Navigating Crisis: Small Business Survival Amidst COVID-19
Unlock Zoho’s Full Potential: The Perfect Software & Partner
Even perpetual doomsayers likely could not have predicted the wave of confusion–and businesses forced to close–in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Whether your business was forced to transition to a work-from-home model, or you lost business due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or you were simply forced to shut your doors, chances are the virus has affected you in some way.
And, whether or not you even use Zoho software, you’re probably looking for guidance to power it through this troubling time.
Fortunately, Zoho software was practically built for situations like these, even if you didn’t know it already.
How Zoho software positions itself to help businesses
Zoho is well-known for being an inexpensive business software option. And, unfortunately, this lends it a bad rap among some circles. It’s widely known that highly-priced products are seen as more valuable than lower-priced ones, even if that isn’t actually the case. And, in this case, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
For example, despite Salesforce being a household name, Zoho packs about 95% of the features of Salesforce. Furthermore, any small gaps can usually be filled by Zoho’s platform-as-a-service, Zoho Creator. But, the difference in price between Zoho and Salesforce is anything but small.
Zoho’s flagship offering, Zoho One, goes for $45/user/month.* And, that gives you nearly every app (40+) in Zoho’s arsenal. *Pricing updated June 2021
Compare that with Salesforce’s enterprise-level solution, which comes in at $150/user/month–and that’s just for the CRM! Add extra apps and the recurring price only rises. Businesses who have switched from Salesforce to Zoho know all too well about these differences in costs.
Zoho’s Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP)
Zoho already prices itself very competitively. But, the recent coronavirus pandemic has caused Zoho Corporation to take swift action to help its customers even more. Zoho knows that many of its clientele are small businesses. And, because of the size of these businesses, statistically the coronavirus outbreak affects them most. Zoho wants to do everything it can to help keep these customers in business. After all, small these businesses have been a key to Zoho’s success thus far. Furthermore, the loss of their business software wouldn’t just mean these companies would move to another platform. Rather, it could mean the end for some, if not most of them.
For these reasons, Zoho has launched the Emergency Subscription Assistance Program. This allows any severely affected Zoho customer with 25 or fewer employees to apply for completely free licensing for up to three months. While ESAP requires an application to receive help, its availability to begin with shows Zoho’s great empathy for its customers.
How about working from home? Zoho covers you there with Remotely, too.
Even if coronavirus hasn’t sidelined you completely, you’ve likely shifted at least some operations from an external office to a home office. Any business can use Zoho CRM Plus if they need a whole suite of apps, but what happens if a business needs to be a little more collaborative than CRM Plus allows?
Zoho Corporation has made their Remotely suite completely free to use through July 1, 2020. This move will surely help businesses through these troubling times. Remotely contains these apps, which focus on collaboration or general communication between team members:
- Zoho Cliq
- Zoho Meeting
- Zoho ShowTime
- Zoho WorkDrive
- Zoho Projects
- Zoho Sprints
- Zoho Assist
- Zoho Lens
- Zoho Writer
- Zoho Sheet
- Zoho Show
What can ZBrains do?
As always, we maintain our full staff of Zoho certified consultants and developers completely on-site to help with any Zoho project. No matter what you need–from consulting, training, integration, or a custom ERP app–we have the tools to help.
We don’t often recommend jumping into action, especially if we haven’t already analyzed your Zoho software and helped plan your next moves. However, if you don’t have time to spare, doing something–anything–may be miles better than doing nothing. Let us know exactly how you’d like to engage with a Zoho partner, and we’ll do our very best to make that a reality.
As a small business ourselves, we know what you’re going through, and we care about you. Above all else, stay safe, and we hope to collaborate with you soon.
