This is a case study of how Zoho Workplace was selected as the core communications portal for a construction company in Cyprus.

Zoho Workplace

Zoho Workplace is an all-in-one small business communications portal that includes several of Zoho's key communications and organisation apps, such as

Zoho Mail
Zoho Calendar
Zoho Tasks
Zoho Notes
Zoho Cliq
Zoho Workdrive

Zoho Mail

Obviously, email is a critical part of any business and our customer, as many others do, used to host email separately with a 3rd party email hosting provider. Although this was not an issue in itself it was problematic sometimes when there were issues in that the downtime was quite long and communication became impossible; and fixing the issues with a local company proved to be surprisingly difficult despite them being in the same city.

Zoho Mail on the other hand is a fully hosted solution on Zoho's extensive and robust server infrastructure. The uptime of Zoho mail has been superb and there has been just one temporary glitch in a few years and even that was trackable using the Zoho status monitoring website. There was no need to contact anyone as Zoho were aware of the issue as soon as it started and rectified the matter in less than an hour.

Zoho Mail itself has an extensive feature set and comes with inbuilt Calendar, Task management as well as Notes and Contacts.

It also has capability to integrate to another key app that's included in Zoho Workplace, and that is Zoho Workdrive. This means when you receive an attachment on an e-mail you can insert it into your organisational document sharing platform with just a few clicks directly from the e-mail.

Zoho Calendar

Another core part of the Zoho Mail suite is the calendar function handled by Zoho Calendar. Since using the system the entire team are now arranging their meetings and other important schedules using Zoho Calendar which can be added directly from inbound emails so that you can quickly and easily create appointments based on communications with customers or other team members.

Zoho Tasks

The entire organisation now uses the task management module to manage their internal workload, while Zoho Projects is used for client projects and time based accounting. Set the priority category and reminders for your tasks and assign them to different team members to stay on top of workload and monitor and assess your teams.

Zoho Workdrive

Zoho Workdrive is the powerful online document collaboration application from Zoho that can be used to share and control versions of all of your corporate documents as well as important customer documents.

The various teams in the organisation now use Zoho Workdrive to keep not only corporate documents such as policies, staff contracts etc, but also all of the numerous documents required for ongoing construction projects such as client contracts, building CAD designs/drawings, project images and much more.

More Zoho Apps...

Our customer is also using other Zoho apps for a full 360 degree operations on the Zoho platform.

Zoho CRM

All company sales are logged in Zoho CRM from the lead capture stage right through to the closed deals.

Leads

Leads are captured using a standard web to lead form that has been integrated to the business website.
Email templates are used for follow ups and lead conversion.
Zoho CRM is used for small, targeted email campaigns.

Sales

Being a construction company deals can have a long life cycle - many months, sometimes years - so it is also important to record all interactions with the customer and this is where they make use of the inbuilt communications/relation s modules such as tasks, Calls, Meetings and Notes.

A customised set of pipeline Stage field values means that they are able to get meaningful and accurate reports on potential and actual sales over any time period.

Zoho Projects

This is where the company runs it critical construction projects.

All project team members are allocated to their relevant projects which would include people who are both office based and on site.

Architects, Customer Support, Pre-Post Sales all use Zoho Projects in the office, using their computer and a browser. Files that are uploaded to Zoho Workdrive are synch'd to Zoho Projects,Tasks belonging to office teams are updated in real time.

On-site team members such as Project Managers, Foremen, Technicians and so on use Zoho Projects at the construction site to:

Update task status
Log issues
Upload project images
Manage resources
And more...

Office staff use the inbuilt Task timer to time their work which helps a) understand how long Tasks take and b) estimate more accurately for future work.

All of this extensive Task management gets automatically consolidated in terms of billable work, which can be cross checked and reconciled against the company's accounting system at the end of each month.

Use the 'ZohoSphere' to Manage YOUR Business

The above case study shows just a few of Zoho's applications namely Zoho Workplace combined with Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects. Zoho have dozens of other applications that can be utilised on a application basis or, better, can be included under the Zoho One licence, which gives you full access to all Zoho software, allowing you to build up your business automation process is overtime helping you to create an efficient and smooth running operation.

Click here to sign up for a trial Zoho One now and start your journey on the 'ZohoSphere'!