Small business teams need connection to collaborate.

Think one place to share email, spreadsheets, documents, calendars and notes. Many tools offer all this stuff and more, of course.

But small businesses also need it all on a budget.

Zoho continues to build onto its own collaboration and productivity suite with all these aims in mind. And for a service that starts as low as $1 per user per month and offers more robust plans at between $3 and $6 per user per month, prepare to be amazed at what you get.

“We’re really trying to make Zoho Workplace the most flexible collaboration suite in the market,” says Rakeeb Rafeeque, head of market strategy for Zoho Workplace.

And flexible seems like just the right word for it.

Zoho Workplace Gives Your Team a New Home

Zoho Workplace bills itself as “a beautiful new home for your team’s best work.” That new home has everything you need. But you also get the option to move the furniture around anyway you want.

So turn the key and look inside. The best phrase for how the rooms are laid out in your team’s new home seems to be “open concept.”

“One interesting part about it is that all of these apps are also connected into each other,” explains Rafeeque.

Say you run an automotive ecommerce store in Indianapolis. Or maybe you operate a burger franchise in Fresno. Just go into your main dashboard in the morning.

You find a monthly financial report in Spreadsheets. You read a message from an important supplier in your email. Then you open Calendar to check the time for the morning’s first meeting.

And you check all these things from just one place.

“So we’re not asking you to open your email on one side, your chat on the other side, your files on the other side and then kind of figure out what you’re supposed to do by juggling through all these multiple tabs and windows,” says Rafeeque.

Instead, Zoho Workplace offers one “pane of glass” through which to see everything that’s happening. Zoho calls this dashboard the “center of gravity” for your business.

And it really changes how you and your team collaborate and keep track of what comes next.

Sounds easy, right? We thought so!

Within Zoho Workplace you find a variety of individual applications covering email, collaboration, video conferencing, texting, telephone and employee engagement.

Take a look at some of the key application suites that make Zoho’s productivity platform a standout.

Zoho’s Email Suite Gives Enterprise Scale at Small Business Price

Imagine an email suite on par with the ones your biggest competitors use. But that suite delivers for a cost well within your small business budget.

Open Zoho’s Email Suite, an integral part of the Zoho Workplace experience. You might first think this seems like part of a much more expensive enterprise grade platform.

Well, yes and no. Zoho’s email suite brings robust functionality at a level comparable with more expensive enterprise tools.

That includes Zoho’s robust security and spam protection. The company’s data and threat protection detects and eliminates threats like phishing, malware or spoofing emails from ever reaching your employee’s inbox.

This protection also prevents email accounts used by your employees from being hacked into and data from that email being compromised or stolen.

And Zoho offers a scalable service any enterprise would consider impressive.

The real difference comes down to price – as low as $1 per person for the email alone.

And just look at the features!

With Zoho Mail, every member of your team gets an enterprise grade custom domain hosted scalable email inbox.

This comes with its own email calendar and task manager.

For example, suppose a client shoots you an email containing an important date for an upcoming meeting. You can highlight that date in your email and with one click add it to your calendar.

Or create a simple to do list using the Tasks feature. Before this client meeting you need to create a list of important product features, create a slide deck then create a brief explanation video.

How do you keep track of all this – and remember to do it? Well, Zoho Mail’s task feature allows you to create a checklist so you won’t forget.

And all of this comes with Zoho’s trademark security ensuring communications aren’t compromised and your inbox stays free of spam.

Zoho’s Content Collaboration Suite Gives Teams a Place to Create

Imagine the marketing department of your Phoenix-based software company needs to pull together a new ebook to use as a lead magnet for a new email campaign.

To complete it, they need not only images from your latest corporate event but data from your sales department and a list of features from your product development team.

The sales team hastily pieces together some spreadsheets to be turned into more attractive graphics for the ebook. And your product team creates a document giving a rough overview of your new platform. Meanwhile, the photos are uploaded one by one by the team who ran the event.

Your various departments share all this stuff very quickly and easily in a brilliant content collaboration suite offered as part of Zoho Workplace. The achievement proves all the more impressive because of the fact that your marketing department is in the Philippines, your sales team is in Eastern Europe, and your event was held in New York City!

If your marketing, sales, and product development team serve as the brain and nervous system of your business, then Zoho Workdrive serves as the beating heart.

Zoho’s content collaboration software offers a document and spreadsheet management system allowing teams to create and share files quickly.

It also offers a desktop sync feature for pulling up documents from your own local drive and placing them in the collaborative space.

Finally, it features Zoho’s office suite equipped with a document editor including a word processor and tools to create both spreadsheets and presentations.

Zoho’s Unified Communication Suite Gets Your Team Talking

Of course, communication remains one of the most critical components of collaboration.

So any platform aiming to help your teams to work together must help them talk together too.

Zoho Cliq accomplishes this by bringing together video conferencing, voice, chat and more.

“We’d really like to see Zoho Cliq as the center of the user experience,” says Rafeeque. “It’s most likely the first app a user opens in the morning among the workplace apps.”

The app offers not just video and voice chat but also a telephoning system – plus the texting so ubiquitous in today’s business and social settings.

Imagine you run a fast fashion brand based in Miami with manufacturing in Malaysia. Overnight  (your time) some questions come in about a new line of swim wear you’re developing.

You respond instantly via text and if necessary plan to hop on a call later this evening when it’s early morning in Kuala Lumpur.

Next you text your marketing team in New York City and the company managing your ecommerce site in the Bay Area. You set up a video conference call for later that day to discuss strategies for rolling out the new swimwear line on your website and on social media.

All these communications, across the country and around the world, happen through various tools all located within the Zoho Unified Communication suite.

“It’s really like a virtual office where you talk to each other,” Rafeeque says.

The platform allows you to check co-workers’ status to determine whether they are in a meeting, on a call or available to talk.

Thus, the Zoho communication suite allows you to interact with co-workers around the world as easily as if they worked in the next cubicle.

Zoho Employee Engagement Builds Culture Even Among Remote Teams

Ever since Covid 19, remote work powered by technology continues to grow.

Both businesses and employees recognize the benefits and pitfalls.

For employees, remote work offers flexibility. You choose where to live and eliminate long punishing commutes. But this new way of working also robs employees of the social interaction and camaraderie offered by the office.

For businesses, remote employees represent lower overhead with less need for office space and on-site resources. But they also present challenges. Businesses need to rethink how to measure productivity and consider new ways to build cohesive company culture.

Zoho’s Employee Engagement Suite, Zoho Connect, helps enhance the benefits of remote work while addressing some of the difficulties.

For example, the Forums feature allows employees to share something a bit more personal with fellow employees. You might tell others about  a cool trip you took recently, a poem you found inspiring or a piece of everyday wisdom you find helpful in life.

Posts in Forums take the place of a conversation you might have had with some co-workers in the breakroom or standing around the water cooler.

But also consider posting about a new project launch or something else you’re doing for work. This way Forums also allows other employees to share in your sense of accomplishment.

“It’s also a way for the leadership to stay in touch with the rest of the company,” Rafeeque explains.

Consider Zoho Connect’s Townhall feature. It allows business owners to address the whole company at once in a virtual setting. At the same time, employees get a chance to send in questions about the company’s direction.

This gives employees the feeling of being more strongly invested in the company. But it also offers you as a business leader an unvarnished insight into your employees’ thoughts and concerns.

What Sets Zoho Workplace Apart?

When comparing Zoho Workplace with collaboration and productivity suites from the competition, It helps to look at the flexibility Zoho offers.

You started as a small business with 10 to 20 employees. But consider that with Zoho when you reach a team of 300 to 400, no one will force you to switch to a more expensive plan. That represents a big difference from others in the market, says Rafeeque.

Not only that, but Zoho allows businesses to mix and match plans for their team members. Maybe you operate a logistics company or an HVAC business. Drivers and repair teams in either of these businesses need email but not a full collaborative suite.

With Zoho Workplace you can buy a less expensive “mail lite” plan for these team members and save the more comprehensive and expensive plan for the back office team.

In fact, Rafeeque says, this happens to be what 30 to 40 percent of the more than 450,000 businesses already using Zoho Workplace already do.

Zoho says surveys of these businesses show an average of 60% savings when switching to Workplace from other leading collaboration suites.

Cool AI Features Round Out the Platform

Zoho also incorporates its own Zia AI platform and OpenAI functionality into Workplace with some interesting results.

For example, stop banging your head against the keyboard trying to come up with the perfect turn of phrase for that next email. Simply tell Workplace what you want to say and let its email generation feature do the rest.

Avoid reading every email in a thread or the full conversation in a chat you’ve just been added to. Let Workplace’s AI feature summarize the conversation for you.

Workplace’s AI tools also allow you to create documents and presentations with a few prompts. Or take a photo of a budget report or list of customers and watch as Workplace’s AI organizes the data into a spreadsheet.

In addition, Workplace’s AI Writing Assistant tells you whether you’ve used too many run-on sentences, whether you’re using passive or active voice and how readable your message might be.

Meanwhile, Zoho’s Message Assistant in Cliq not only tells you about spelling and grammar errors in your text messages. It also gauges whether the text you’re about to send comes across as too angry.

“Hey, calm down, bro!”

Workplace’s AI even offers image generation. So with a few prompts, let your design department know exactly what you want that graphic or T-shirt design to look like.

Final Thoughts

Small business teams need a place to collaborate these days, even if they find themselves in different cities – or different countries.

Meanwhile, small businesses, or those just getting started, need to control costs. They require the tools of an enterprise company without its financial resources.

Zoho Workplace addresses this paradoxical need with a platform that does it all – and at a low cost.

Email, instant messaging, phone systems, document sharing and design, townhalls, forums, spreadsheets, presentation creation and more: you find it all here.

And remember the robust AI tools to help you create and perfect your interactions with other employees.

Yes, Zoho Workplace brings everything you need to collaborate and improve your productivity together in one place.

Take a look at Zoho’s Workplace today – or call the Zoho sales team for more details.

This article, “Zoho Workplace Offers Premium Collaboration at Lower Cost” was first published on Small Business Trends