Zoho ramps up its collaboration platform Cliq, launches smart conference rooms solution

Zoho, the global technology company, today announced that it has grown by 37% in India, one of its fastest growing markets, in 2022. The company also launched Cliq Rooms, a smart conference rooms solution, and announced new updates to Zoho Cliq, its communication and collaboration platform, that will enable it to further boost its upmarket momentum. These announcements were made on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company’s annual user conference, held at Bengaluru this year.

Seamless collaboration across functions helps solve the problem of data silos, and also allows for better business continuity and operational efficiency. The improved platform capabilities of Cliq, enables cross-functional collaboration in organisations.

“Zoho Cliq is the most refined collaborative platform in the world. Zoho offers the operating system for business and we call Cliq the operating system for Zoho. The entire functionality of the Zoho suite is increasingly available through Cliq, with its beautiful messaging interface. This allows employees across a large organisation (like Zoho Corp. itself) to communicate and collaborate, provide data in real time to apps, and consume reports, all from the world-class interface, across the desktop and mobile platforms,” said Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Co-founder of Zoho Corp.

“With this launch, Zoho Cliq provides a robust platform that can enable employees to perform most of their tasks right from within the app, whether it is resolving a customer issue or approving expenses. This can help organisations, especially ones in the medium and large segment, improve both employee experience and customer experience by bringing in the key functions from front-end and back-end apps into the Cliq interface,” added Vembu.

Zoho Cliq is one of the most used apps in Zoho One. As Cliq is maturing as a platform, it has seen a 30% increase in user migration from Slack and MS Teams in 2022. According to a report, the revenue of the Indian collaboration software market is expected to be US$275.50 million by 2028. The solution has been completely developed in India, and is a part of Zoho’s R&D efforts in building a unified technology stack, that will in turn allow the company to offer unparalleled user experience.

For a distributed workforce, Cliq offers a customisable interface that can be changed to different languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada (with more languages coming soon), improving accessibility. Live translation is provided for various Indian as well as international languages that helps users interact with internal and external users from other regions.

With the latest updates, Zoho Cliq offers the following:

Expanding platform capabilities: Zoho Cliq offers low-code extensibility that allows developers to build and run custom apps on Cliq (up to 1 million rows). Unlike competitors, Cliq has its own custom database, allowing developers to run their apps in a serverless fashion. They can also extend the platform and create workflows to third-party applications using Connections, which simplifies the process of external integrations for developers. Through Schedulers, developers can create workflows that will allow users to pull regular updates from a Zoho or third-party application, and push data back into the app concerned from within the Cliq interface.

Smart conference rooms solution: With Cliq Rooms app for Android TV, users can enrich their meeting experience by scheduling meetings for physical conference rooms, connecting to the TV audio and video, projecting screen, and also conducting hybrid meetings. Unlike its competitors, Cliq Rooms works with any Android TV. With Cliq Rooms, users can also connect their A/V input to their phones or laptops.

Run live events: Organisations can run internal virtual events on Cliq. The organisers can choose who will appear on stage, share posters in-between sessions, and ask questions to the audience. Different communication channels can be set up between the presenters and the organisers as well as the presenter and the audience. Attendees can join the events right within Cliq’s web interface, mobile apps or watch from the comfort of their home with the Cliq TV app.

Compliance with industry regulations through eDiscovery, Data Retention Policy (DRP) and audit logs: Through e-discovery module in Cliq, businesses can access, remove, and recover data as needed. They can create data retention policies to determine how long the data can be retained before deletion. They can also ‘hold’ data in case of an investigation. Audit logs record all critical actions performed within Cliq, and can be used for investigating suspected data breaches and tracking unintentional modifications to the admin console. These functionalities help organisations comply with various industry regulations.

AI functionalities: Through Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, users can get meeting summary, create action items as tasks in Zoho Projects and set follow-up reminders from within Cliq. Zia also acts as a writing assistant, helping users craft, polish, and proofread messages. Users can also get sentiment analysis using Zia.

Zoho Momentum in India

Zoho’s growth in India is driven by its diverse portfolio of products and suites that is seeing increased upmarket as well as mass-market adoption. The top products driving the growth are Zoho One, Zoho CX suite (CRM and CRM Plus), Zoho People, Zoho Books and Zoho Workplace. The industries witnessing adoption of Zoho in the country are: IT Hardware, BFSI, manufacturing, education and retail. Zoho has also grown its partner network in India by 30% y-o-y. To support its rising upmarket growth in India, the company has opened sales offices in ‌Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Hyderabad, and also expanded its SI partner network.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Cliq is available for use, with the Unlimited plan starting at ₹36/user/month. The newly launched features will be available from November 2023 in its enterprise edition offered at ₹200/ user/month. Zoho Cliq also has a free edition. For more information, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/cliq/pricing.html

Zoho Privacy Pledge 

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/privacy-commitment.html

About Zoho

With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 15,000 employees. For more information, please visit: www.zoho.com