ZohoDay 2025 offered the possibility for some good conversations with Zoho enterprise customers about their journey with Zoho. Another in-depth conversation I had during this event was with Adrian Castellanos of Selectra.

Selectra is a French company that was founded in 2007. It specializes in helping customers, mainly consumers, compare and move between energy providers. From this segment, the company has expanded into other segments, with the mission to make the managing of utility bills simpler, cheaper, and greener. The company has more than 2,000 employees and is active in 17 countries across Europe, APAC and America.

As Selectra’s business model is highly digital and fast moving, it requires strong, ideally real-time analytics capabilities to provide its services. Due to operating in different countries and different verticals, reporting processes have been based on Microsoft Excel, with these Excels differing across countries and even across verticals.

Castellanos says that Selectra had “3 different countries, each one with several verticals. And the reporting was Excel. We had Excel for everything. Each department had their own Excels, their own reports. And you had managers spending two, three hours each week to update all their reporting. If they had to create a new one, they could spend one week doing only that. People that were more valuable doing their actual managers roles or if they were working with interns. Okay, it was the intern. But the interns need to learn the real work and not just the reporting. So, we require something. Hey, let's automatize this. We are losing too much time. We are losing uh work hours uh each week just to keep up and it's not even that good because at the end you do it once a week.”

In short, Selectra urgently required an analytics solution to automate the reporting requirements.

Here, you can watch the complete conversation with Adrian.

Selectra investigated a number of possible solutions including Power BI, Tableau and Metabase. Being a Zoho CRM customer the company ultimately settled on Zoho Analytics as it is well integrated and offers an easy-to-understand UI. In Castellanos words, “We had different options PowerBI, Tableau; we were already using a little bit of Metabase the open-source BI tool. The engineers love it in the company, but it requires a lot of knowledge, and we choose Zoho for two reasons. First, the native integration with CRM, which has been our CRM since 2015 and was where the big majority of our data was stored. Well, the having a native integration with it made it great. It was one headache less and making transition really fast and implementation super-fast. And the second one was that the UI is not simple, but easy to understand. Drag and drop. Take it, put it, you have it everything.”

The positive working relationship with Zoho helped to make this decision, too. “We have always had the feeling that they hear our feedback, and they implement solutions for that, or in case they couldn't implement it because maybe it was too specific or whatever. At least they were interested in looking for workarounds and other options.”

Although the integration with Zoho CRM made the initial implementation easy and fast, Selectra encountered and overcame a number of issues during and after the implementation project. It was far from a slam dunk. Specifically, the replication of the CRM data into Zoho Analytics and the recreation of the existing reports took considerable time, which partly had to do with a lack of data standardization. This lack of standards became apparent during the recreation of the reports, when the team found out that different countries and verticals measured KPIs differently, which led to inconsistencies in the reporting. “When I started migrating reports and getting the external reports and trying to replicate them into Zoho, I failed terribly doing that because I was not matching the same data that those reports were providing and I realized that that was just because we didn't have a standard, we didn't have a standardization of KPIs and how to measure things, and each vertical each country was measuring in their own way. We had to actively establish the standard.”

Of course, this also led to trust issues, in addition to resistance to change. Overcoming them took some effort for training and documentation and, most of all, transparency and continuous communication.

The biggest problem emerged after about a year. With increasing reporting requirements, it became clear that the CRM data structures didn’t give the necessary granularity of data. “And what happened afterwards, like one year after, is that no one in the company was happy with Zoho. It was not providing the data that they required. We realized that our CRM data structure was really bare bones, and we needed something more. So, we went through this process of transformation; we are still in that process of transformation in some verticals because it's really difficult. It's a big project.”

Lastly, the increased use of Zoho Analytics showed that the management of the solution became an issue. With approximately 150 dashboards with between three and twenty different reports, it became difficult to maintain control over the workspace. This has been addressed with Zoho and is being solved.

The outcomes

Zoho Analytics is well in use now, in spite of its initial and ongoing challenges. The time to create new reports has gone down considerably and Selectra achieved a near-time reporting. This allows for faster and better decision making.

Due to the initial scope of the project, Selectra also gained an additional benefit due to the need of KPI standardization across regions. Zoho Analytics has become the single source of truth for Selectra.

Key takeaways

Selectra successfully transferred its reporting requirements from Excel to Zoho Analytics. Thanks to its native integration into Zoho CRM, the initial setup went fast.

It is important to plan and prepare the setup of an analytics solution very carefully, to ensure company-wide definitions of KPIs.

Analytics is only as good as the underlying data. An analytics project has an impact on the source systems. Increasing reporting requirements can make it necessary to have more complex source data structures.

Change management and user training are key activities. Constant communication, documentation, and user involvement are important for project success.

The News

On September 12, 2024, Zoho released a new, AI-rich version of Zoho Analytics that brings self-service BI to any persona in business.

The release added more than 100 features and now offers powerful AI and ML capabilities. These enable diagnostic insights, predictive analytics, and automatic report and dashboard generation. “Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions. The new version of Zoho Analytics has added power, intelligence, and flexibility to serve a broader range of businesses and users than competitors in the market.”

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform now offers more than 500 connectors to other systems, including streaming analytics.

Overall, the new release offers new capabilities across four main categories:

• Data Management Hub: Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights to accelerate business success
• BI Infusion with Generative AI: Zoho Analytics has introduced Generative AI capabilities across the BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas.
• Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML): Zoho Analytics now features the DSML Studio, allowing users to simply and quickly build custom machine learning models, which, for example, analyze or predict customer churn. n of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas.
• Platform Extensibility: Zoho Analytics is more deeply extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. Zoho Analytics is a composable platform on which any analytical solution can be built.

Alun Rafique, CEO and Co-Founder of Market Dojo says about the new Zoho BI and Analytics Platform that "as developers, Zoho Analytics 6.0's new AutoML capabilities caught our attention immediately. Our team is currently working on a model to analyze and predict customer churn, among other projects. Zia Insights' diagnostic capabilities have been a game- changer as well, helping us understand the underlying causes of a spike or drop in sales or performance so we can take quick action. Again, as solutions providers, it's critical we understand what's working and what's not within our own company before helping other businesses and professionals. Zoho Analytics 6.0 continues to give us that insight and more. Ask Zia' is another useful feature. With a simple prompt, I'm able to get the right insights I need instantly. The new chart types are amazing, and I'm particularly impressed with the racing and sunburst charts."

The bigger picture

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform has its origins in 2009 as one of the first self-service cloud BI platforms. It can be installed behind firewalls locally or can be deployed on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, it is available as an embedded platform that can be leveraged by other vendors. Originally, it was aimed at line-of-business users and in the meantime has evolved into a full-blown BI platform with around 17,000 customers, as of August 2024. Within the Zoho One suite, it is used by 70,000 business on a daily basis. This makes Zoho Analytics the second-most used app, after Zoho CRM, of the Zoho One suite.

The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform covers the complete analytics workflow from data preparation through visualization and exploration. It addresses challenges that a broad range of users, from data scientists and developers to line-of-business users, have.

This new Zoho Analytics release features more than 100+ updates, including new visualizations, enhanced dashboard building, audit and admin controls, revamped mobile apps, right-to-left (RTL) support, and more.

The new version of the Zoho BI and Analytics Platform shall address five key challenges, namely:

• Data velocity and diversity
• Data management and -governance
• Complex analytical needs
• Limited adoption of analytics caused by diverse user needs
• Rapid technology changes.

Zoho addresses these challenges using the four different categories listed above.

1. Deepening the data and integration management using a powerful data management hub to establish a strong data and data management foundation
2. Infusing AI, particularly generative AI, across the platform to accelerate BI adoption
3. Increasing the ability to build machine learning models for analytics workloads by making this capability available to a broader user audience
4. Enhancing the platform’s extensibility to serve more use cases.

My point of view and analysis

As my colleagues Brian Sommer and David Smith said in an article by Lynn Greiner on CIO.com, the Zoho BI and analytics platform has some key strengths, including the deep integration into the whole Zoho suite of applications while simultaneously offering “some 500 integrations to other firms’ software products and data”, which makes it a very good platform for generating insight from disparage sources. In combination with Zoho’s own and the ability to leverage external AI, this can lead to strongly improved business analyses and forecasts.

With the help of decision intelligence that answers the very important question “why” and recommendation, immediate value can get created for business users.

Lastly, the strong support of very different user personas helps in making powerful analyses available throughout the enterprise.

You can download and read my full analysis on the Zoho BI and Analytics Platform directly from the Zoho site.

Disclosure: My report “One Platform to Help them All – The Zoho Analytics Platform” was commissioned by Zoho. Zoho did not and did not try to influence the analysis part of the report in any way.

The news

On January 8, 2024, Zendesk announced the acquisition of Klaus, “the industry leading AI-powered quality management platform”.

With AI driving a rapid increase in customer service interactions it is necessary for customer service teams to become more efficient while maintaining their quality of service. This is accomplished by a combination of digital and human agents across an increasing number of channels. Ensuring good quality requires a QA solution that is capable of scoring 100 percent of customer interactions, which is what Klaus’s AI is capable of. In doing this, it “pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations, and necessary follow-ups. According to Zendesk, most QA software does handle only one to two percent of all customer interactions.

With workforce enablement management capabilities, Klaus enables the identification of knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities with the goal of improving agent performance and productivity. The result is higher customer satisfaction.

According to Martin Kōiva, CEO and founder of Klaus, “Zendesk and Klaus share a vision of Ai-led, personalized CX with businesses fully anticipating and acting on their customers’ needs. QA software plays a critical role in this, ensuring consistency, assessing both human and digital agent performance and providing actionable insights for strategic planning. As part of Zendesk, we will continue to build and deliver thes crucial capabilities, but now at an even greater scale”.

The bigger picture

Customer service personnel works in a high-pressure environment with lots of turnover; even worse, as frontline workers, they are often the first ones to deal with customers who are already less than amused – equipped with tools that are not helpful, either. At the same time, partly due to the high attrition rates, agents often lack the training and experience to deal with difficult situations and do not have the contacts to find relevant information fast.

What they need is being able to concentrate on the “hard cases”, easy access to the relevant information, ideally without the need to use multiple browser tabs, good training and coaching, and empowerment.

In addition, the increasing need for automation, that is caused by a shortage of available personnel as well as increasing customer demands for availability, leads to an increased proliferation of chatbots. At the same time, customers do not trust into AI, as the last state of the connected customer (registration required) report by Salesforce found out.

My analysis and point of view

After the acquisition of Tymeshift last year and the provision of “ready-to-run” AI supported bots, Zendesk is continuing on its path to provide a very rounded customer service platform.

The emphasis on coaching customer service agents is great – and important – to see. Agents are already some of the most monitored and measured workers around, so they will be glad to see some help instead of just feeling surveilled. Especially, as there is so much attrition going on. Businesses that understand that a better trained and enabled team increases agent motivation and therefore in all likelihood the individual and team performance. This has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and with that on business outcomes. Zendesk now can support this better than before.

This is also something that was found in the recent Customer Experience Horizons report by Genesys. 70 percent of respondents will invest into AI-based coaching and training recommendations for their personnel with still almost 60 percent looking into implementing AI-based performance monitoring and evaluation solutions.

Being in times of AI, the ability to also analyze and especially improve the performance of digital agents becomes more and more important. With Klaus, Zendesk is now better able to identify customer service bots’ “knowledge deficiencies”. In my eyes, the next important step from here is to (semi-)automatically reduce these deficiencies, supported by generative AI. This, based on actionable analytics. Why is this important? Because the performance of both, human and digital agents, highly depends on a well-performing knowledge base.  I am interested in seeing how this topic evolves. Embedding Klaus in the fold, certainly should help taking the first steps by helping to find out what the relevant customer and organizational data is, and to initiate steps in improving the state of this data.

But again, looking at the needs of customer service agents, businesses that pursue helping their agents are now in an even better position when using Zendesk.

• Combined BI Platform Administration with Security and User Administration
• Modified Data Source Connectivity to Data Source Connectivity and Ingestion
• Combined Publish Analytics Content and Collaboration and Social BI to Publish, Share and Collaborate on Analytic Content
• Added Visual Appeal to Ease of Use

• Smart Data Discovery
• Platform Capabilities Workflow Integration

• A drastic advancement of Microsoft and Tableau making them, especially Microsoft, the undisputed leaders of the pack
• Salesforce and Sisense jumped big time from the Niche Players into the Visionaries quadrant
• Clearstory Data moved up in terms of Completeness of Vision while TIBCO Software and IBM moved up on the Ability to Execute axis
• Alteryx, Pentaho and Logi Analytics dropped off the Visionaries quadrant and became Niche Players
• With Zoomdata we see a new player in the Visionaries Quadrant
• We are welcoming Oracle back in the Quadrant as a Niche Player

Microsoft

Tableau

Qlik

Salesforce

Clearstory Data

IBM

Sisense

TIBCO Software

Zoomdata

But wait, that cannot be all!

Some Observations

My PoV