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.