With over 1,500 schools across Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda, Bridge International Academies is one of the largest education providers in Africa focused on providing quality, affordable education to underserved communities.

Bridge International Academies uses a data-driven approach to ensure that children receive high-quality education, regardless of their socio-economic status.

The partnership with Zoho is expected to further enhance Bridge’s ability to deliver impactful educational outcomes through the use of Zoho’s comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications.

Ogundare explained the importance of this collaboration, saying, “At Zoho, we believe in the power of technology to drive social impact. Our partnership with Bridge International Academies will help drive our goal to help communities thrive by empowering institutions like Bridge with the tools they need to deliver top-tier education.”

Through this partnership, Zoho aims to sponsor school uniforms, shoes, and fees for four academic terms, starting from the third term of 2024 and extending into 2025. In addition to these essentials, Zoho will provide other necessary items to 200 underprivileged pupils attending Bridge International Schools.

Zoho is contributing to sustainability by repurposing billboard flex materials to create school bags. These eco-friendly bags, designed and distributed by Zoho, have been given to 500 school children in Nigeria, further enhancing the company’s focus on both social and environmental responsibility.

The partnership will also see Bridge International Academies leveraging Zoho’s platform to simplify its operations, improve communication, and enhance overall efficiency.

Bridge will integrate Zoho’s productivity tools such as Zoho Workplace, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Desk into its day-to-day operations, allowing administrators, teachers, and support staff to work more effectively.

Zoho’s cloud-based tools will enable Bridge to manage student data, track academic performance, and facilitate better communication between schools, teachers, and parents.

One of the key aspects of the partnership is Zoho’s ability to offer customized solutions specifically tending to the needs of educational institutions.

“We understand that every industry is unique, and education is no exception. That’s why we’ve developed tools that are adaptable and can be tailored to the specific needs of schools like Bridge International Academies,” Ogundare noted.

By using Zoho’s tools, Bridge International Academies will also be able to analyze data more efficiently, allowing them to make informed decisions that can improve student outcomes.

For instance, Zoho Analytics will enable Bridge to assess the performance of its schools, track student attendance, and evaluate the effectiveness of teaching methods. These insights will help Bridge to refine its approach and ensure that it continues to provide high-quality education to its students.

Ogundare also emphasized the scalability of Zoho’s solutions, which will allow Bridge to expand its operations and reach even more students across Africa.

This partnership is part of Zoho’s goal to support social impact initiatives across the globe. Zoho has a long history of working with non-profit organizations and educational institutions, providing them with the tools they need to succeed in their missions.

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Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, Friday launched new tools for Zoho Desk, the anchor application in the company’s customer service platform, to help customer service teams evolve with the changing needs of customers and meet heightened business expectations.

Zoho Desk, which has achieved 45% year-over-year revenue growth for the past five years in Nigeria and globally, now serves more than 100K businesses around the world.

The platform has also witnessed a phenomenal adoption across the MEA region, achieving 580% CAGR over the past five years.

New capabilities in Zoho Desk include Blended Conversations—a seamless combination of human-driven and bot-powered conversational service experiences—as well as several refinements to the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and more accessible to users with a wide spectrum of different needs.

These additions enable customer service agents to improve engagement and deliver higher-value customer experiences (CX).

“During these challenging economic times, the best companies are doubling down on customer retention while simultaneously trying to do more with less,” said Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corp. “Great service experiences address this by forming the bedrock of sustainability through economic downturns. Blended Conversations in Zoho Desk addresses exactly this outcome by cleverly combining human and bot agents while also reducing friction, frustration, and costs-to-serve.”

To help small and micro businesses transform their customer service operations by empowering them with an easy, and value-rich helpdesk solution at an affordable price point, Zoho Desk has launched an Express Edition.

Blended Conversations for Zoho Desk allows customer service agents to deliver the best experience in the moment by delegating the majority of manual and transactional tasks to bots, while remaining in control of the overall service experience.

With fast and easy deployment that does not require external help, Zoho Desk allows brands to scale their conversational service experiences through higher agent productivity without compromising on the quality of CX.

This experience is a culmination of Zoho’s Instant Messaging (IM) Framework and Guided Conversations, a low-code builder for self-service experiences.

The IM Framework allows organizations to integrate any messaging service they use with Zoho Desk, and comes pre-integrated with services like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram.

Guided Conversations for Zoho Desk allows business users to build powerful self-service flows that are useful throughout the customer journey, and help customers quickly and securely manage their relationship with the organization.

It offers service teams tighter collaboration and integration with other Zoho marketing apps at no extra cost, including Zoho’s CX Platform and Zoho CRM Plus, for example.

Zoho also announced a technological overhaul of the user interface to include options to support: cognitive and dyslexia challenges; visual impairments including astigmatism; animation reduction for those with seizure disorders; customization capabilities for colour-blindness. This is the company’s biggest step towards improving digital accessibility to date.

Zoho continues to build a system of experiences that focuses on every aspect of the customer journey, giving every stakeholder greater ability to add value to CX, from planning and creating diverse customer experiences to delivering and evolving them for the future.

Zoho’s CX offerings help organisations of all sizes enable employee productivity, improve stakeholder collaboration, and increase customer success.

Specifically, Zoho Desk’s integrated omnichannel approach supports entire service teams to connect with customers and with one another. On the business side, it enables high-quality consistency and reliability.

Customers, in turn, have better overall end-to-end experiences with the brand, which ultimately drives loyalty and trust.