Student Experience - News , Analytics and Insights

Announcing Zoho Analytics 5.0: Modern Self-service BI & Analytics Platform

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:19:45 +0000

Zoho Analytics has had a more than a decade old journey. Launched as a pioneering, cloud-only BI service in 2009 as Zoho Reports, we had Zoho Analytics 4.0 in November 2018. Since then, we have been continuously working on bringing in new functionalities to the product that help you unlock insights from continuously growing data. The culmination of which is today’s announcement, Zoho Analytics 5.0.

Broadly speaking, the Zoho Analytics 5.0 Platform comprises of,

Zoho Analytics, a self-service BI and analytics software, that is available on the cloud, on premise, embedded, and deployable in public clouds.
Zoho DataPrep, an augmented data preparation and management service, available on the cloud.
Zoho Analytics Embedded BI, offering ISVs and developers to integrate Zoho Analytics seamlessly into their product/solution offering
Zoho Analytics Marketplace, which allows partners and third-party vendors to build analytics apps on top of Zoho Analytics and market in Zoho Marketplace. Also included are Zoho Analytics Native Apps, apps built by us and natively embedded within third-party apps, and available in their marketplaces.

Let’s look into key capabilities rolling into Zoho Analytics 5.0.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/le7L5NM36uM

Zoho DataPrep

Studies indicate 80% of the time is spent on cleaning and preparing the data before analysing it. That’s where a service like Zoho DataPrep comes in. Zoho DataPrep allows you to connect, prepare, cleanse, transform, model, and catalog your data. While Zoho DataPrep is available as a standalone product, it is joined at the hip with Zoho Analytics. Zoho Analytics users can use Zoho DataPrep from within Zoho Analytics seamlessly. This integration vastly improves the ETL (extract-transform-load) capabilities of Zoho Analytics, as you can connect, clean, transform and enrich data from inside Zoho Analytics itself.

Augmented Analytics

Analytics is now becoming more and more augmented, as AI and ML technologies assist you in getting faster, better and powerful insights from your data. With Ask Zia, there’s no need to learn complex SQL querying. You can hold colloquial conversations with our smart AI assistant Zia, and get the answers you need as relevant reports. Zia understands English and Spanish (in Beta).

Zia also assists you by providing inferences for any report or dashboard. With Zia Insights, you get instant insights through smart narratives, with the click of a button.

More augmented capabilities including what-if analysis, cognitive analytics and new forecasting models are rolling into Zoho Analytics 5.0.

Data Stories

So, you have analysed the data and found some valuable inferences. And you want to present them to your audience in the right way that will provide maximum impact. That’s where crafting data stories comes in.

With Zoho Analytics 5.0, you can create immersive analytical presentations embedding reports & dashboards along with rich narrative elements into your slides. . This is possible, thanks to our seamless integration with Zoho Show.

What’s more, thanks to our easy website builder Zoho Sites, you can create purpose-built analytics specific portals, to share insights within your institution.

7 New Business App Connectors

Zoho Analytics provides easy connectors with 50+ popular business apps, that come with pre-built reports and dashboards. You can jumpstart your analytics instead of starting to build your reports from scratch. In 5.0, we are introducing 7 new connectors for Bigin, Zoho Sprints, Exact Online, Jira, LinkedIn Pages, ServiceNow, and WooCommerce.

New Dashboards Mobile App

We have had the Zoho Analytics mobile app in App Store and Play Store for a few years now. The mobile app now supports conversational analytics with Ask Zia. You can now converse with Ask Zia and get insights as answers. You can also add comments, and collaborate with your colleagues too.

Also today, as part of the 5.0 launch, we are introducing a completely immersive native app named Zoho Analytics – Dashboards. With creative gestures and interactions the app helps you quickly access and analyse your dashboards in Zoho Analytics and get insights on the go.

Other than the above, Zoho Analytics 5.0 comes packed with 60+ features. Like client portal, tabbed dashboards, import templates, windowing and granularity functions, viewer mode, word cloud chart, custom image background charts, KPI dial widgets, night mode and more.

Want to find out more about the 5.0 release? Head to our What’s New page, or register for our live webinar.

Modern student engagement decoded

Wed, 26 May 2021 09:50:36 +0000

Keeping up with Gen Y and Z

The term student engagement is quite a buzzword in today’s education and training sector. It’s been so overused that it’s often misconceived as an item on a checklist rather than an ongoing relationship between an institution and students, that depends on student preferences and behaviour. Student engagement is about actively interacting with your audience with messaging that interests, educates, or helps them and encourages two-way conversations with the institution. In simple terms, it’s just about learning and anticipating what students want and then giving it to them at the right time.

This, however, is easier said than done, especially given that most of your current and future audience are millennials and zoomers. Being digital natives, your audience has a plethora of choices, richer and faster access to information, little or zero tolerance for complicated processes, and are increasingly privacy-conscious. All this translates to a power shift, and we’ve decoded what that means for you as a business and how you can adapt to this new market reality.

Preparing for a mobile-led shift

The most significant change is that mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage, and students are more likely to look something up on their phones or tablets than a computer.

So the first step is to make your website mobile friendly and create mobile apps for major mobile OSs. Step two is to ensure your website visitors and mobile app users can reach the institution instantly for information or help, by adding live chat on the website and mobile apps. In addition, our mobile SDK, Mobilisten, helps you automatically set up contextual, personalised push notifications and even add relevant in-app messages to nurture your mobile app users.

Cross-device shopping is also a challenge that makes it difficult for institutions to maintain a consistent brand identity and experience, more so for businesses with multiple brands and qualifications. We’ve solved this with a single admin space to manage each of your brands’ multiple digital touchpoints.

Catering to the “always-connected” generation

The main requirement of student engagement is being available to existing and prospective students at the time the choose to study. This is especially challenging in the present scenario, where time and geography have become irrelevant, and prospects and students expect institutions to be reachable around the clock. The advent of chatbots has made this possible without hiring employees to cover multiple shifts, but having developers/agencies build bots for your multiple requirements is going to be expensive. We’ve solved this with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop chatbot builder that makes creating a bot as easy as drawing a flowchart!

Making AI chatbots more human

Though chatbots were invented to free up your staff from mundane tasks so they can focus on more complex ones, research shows that customers find it harder to get issues resolved by AI chatbots.

Zoho SalesIQ offers you the best of both worlds with Answer Bot— an AI-driven chatbot that can greet your prospective- and existing students and respond to small talk with engaging phrases, and even understand common queries, regardless of the tone or terms used, and answer them using your resources. At any point if the student decides to switch to a human agent, the bot can forward the chat to one of your student support team members.

Scaling as required

Running a social media or email campaign? Just deploy a dedicated chatbot to handle the new influx of traffic coming from the campaign, at no extra cost!

Personalising your messaging without over-targeting

Personalisation is considered the pinnacle of student engagement, but when you’re dealing with a more privacy-conscious generation of customers, it’s too easy for institutions to inadvertently cross the line between being helpful and just plain creepy. Zoho SalesIQ lets education providers deliver timely and relevant messaging to your most valuable leads right when they need it, like an offer for assistance during registrations, or when they’ve spent a long time trying to decide between two qualifications.

Set up automated chat invites and notifications based on the data prospective students voluntarily give you, publicly available data like company details in the case of B2B models, non-sensitive information like visit source, pages visited, time spent and actions on the site, order history and other data available on your CRM if they’re existing customers, date, time or even day of the week. You can also display a GDPR banner if your customers are in the EU.

Achieving institutional zen with a unified customer view

Many institutions fall prey to ad fatigue and endless retargetting. While it’s frustrating, it throws light on the fact that student data is still jumbled, redundant, or even mismanaged chunks of information.

Zoho SalesIQ has ready-to-use integrations with major CRM tools, help desk software, email marketing tools, analytics software, and just about everything else you use on a regular basis. This gives you a holistic view of customer data, and avoids any missteps in data management and student communication.

Widgets let institutions create custom app integrations to bring favourite apps inside SalesIQ, so you can view and manage the data right from within the app. Users can also avoid redundancies by adding an auto-sync feature to the widget, to sync all the data changes in the respective apps.

We hope this blog helps you shape a more successful student engagement strategy. Please let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any additional ideas, we’d love to hear them too!

Smaller but just as powerful: Introducing the Zoho Analytics Mobile BI app for your phone.

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:45:09 +0000

Imagine you call one of your sales executives, who’s currently on the road. You ask how the pipeline looks for the upcoming month or quarter. How cool would it be if she could pull up an app, tap around, and answer you with the latest numbers right from her mobile device?

As of today, the Zoho Analytics mobile phone app makes that possible. Zoho Analytics has been available for the iPad and Android tablets for quite some time now. Today, we add phone-compatible apps for both iOS and Android.

Here’s some of what you can do with the Zoho Analytics mobile app.

Easy Access

View all the reporting databases in Zoho Analytics that you created, and also those shared to you. Mark the dashboards & reports that you access often as Favorites. With the Recent Views tab, quickly access the views you last opened. View your reports by Folders, Types and Related Views.

Explore and interact

View reports in both portrait and landscape modes. Single tap a bar or a point in a chart, and view details in the tooltip. Double-tap a bar or a point, to view the underlying data, or do a drill-down. Interact with Legend checkboxes and see particular data series alone.

Share and collaborate

Share reports with your colleagues and clients, with permission control over what you would like them to see/do with the views you share with them.

The Zoho Analytics mobile app helps you with analytics on the go, and to get useful insights from your data, anywhere anytime, all from the palm of your hand. Try it for free from the App Store or the Play Store.