Zoho Launches Backstage and Zoho One Updates
Zoho today announced a new event management product, Backstage, and three updates for the Zoho One platform. The Backstage tool aims to help in the planning, promoting, and running of enterprise events, with features designed for before, during, and after an event.
The new tool includes a website builder for creating a dynamic event website quickly and easily, an agenda builder for creating event schedules, a feature for managing speakers and sponsors, a promotion tool for increasing event reach, a ticket-sales-monitoring tool via an integration with Eventbrite, and a custom branded event mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
Backstage’s event-day features include a centralized content library for presentations via integration with Zoho Docs and Zoho Show, self-selected schedules for attendees, a tool for audience engagement during presentations via integration with Zoho ShowTime, a feature for creating an online event community, and the ability for staff to check in attendees with a single click on the web dashboard or the mobile app.
Post-event, organizers can use the tool’s analytics to measure a range of key performance indicators, from engagement statistics for individual sessions to attendance metrics for the entire event. It also has the ability to gather feedback from attendees via integration with Zoho Survey.
Backstage will available as part of a Zoho One subscription and also as a stand-alone product, says Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho.
The three updates for Zoho One include Zia for Zoho One, new dashboard functionality, and a new search capability. Zia, an AI-powered assistant that was first introduced by Zoho in 2016, is being extended to Zoho One and can operate across multiple applications, gathering data from different departments to deliver accurate contextual information. “Because Zoho One is integrated across the board, Zia can give you cross-functional information,” Vegesna says.
A new analytics tab in Zoho One provides analytics across Zoho’s suite of business apps, and a number of out-of-the-box dashboards are featured, including ones for marketing, sales, and customer support. “By default, because Zoho One has all the information across various departments, we have all the data. So instead of somehow having to build a ton of reports and dashboards, we by default are building out-of-the-box dashboards across functions,” Vegesna says.
Finally, the new search functionality enables users to search across all of their Zoho apps. “Now, in the context of Zoho One, if you search for something it will display all the information across various applications,” Vegesna explains. “When you search for something, it’s important that the results shown [are] for the data that only you have access to…so to do that we had to understand every single application’s access control for every single user and then provide the results.”