CRM Asia Solutions - Blog , Zoho Apps and Features

Introducing Breakout Rooms for more efficient collaboration in online meetings

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:14:42 +0000

A significant problem that many businesses have to deal with when having large meetings is the difficulty of also having smaller group discussions at the same time. It can be challenging for every single meeting attendee to voice their own opinions or concerns efficiently without you being overwhelmed and overloaded by everyone else. This problem is made worse in a virtual setting, when there are countless things happening at once.

Consequently, team dynamics may suffer and important ideas and suggestions may go unheard in the chaos of the meetings, which could eventually impact your business productivity. With all of this in mind, Zoho Meeting have come up with the perfect solution to improve your brainstorming and collaboration: Breakout Rooms.

What are breakout rooms?

Breakout Rooms, as the name suggests, are virtual spaces within an online meeting where meeting attendees can be divided up into smaller groups - to "break out" from the large numbers. This means that everyone participating in your meeting can be heard and can brainstorm more effectively using Breakout Rooms, because the lower numbers mean discussions and sessions are more focused.

Breakout Rooms are designed to overcome the limitations of traditional large online meetings, and are created so multiple smaller groups each have a virtual room dedicated to effective collaboration, where they can fully engage themselves without their input being lost to louder members.

How do breakout rooms make your online meetings better?

Effective and revolutionary, Zoho Meeting's Breakout Rooms provide businesses with a chance for small group interactions. Here's how this simple solution will transform your online meetings:

- Enhanced focus: Because of the smaller groups, attendees can take part in discussions that focus on specific tasks or topics, meaning that your meetings can become more productive with each team working on a different task. This targeted approach ensures that each and every one of your meeting's participants can contribute meaningfully throughout.

- Improved collaboration: Collaboration effectiveness skyrockets when using Breakout Rooms - with participants working closely with a smaller subset of colleagues, teams can build their cooperation and teamwork skills in a quieter environment and learn to become more productive and efficient.

- Inclusive engagement: Creating smaller groups within a large meeting can increase and promote inclusivity, because all attendees are allowed to contribute and engage. Each participant is given equal oppurtunities and everyone's ideas can be heard. Team members may feel more comfortable and at ease with smaller groups, fostering a more inclusive environment.

Multiple rooms, multiple use cases

Breakout Rooms offer flexible solutions to various collaboration challenges that you may face in your online meetings. Here are some common cases where using them can noticeable improve team collaboration and productivity:

- Small group discussions: Breakout Rooms are ideal for dividing meeting members into smaller groups to focus on specific tasks or topics in more depth. With multiple groups each working on a different topic, your productivity will increase dramatically.

- Team building activities: To boost the morale of your meeting attendees, why not allow them to engage in icebreaker activities and interactive games at the start of each session? Because of the lower number of colleagues, it's important that your team members are comfortable working with each other.

- Student group work: Breakout Rooms not only increase collaboration effectiveness in the workplace - they can also be used in virtual classrooms and facilitate student group work, discussions and group learning activities.

- Networking events: When used in online conferences, Breakout Rooms can provide countless oppurtunities for networking by grouping participants based on common objectives or interests. By grouping people with similarities, new connections can be made and existing bonds strengthened, all within a controlled environment.

- Feedback and review sessions: Being able to give both positive feedback and constructive criticism is of the utmost importance - especially when everyone is working on something different. Allow your meeting participants to efficiently conduct feedback and review sessions with Zoho Meeting's Breakout Rooms.

Here at Zoho Meeting, we're taking online meetings to the next level. We're fully committed to providing businesses with the tools and features they need to improve collaboration efficiency, no matter where in the world they are. And so we've created Breakout Rooms, where your teams can build deeper connections, take part in meaningful discussions and make significant progress.

Sign up to try our Breakout Rooms feature today and experience the difference it can make in your team meeting's productivity and collaboration.

Zoho Workplace Business Communications Portal

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:47:45 +0000

Consolidate Business Communications Apps with Zoho Workplace

Zoho Workplace is a single sign on, one license app from Zoho offering a superb selection of Zoho's best communications apps in a single portal for all of your business users. One license, multiple apps, multiple users... That's Zoho Workplace!

Free Trial

Click Here to Start a FREE Trial

More Information

Click here for more information on how Zoho Workplace can benefit your business.

Zoho People Includes Integrated Learning Management System

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 10:58:23 +0000

Zoho LMS Integrates to Zoho People

Zoho People is expanding with the inclusion of Payroll integration but also a powerful Learning Management System module (that is also available as a standalone app), which can be used to create robust e-training courses for your teams. These can then be tracked and referenced within Zoho People for a complete end-to-end training and training assessment program.

Seamless Employee Training

Zoho People's Learning Management System allows trainers in your organisation to create a learning culture within your organisation that stimulates staff to learn according to their style and their pace.

Zoho Learning Management System facilitates:

Self Paced Learning - allow employees to learn in a style and pace that suits them best.
Blended Learning - a combination of various learning styles such as self paced, virtual and traditional classroom style

End to End Course Customisation

Zoho LMS contains a powerful course builder function allowing trainers to create courses on multiple topics, for multiple learners.

Course Builder

Courses are allocated modules and modules have within them topics as well as materials for upload and download.

Learning Plans

The LMS helps you design an effective learning plan by combining a string of courses which will help attendees progress though the skills assigned.

Course Schedules and Notifications

Schedule and manage e-learning. Monitor enrolment and trigger notifications for students. Show courses in staff calendars and more.

Engage Your Learners

Zoho People LMS has functionality for

Interactive classrooms using Zoho Meeting
Testing for learner assessment
Discussion forums for open ended discussions, analysis and to help learners understand concepts
Feedback for improvement of courses
Management suggestions to allow management to suggest course ideas and even enroll team members on courses they feel would be of benefit.

Learning Analytics

Zoho LMS comes with a wide variety of reports to give insight into learner trends, course performance, trainer ratings and top performing employees, much of this of course comes into effect in the other modules of Zoho People in terms of employee training management and performance tracking. It's all done right there, in Zoho People!

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Zoho Sign - e-Signature Software from Zoho

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:02:21 +0000

Zoho's latest online business app is an e-signature software solution to allow small businesses to electronically sign documentation online.

This is just one more example of how Zoho really listen to their customer feedback as we know this has been a very popular request from users of Zoho CRM and other Zoho software through the years, who often struggled using external software to e-sign the documents, which lacked the functionality to integrate to Zoho CRM.

Zoho Sign is an online document signing app that can be integrated with other Zoho software such as Zoho CRM and also Zoho People which is there online HR information system software.

You can use this to sign documents such as quotes/invoices, contracts, policies, training records and more.

The software allows you to create your signature online using inbuilt functions such as a handwritten signature generator, or by writing the signature yourself on-screen, or uploading it from a JPEG file.

You can then upload the document that needs to be signed and then send it to the people who need to sign it, as well as specify the order that it needs to be signed.

These people will each receive an alert when they at required to sign the document and they will be able to apply the signature so that the document gets sent to the next person in the approval process.

There is even a feature to have a kind of 'time out' function so that the document becomes invalid if one of the signees does not sign it in time.

This kind of app is invaluable for any kind of business that has documentation that requires a 'sign off' as part of the business process.

Obtaining signatures on documents can often be a time-consuming part of any business process, often causing bottlenecks and delays, so this can be considered an important area to increase efficiency and certainly internal and even external documents can be signed in this manner and synchronised with the CRM lead or contact the document is associated to much faster than sending PDFs, printing them, signing and scanning and sending back.

We're excited to see where this app will go and are really pleased that Zoho have introduced this e-sign software to their rapidly expanding sweet of online business tools.

Contact Us

Contact us here for more details on how Zoho Sign can be implemented in your business and/or integrated to Zoho CRM to make your business operations more efficient.

Add Multiple Attachments in Zoho Books or Invoice Email Notifications

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 08:59:30 +0000

We thought we would announce this small but useful enhancement on Zoho Books/Zoho Invoice, not only because it is a useful function but because we like how it demonstrates how Zoho listen to their customers and take valuable feedback on board to improve their software.

A customer of ours one day asked whether they could - instead of including lengthy terms and conditions in an invoice template - include them as an attachment on the email that send the invoice.

Different terms and conditions, could be attached to different email templates, rather than trying to remember to attach them when sending the invoice.

We suggested this to Zoho and within a week, they had introduced this enhancement.

You are now able to add attachments to the email template itself:

These can be Terms and Conditions, standard contracts, a company introduction pack, or anything else you want to send to your customers in the quotation/invoice process.

If you have different contracts or Terms and Conditions documents, depending on what you are selling, then you can create different email templates.

This example is just one way that user feedback has helped to improve a Zoho product and we hope you will like this new function!

For more information on Zoho Books/Zoho Invoice, please contact us here.

Log your Expenses on the Move

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 16:50:06 +0000

I went on the train the other day on a business trip and was wondering how I can log my expenses on the go.

Then I remembered that we use Zoho Expense within our business. Problem solved!

Zoho expense allows you to add expenses such as travel, meals and other costs whilst your on the go, using your mobile device.

So, keen to capture all of the expenses for the day before forgetting them or losing the receipts, I used to Zoho Expense to log my expenses by snapping a picture of the receipt and logging the basic information including the expense amount and category and date.

And with that, zapped it in to the Cloud in just a few clicks!

All of the expense information is updated in the central database and can be accessed immediately by the accountant back in the office. Thus there is no need for me to get back to the office and laboriously key in the information.

Zoho expense is the small business expense tracking application from Zoho.

Add expenses
Categorise expenses
Capture receipts
Send receipts from email
Report on expenses
And more...

Please contact us for more information here about Zoho Expense