Add Online Forums to your Support Portal

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Siddharth

The best way to fully understand your customers is to go beyond their needs and identify/solve their problems. We have tried to make this easier for you in Zoho Support through the introduction of the

Forums

add-on. This add-on is powered by

Zoho Discussions. The add-on helps you setup a result oriented, online customer community where your community members can start general discussions, share ideas, report issues, ask questions etc, all under one roof.

With the Forums add-on, you can engage your customers in various ways:

Start discussion threads
Make product/service announcements
Manage your product roadmap through voting of Ideas
Convert forum posts as requests in Zoho Support and track them
and do much more

The Forums add-on supports all the features of the Zoho forum (http://forums.zoho.com/).

You can read more about the Forums Add-on at http://www.zoho.com/support/help/forums-addon.html.…

Enable Collaboration and Innovation in your Organization

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Meera Sapra

A recent

Harvard Business Review article talks about the need for people across hierarchies, functions and geographies within an organization to collaborate. Your employees should be empowered to submit their ideas and suggestions across the hierarchy. And your top management should be able to provide feedback and guidance to employees across verticals. Also, companies/teams within the same parent organization should be able to bridge differences in objectives and work together towards organizational goals.

Another aspect of collaboration required within an organization, is to tap knowledge and experience for process improvement in a large, global organization. The article suggests the need for online tools that can be employed to bridge these gaps and to enhance vertical, horizontal and global collaboration within the organization.…

Introducing ‘Zoho Discussions for Google Apps’

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Naveen

The last 2 Tuesdays saw

Zoho Reports and

Zoho Wiki debuting at the Google Apps Marketplace. The star of this week’s Google Apps Release is Zoho Discussions.

Zoho Discussions is about making decisions from discussions. The members of a community can share ideas, report problems & ask questions, in addition to other discussions from a single point. Zoho Discussions brings everything under one roof to engage the community.

Last week, we’d introduced

private communities in Zoho Discussions. Now, we’re extending this enhancement to Google Apps users as well. With Zoho Discussions’ private community, organizations can bring people together and make decisions quite easily.

Here are the highlights of Zoho Discussions – Google Apps integration,

Single Sign-On (SSO)

: Once Zoho Discussions is installed in your Google Apps domain, your users can start using it conveniently right from the universal navigation bar in Google Apps.

…

Introducing Private Communities in Zoho Discussions

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Dhan

For over an year, Zoho Discussions has been helping businesses and non-profit organizations create and foster communities that involve and empower its members and help crowd-source decision making.

One of the design goals of Zoho Discussions was to reduce the amount of technical expertise administrators needed to setup and maintain an user community. But one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that many of our customers did not find the initial setup process as easy as they’d like it to be. The main reason was that Zoho Discussions setup management had so many options and controls that it took some time to get used to.

We also realized that our customer base was broadly split into two main segments – those who wanted to setup a private community (for improving employee engagement, supporting private beta launches etc) and those who wanted to set up a public customer support community.…

Improved community membership management with Zoho Discussions: Introducing Subscriptions

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Dhan

One of the challenges of running an online community is who you invite or let in to participate.

While some communities are “open”, some other communities, as a result of their nature, tend to be a bit more vigilant about who can come in and read/post.

Zoho Discussions has for long supported membership and provides fine-grained control over who can access and participate in a conversation, but today we are building on that and making it a bit easier.

We built a nifty feature that simplifies life for community admins:

membership requests

.

Membership requests allow visitors to apply for memberships that the community admin would then evaluate and grant. If adopted for your community, this subscription feature in Zoho Discussions will help you know your users better and also help reduce spam. This is also ideal for open communities where you would like to know your users better before you allow them in to participate.…

Easy Ways to Kill Spam in Your Online Community

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Sivaranjani

In our earlier blog posts, we spoke about various features that help in
tailoring your online community for a better user engagement and
branding. Once you popularize your forum, the first thing that hits you
is spam. If not effectively prevented, unwanted comments and irrelevant
responses can drive users away and suck your time up. Zoho Discussions
has powerful spam detection and moderation features that we will explore
in this blog post.

Spam Engine: To stop spamming right at the door, Zoho Discussions has a built-in spam
engine, which automatically detects and stops most of the irrelevant
content. This content is labeled and pushed to a moderation queue where
designated forum and portal moderators can approve or reject these
content.

Captcha: Another form of
spamming is repetitive posting of valid content. Zoho Discussions
provides a way to cut this down by adding captcha option for guest
posts.…

Beyond Web Analytics: Tools to Improve Customer Support Efficiency

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Dhan

You cannot improve what you cannot measure! In this day where inbound traffic is everything for a website, webmasters can’t live without Web Analytics tools. They give you hard data about how your website was accessed, the usage patterns, user interests and trends and so on.

However, they cannot tell you semantic data about your application. For instance, Google Analytics cannot tell you the efficiency of your support reps, or the rate of participation of your customer community. It cannot tell you whether your users really “found” the answers to most of their questions or they just kept shooting in the dark till they got frustrated. It cannot tell you if ideas are languishing without votes or questions without answers. You will need special tools for that.

Zoho Discussions now has an

integrated statistics and analytics panel

that gives you just that ability.…