After a lovely Easter weekend, there was a busy week for 1 Cloud Consultants. Both Zoho and Freshworks were hosting their end user conferences in London. Zoho was Tuesday and Wednesday, with Freshworks on Wednesday and Thursday. 1 Cloud Consultants attended both. Both Freshworks and Zoho had new product releases, new feature releases but we feel it more valuable to focus on their strategy and what is driving their current and future product development.

At both User Conferences there were four key themes that are the focus of both companies' strategies:

• Customer 360
  
• Collaboration
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning
  
• One Cloud

"Customer 360" is not a new concept, it has been a desire of many large CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for many years, but it is only now becoming a reality.

Customer 360 is the concept that a customer has a number of touch points with a business, but these touch points are typically on multiple disparate systems. To deliver the best customer experience, to make informed decisions, to understand the value of your customer you need collate all this fragmented data in multiple data silos.

Bill Quinn, Managing Director, recounts advice from one of his earliest managers - Chris. Chris always said before you contact a customer, or visit a customer; review their customer record and try to understand the current customer. At the time, you could see customer details (name, address, phone, etc.), Billing data was on another system (and you needed the appropriate access), and you might see them on the internet (this was over 20 years ago with limited internet presence).

Today, Bill can go to a Single Contact record or an Account record:

• When and who last modified the record
  
• All emails sent to and received by the customer
  
• All calls made to and received by the customer (potentially call recordings as well)
  
• All Support tickets and their status (Open, Closed or On Hold)
  
• What Marketing Campaigns have been associated with that contact and how they interacted with them
  
• Invoices raised, paid and outstanding
  
• What Projects are being worked on, how many milestones have been completed and how many tasks have been completed
  
• What business Opportunities are Open, Closed (Won) or Closed (Lost)
  
• What Activities are associated - Tasks, Meetings, Customer Check Ins (Visits)
  

This is just an example of information that you can view in one single place - this is Customer 360. It allows Bill to use all available data to make informed decisions focused on the customer.

Increasingly employees are becoming more disparate - mobile working, multiple offices, home workers, etc. The challenge is creating a platform that facilitates effective communication and collaboration within a business. Employees have become used to combining Email and Instant Messaging but these are typically out of context communications. If you want to reference a support ticket, or cut and paste the customer enquiry from the CRM, etc.

Collaboration is taking Instant Messaging and using it to attach to a customer interaction to place the question in context. Imagine the scenario that a support ticket is raised and you need assistance with it. With contextual Instant Messaging, within the support ticket you could contact a colleague and ask them to review the ticket. A single line message, with the ticket associated allows the colleague to see the entire history associated with the support ticket. There is no need to cut-and-paste data back and forth. 

This is just one example, but it could be related to an Opportunity on your CRM system, a Task in Project Management, an Email received, etc

One of the big concepts with software in recent years is the concept of Artificial Intelligence. It is perceived that AI could have a detrimental impact on the job market. The reality is that it is quite the opposite. It will enhance the employee and customer experience. Employees do many manual, repetitive robotic actions that AI will replace. AI can reduce employee training time of agents by using a knowledge base to prompt for next steps. AI will enhance customer experience by delivering answers faster by self-service.

There are challenges with AI. The first is that the answer is definite or specific but there are multiple ways of asking the same question. Secondly, AI needs training - the more data it receives the more informed the decision can be.

The way to achieve Customer 360, Collaboration and effective AI is by having all your data silos integrated so that data can be collated, analysed and acted upon. If your systems are on multiple SaaS (Service As A Solution), or multiple Clouds then whilst they can be integrated the integrations can be costly, not as deep (providing all the data) and are reliant on both parties working together.

With utilising 1 Cloud, the integrations are prebuilt and quick to turn on. Data can pass between applications seamlessly. The 1 Cloud experience facilitates Customer 360 by allowing a person to view all customer touch points on one record. 1 Cloud enhances collaboration as you are relating to records within the 1 Cloud. 1 Cloud powers your machine learning by allowing all customer touch points to be analysed and acted upon.

Both Zoho and Freshworks have recognised the value of 1 Cloud and deep integrations between their applications. Either in their tools purchased separately, or purchased as part of one of their flagship products - Zoho One or Freshworks 360.