At Zoholics Mexico, Zoho has launched Zoho One Essentials on the Mexican market. Zoho One Essentials is targeted at Micro and Small businesses and has a price point to match. In Mexico, the cut-down Zoho One suite costs $180 MXN per month per user (approximately US$8.8). The price point is competitive with other solutions and has no usage limits and no long-term contract.
Zoho One Essentials provides smaller firms with the essential components to run their business. For those that are successful and grow, the transitioning to the more comprehensive Zoho applications is seamless. Zoho has created a cut-down suite of solutions that will meet the needs of many small businesses, delivering the benefits of digitisation without onerous costs.
Zoho’s solutions offer a broad range of features, all delivered within a common and easy-to-use interface with localisations for the Mexican market.
Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho, commented, “Getting the latest technology doesn’t have to be expensive for small businesses. We want to make Zoho One more accessible for businesses in Mexico. So we are introducing a new Essentials plan that can offer a great set of apps that span functions at a very attractive starting price.
“The applications included in Zoho One Essentials offer full, functional versions of Zoho products without feature limitations, enabling businesses to grow without restrictions. Moreover, they include advanced AI capabilities to automate tasks and maximize operational efficiency.”
What is Zoho One Essentials
Zoho One has over 40 applications within it. Zoho One Essentials cuts that down to twelve applications that should form the basis of the technology stack for any small business. The solutions provided combine Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Human Resources, Collaboration, and Productivity tools.
Zoho One Essentials includes the following Applications:
Sales
Zoho Bigin is a CRM solution that meets the needs of small businesses. It enables firms to manage their relationship with customers across their entire lifecycle. Features include sales deals, support tickets, customer onboarding, order delivery, customer testimonials, and contracts. The application is simple to set up, with pre-existing templates to personalise the solution for any business.
Simple to use, CRM solutions have proven benefits that include increasing revenue by 41% and retention by 27%. Bigin also supports personalised communications across multiple channels, including email, phone calls, WhatsApp, social media, meetings and forms.
Marketing
The marketing applications provided by Zoho One Essentials are Zoho Publish, and Zoho Campaigns. Zoho Publish enables SMEs to manage their listings on platforms such as Google Business, Hotfrog, Brownbook and others. It allows businesses to manage and respond to reviews supported by AI.
Zoho Campaigns provides a unified email and SMS marketing solution. SMEs can create personalised emails and text messages. Users can create automated workflows that trigger responses. The platform also supports A/B testing to identify the winning approach for your business.
Customer Service
Zoho Desk is Zoho’s powerful customer service tool. There are over 33 million users of Zoho Desk and it is used by some of the largest and smallest organisations globally. The solution is fully mobile-enabled and can manage service requests from multiple channels, including phone, chat, email, instant messaging, and social media.
The solution powers end-to-end ticket management, with automation and self-service available for customers. Response to tickets can draw on information available around the customer context, FAQs and templates with Zia, the Zoho AI chatbots helping to increase productivity.
Finance
Zoho Books provides a simple accounting solution localised for the Mexico market. Launched in 2022 to Mexico, the platform is fully VAT compliant and uses the CFDI (Comprobantes Fiscal Digital por Internet) format and is in line with SAT (Servicio de Administración Tributaria) regulations, It uses a PAC (Proveedores Autorizados de Certificación) to connect with SAT.
Human Resources
For organisations with employees, Zoho People provides an HR solution that allows them to manage employees, set goals, review performance, track attendance, create training courses, schedule shifts, and monitor leave or vacations. The attendance solution can be converted to timesheets to simplify payroll processes.
Collaboration
Essentials includes three solutions from the collaboration solutions that Zoho offers. They are Zoho Mail, Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meeting. Zoho Mail provides a secure, encrypted, privacy-guaranteed, ad-free email service. It retains mail for 365 days and has a dedicated mobile application.
Zoho Cliq is a chat tool that enables teams to communicate in real time internally and externally. The solution supports video conferencing and customised messaging channels. SMEs can also create chatbots to help automate tasks.
Zoho Meeting is an online meeting platform that supports video conferencing and webinars. Zoho recently added on-demand webinars to the Meeting functionality as well.
Productivity
Zoho WorkDrive forms the shared file storage platform that all the Zoho Apps accesses. Zoho applications can draw on files stored within it. Pricing on Zoho WorkDrive does scale up as storage requirements rise, but it begins with 1TB of storage.
Office productivity applications include Zoho Writer, a word processor; Zoho Sheet provides a comprehensive spreadsheet solution; and Zoho Show enables users to build dynamic presentations. These applications are feature-rich and have a user interface similar to Microsoft Office but with several enhancements to usability.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
According to the OECD, before the pandemic, there were over 4.86 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Mexico, 96.6% of which were micro-enterprises, which generated 14.6% of the national GDP and employed nearly 50% of the workforce.
Zoho One Essentials is targeted at this substantial market. What is interesting about Zoho is it carefully analyses the market and develops a pricing strategy and suites that are specifically devised.
Not included within the Zoho One Essential is Vikra, a simple, entry-level eCommerce platform. Originally designed for the Indian market. It will be interesting to see whether it can localise that for the Mexican market and include it as a component of the Mexican Zoho One Essentials package.
The Mexican Online Sales Association estimated that the domestic eCommerce market was valued at USD 26.2 billion in 2022, representing a 23% increase over 2021. It was also one of the top five fastest-growing markets globally.
