Given that Zoho has more than 100 million users spread across the globe, the Zoho Community team is naturally one of the busiest teams in the organization. The challenges in managing operations at this scale are multifold, and the most critical part is finding the right tool to streamline their processes and organize their work data. In this case study, you'll learn how adopting Zoho Tables has transformed our Community team's workflows, paving the way for enhanced productivity, collaboration, and seamless event management.
About the team
Zoho's Community team is dedicated to fostering customer communities, empowering our customers to derive maximum value from our offerings, and enabling partners to deliver the best services. The team's responsibilities include conducting online/offline Zoho user group meetups, building and maintaining communities, and managing community forums.
The challenges
Information overload
When the scale of the team's operations grew, and they expanded from being a small team of four to five members to one of more than 25 members, managing the influx of information became daunting. Event management, which is a critical part of their work, involves intricate planning and promotion across various channels like webpages, social media, and emails and coordinating with multiple vendors. When a team of 50 coordinates with more than 10 different teams within Zoho to plan, organize, and execute meetups globally, the amount of data and the work items to be tracked explodes. Finding critical information quickly when necessary was becoming difficult for the team, and this was their primary challenge.
Collaboration
In addition to the internal collaboration with other Zoho teams, the team collaborates with external vendors for requirements such as venue booking. Relying solely on spreadsheets proved inefficient and cumbersome in this case, mainly due to the lack of collaborative features designed explicitly with work management needs in mind.
Usability and adoption
The team experimented with a mix of multiple tools, including spreadsheets. However, they soon realized that having multiple tools complicated their processes and, instead, proved to be a deterrent in simplifying work. Consequently, the task of keeping these tools updated with the latest information ended up falling on a single person to handle inputs for everyone, which would never scale in the long run.
Customization constraints
The sophisticated tools on the market that came close to addressing most of their needs imposed rigid structures and workflows and challenged the flexibility of their processes. So, the team needed to choose between a spreadsheet that wouldn't scale and sophisticated tools that were too much work to set up and manage for too simple a need.
Scattered information and manual interventions
The lack of a centralized system led to scattered information and unnecessary manual intervention, such as checking for updates, following up, and so on, further complicating the workflow.
The solution
Recognizing these challenges, the team sought a solution that offered a blend of simplicity and robust functionality. Right around that time, we launched Zoho Tables, a tool that provides the best of both worlds—the simplicity of spreadsheets (with the power of a database) and the capabilities of a work management tool. The team decided to give this new tool a try.
Centralized data management with Zoho Tables
With Zoho Tables, the team has a centralized platform to manage all their work-related data. The diverse field types ensured the team could store all kinds of work data. In a simple spreadsheet-styled interface, Tables also allowed the team to organize data by establishing meaningful relationships between tables, providing database-level possibilities.
User-friendly interface and customizability
The team seamlessly transitioned to Zoho Tables, benefiting from its user-friendly interface and customization capabilities. Its flexibility allowed them to build a custom solution to satisfy their unique needs. They were able to set up their bases and processes in less than an hour without writing a single line of code.
Every collaborator gets their own view
In Zoho Tables, the team can choose how to view their data based on why they want to view it. The Grid view, similar to a spreadsheet, is very familiar and straightforward. It is best suited for quickly skimming through all data and organizing it. The Kanban view lets them easily monitor the team's progress on assigned tasks. Similarly, the Gallery, Calendar, and Form views come in handy for visualizing social media images, tracking deadlines, and collecting data efficiently, respectively. Additionally, custom views with dynamic filters enable the team to create and share them with third-party vendors with controlled access.
Automating mundane tasks
The team also eliminated unnecessary human intervention by automating simple tasks like content review. This ensured approvers were promptly informed without manual follow-up and that the teams did not miss deadlines. Automation can also be used to update values in tables based on changes in data, using simple trigger and action logic.
Integration with Zoho Backstage
The team uses Zoho Backstage to host their meetups and webinars. By leveraging Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage webhook APIs, whenever a new event is created in Zoho Backstage, it automatically becomes a record in Zoho Tables. The registration count is continuously updated in Zoho Tables, making it a central location for all event data, creating a single source of truth.
In the pipeline
The team plans to use Zoho Tables's Calendar view on their website to offer visitors a consolidated overview of all meetups, eliminating the need for excessive scrolling or clicking. This is an interesting use case for Zoho Tables, and we are excited to see how it turns out!
Our community team has transformed the way they manage work with our simple yet powerful work management tool, Zoho Tables. Regardless of the industry you operate in or the function you are part of, Zoho Tables can be easily customized to suit your needs.
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