have been central for many customers and businesses to stay afloat during lockdowns.

Now that such offerings are in short supply, Zoho will likely see increased demand for their Workplace services as customers seek strong ROI for productivity and collaboration software.”

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Workplace is available in three editions:

1. Standard (NGN780 per user, per month, billed annually);
2. Professional (NGN1560 per user, per month, billed annually) and
3. Mail-only (NGN260 per user, per month, billed annually).

Zoho Privacy Pledge

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products.

More than 75 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.

More About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific technology companies. Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 10,000 employees.

Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“One in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience,” according to PwC’s 2018 consumer intelligence report that surveyed 15,000 people from 12 nations.

Besides, the definition of a ‘first-class CX’ evolves constantly, and organisations need to similarly adapt, tweak  and innovate their CX program to match changing needs and preferences.

With that in mind, here are some of the major trends that will define CX in 2022.

Privacy and trust-by-design

With governments around the globe introducing stringent privacy laws, all companies now have a baseline to work from. Nigeria is no exception.

On 25th January 2019, the National Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) was issued in accordance with section 6 (a) and (c) of the National Information Technology Development Agency Act 2007 (‘NITDA Act’) in recognition that a lot of public and private bodies have migrated their respective businesses and information systems online.

But simply meeting those basic requirements won’t be enough for customers who are increasingly concerned about how their personal data is used and stored.

Organisations shouldn’t just view customer privacy as a legal imperative, but also as an ethical priority. That means adopting a privacy-first approach for their business operations including product management, supply chain networks, software partner choices, CX programs, and workplace culture.

Customers will switch to brands that offer more privacy and take data security extra seriously.

They would even pay a premium for offerings from such brands. This is already starting to be true and will only get stronger as a trend.

Additionally, customers will be increasingly drawn to brands that demonstrate trustworthiness through focus on inclusive and sustainable growth, responsible sourcing practises, thoughtful waste management, and fair wages, among other things.

Self-service becomes increasingly critical

Today’s customer prefers to be in control of their interactions with companies. Whether it’s billing, commerce, or account management, customers would rather handle it themselves than have to deal with a number of people within the organisation.

And while self-service has long been in play in the B2C space, it’s growing in importance in the B2B segments too.

It’s also important for organisations to think about how they deliver self-service functions.

Zero UI, for instance, is gaining popularity. Organisations need to understand invisible user interfaces that are activated by voice, gestures, and movements.

While these technologies may not be as prevalent in Nigeria as they are in more developed markets, it’s still important that organisations work on them now and not risk getting left behind.

Unified technology platforms come to the fore

Creating seamless customer experiences depends to a huge extent on how well your internal functions and teams can converge and collaborate during every customer touch-point. That internal collaboration can be made a great deal smoother through the use of unified CX technology platforms that blend organisational functions and show the entirety of each customer’s story.

Unified platforms help your organisation avoid wasting time trying to integrate disparate pieces of software and instead bring together data from across the organisation for various needs such as cross-referencing customer context, performing automation, and coaching employees.

Reliability matters

With so many areas of everyday Nigerian life plagued by unreliability, customers are desperate for reliable experiences. In fact, consistently good experiences will probably win you more favour than the odd exceptional experience. That’s not to say organisations shouldn’t try out fancy ideas and experiences from time to time. But they should only do so if they have the basics firmly in place.

A birthday gift from a bank is meaningless if you can’t move your money around when you direly need to.

Personalisation will pay off

While there was a time when simply including a customer’s name on a piece of communication counted as personalisation, that’s no longer the case.

Today, personalisation is about reaching customers with the right message on the right platform at the right time.

Of course, achieving that level of personalisation requires data. That means organisations have to balance the usefulness of personalisation with the responsibility of upholding customer privacy. For brands with an international presence especially, this means having a firm grasp of the technological and regulatory environments they operate in.

As these trends may indicate, CX leaders and program managers have a tricky year ahead, with both technology and customer expectations evolving alongside the pandemic itself. The best attitude to have is a mix of flexibility and pragmatism.

More often than not, all of these tools include reporting module that displays department-specific data records and statements.

However, stand-alone data like sales figures, lead numbers, email open rates, and the like, can only tell you so much about customer behaviour.

As businesses continue to go digital and become increasingly data-driven, it’s imperative for them to include a holistic business intelligence (BI) programme in their technology strategy.

A comprehensive BI programme helps combine various data points from multiple sources, perform cross-functional analysis, and bring out intuitive insights like inspirations behind seasonal customer trends, reasons for supply-chain gaps, sales funnel pain points gathered from customer feedback, productivity drops due to employee attrition, future trend predictions, and whatnot.

Powerful information like this can enable organisations to adopt a culture of smart, evidence-based decision-making and gain a true competitive edge.

Getting started with a business analytics and intelligence program

Provided that your organisation has the necessary funding and resources to implement a central BI programme, the first natural step is to identify the key business metrics you want to compute and track.

As pointed out here, once you have identified the goals, the next step is defining a data strategy. You need to go about defining your data strategy for key focus areas and then identify and align its data sources with that strategy. From there, it should be relatively simple for the organisation to build a data pipeline and prepare the data for analysis.

Building a robust, unified data pipeline from disparate sources

Prepping the data pipeline is one of the biggest challenges organisations face while implementing their BI programme. Using a mixed toolset offered by different vendors translates to disparate data sets that need to first be integrated, blended, and unified to enable a(n) smoother as well as accurate analysis procedure.

In fact, it’s been noted that 80% of analysis time is spent on data preparation as poor quality data often results in untrustworthy business insights.

This is where BI tools that include data preparation provisions come in handy. Be it a custom-built BI program or a bespoke tool, it’s important that your option incorporates data-prepping and blending capabilities, i.e., ability to connect to different sources (legacy or cloud app) and port data in different formats, clean and remove duplicates, blend the data into a single data warehouse, and improve the overall data quality. This helps ensure robust, error-free data pipelines, in turn assuring reliable business intel.

Updating your privacy practices and official policy 

With a BI programme, your obligation as a company to protect customer data becomes greater. Some privacy practices to keep in mind include,

(1) masking critical user data, i.e., removing personally identifiable information from all data sets using anonymization methods, before feeding them into the BI data pipeline,

(2) collecting explicit consent from the data subjects (customers and employees) to use their anonymized data for BI analysis,

(3) ensuring that your data sources are also subject to stringent privacy standards, and finally,

 (4) updating your organisation’s customer privacy policy straight away to include required details about your BI programme.

Integrating your BI program with internal collaboration platforms

Despite setting up a cost-intensive, comprehensive BI programme, many organisations struggle to drive adoption among their teams and prompt necessary action or decision-making. One way to solve this is to integrate the BI system widely and deeply across internal communication and collaboration platforms used by employees such as email, chat, intranet forums, project management avenues, etc.

The BI dashboards must allow executives to blend and visually analyse data for cross-functional insights, fashion the insights into easily understandable and interactive reports, decide the next course of action, and subsequently share the information with the teams or individuals concerned in real time.

Staying future-ready – leave room for innovation

As you implement modern technologies and boost your operational efficiencies, running a future-ready business also includes being constantly on the lookout for innovation, and ensuring that the business systems and processes are elastic enough to absorb the change.

Similarly, your BI programme should have enough legroom to experiment and capitalise on emerging opportunities like AI-powered voice analytics and RPA/business analytics integration.

For instance, current AI trends have made it possible for users to hold conversations with AI assistants to generate automated BI insights with a single click, predict future trends, conduct as well as visualise cognitive and what-if analyses, and much more.

If the events of the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that things can change incredibly quickly and it’s vital to be flexible.

Cloud-based BI tools enable business owners to look at real-time data from across departments. to make quick decisions. This helps businesses stay nimble during unprecedented times.